Peter Orlovsky, poet and partner of Allen Ginsberg, has died

Peter Orlovsky, longtime partner of Allen Ginsberg and a poet in his own right, died May 30 in Vermont of lung cancer. He was 76.

Orlovsky met Ginsberg in San Francisco in 1954, before Ginsberg wrote his seminal poem, "Howl." Published in 1956, "Howl" was the subject of a 1957 obscenity trial that became a landmark free-expression case. Afterward, Ginsberg and Orlovsky moved to Paris, where they stayed with Gregory Corso, William Burroughs and others in a boarding house that would become known as the Beat Hotel.

In the early 1960s, Orlovsky and Ginsberg traveled in India together, where they both became devotees of meditation. It's Orlovsky who provided the smiling, besuited meditation model in the 1984 video below. Ginsberg sings and plays harmonium.



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