By the end of 1964, when he received an
invitation from Cuba’s minister of culture to participate in a writers’
conference in Havana, Allen Ginsberg had devoted a large block of his
life to living in and exploring countries outside the United States.
He’d lived in Mexico for several months in 1954, spending most of his
time examining the Mayan ruins on the Yucatán Peninsula.
Then, three years later, following the publication of “Howl” and
establishing his reputation as a major young poet, he was off to Europe,
where he settled in Paris but visited Spain, Italy, and England, among
other countries, over a two-year stretch. In 1960, after participating
in a conference in Chile, he spent months wandering all over South
America, including an extended stay in Peru, where he explored Machu
Picchu and searched the Amazon region for the powerful hallucinogenic
drug ayahuasca, a consciousness-altering substance recommended by his
friend and former mentor William S. Burroughs.
In his most recent extended stay away from the United States,
beginning in 1961, he had embarked on an extraordinary journey with an
itinerary that included Paris, Tangier, eastern Africa, Israel, and
Greece, prior to a 15-month stay in India. He concluded the trip with a
jaunt to the Far East, including stops in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Japan. Ginsberg kept detailed journals throughout
his travels. He filled hundreds of pages with observations, new poetry,
dialogue, sketches, travel descriptions, dream notations, and other
musings. He was an endlessly curious traveler, open to any adventure and
gregarious with people he met. All of his journals written prior to
1965 would be published, beginning with fragments presented in magazines
and, eventually, the first of his book-length journal writings, Indian Journals, in 1970. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/read-from-allen-ginsbergs-cuba-journals/
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