GINSBERG, Allen.
Wichita Vortex Sutra.
San Francisco: Coyote, 1966.
$1,500.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-152541
+$500
First Edition of Allen Ginsberg's Wichita Vortex Sutra; Inscribed by Him to Artist David Savage with an Original Drawing
First edition of Ginsberg's incantatory anti-war masterpiece, composed aloud into a tape recorder as he drove across the Kansas plains in February 1966, in which the poet declares, by the ancient authority of the mantra, an end to the Vietnam War. Slim octavo, original printed wrappers. Association copy, lengthily inscribed by the author with an original drawing in black ink of a Star of David enclosing an eye on the first page of the poem, "David - Happy Hanukah from old friend Allen Xmas '67." The recipient, David Savage, was a painter, sculptor, and architect based in Princeton, New Jersey, the husband of the pioneering photographer Naomi Siegler Savage, herself a niece and protégée of the artist Man Ray. In very good condition. Rare and desirable signed and inscribed.
Wichita Vortex Sutra is one of Allen Ginsberg's most powerful political poems, composed in February 1966 as he traveled by Volkswagen bus across Kansas dictating into a tape recorder, the winter landscape and the voices of the radio and the newspapers woven into a sweeping meditation on the language of the Vietnam War. At the poem's climax Ginsberg pronounces, in the authority of the mantra, the end of the war, "I here declare the end of the War!" Allen Ginsberg was an American poet, countercultural icon, and central figure of the Beat Generation. His landmark poem Howl was first performed at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7, 1955, and published by City Lights Books in 1956. A student of William Blake and Walt Whitman, he was a close friend and collaborator of Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, and a tireless activist against the Vietnam War, nuclear proliferation, and the criminalization of marijuana. He received the National Book Award for The Fall of America in 1974 and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1973.
Wichita Vortex Sutra.
$1,500.00
In Stock
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