Peter Anton Orlovsky was born on this day in 1933.
In 1954 he was working as an artist’s model when he met Allen Ginsberg. They began a life long relationship, which only ended with Ginsberg’s death in 1997.
While they were living in Paris Ginsberg encourage Orlovsky to begin to work seriously on his poetry, which until then he simply dabbled with. As the New York Times obit says, his work was “emotionally naked, loopy and occasionally luminescent.” Overshadowed during much of their time together by his partner’s fame, Orlovsky gradually came to be recognized as a significant poet in his own right.
He died in 2010 and as a practicing Buddhist he was buried at the Shambhala Mountain Center in Red Feather Lakes, Colorado.
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