Rare Book of the Day – Clean Asshole Poems and Smiling Vegetable Songs, Peter Orlovsky. Signed First Edition.

Peter Orlovsky (1933-2010) was an American poet, actor and longtime companion of Allen Ginsberg. In 1954, Orlovsky was working as a model for Robert La Vigne in San Francisco. Legend has it that Ginsberg fell in love with La Vigne's portrait of Orlovsky before he even met him. The two soon moved in together, and were social pioneers of a sort, the first gay couple that many people had ever heard of. They traveled to Paris and North Africa together and spent two years in India, where they absorbed the Eastern philosophy that showed up in Ginsberg’s poems and influenced Mr. Orlovsky, who became a Buddhist, for the rest of his life.

Orlovsky became a central figure in the Beat movement, teaching at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, founded by Ginsberg and others in 1974, at the Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) in Boulder, Colo., and figuring in Kerouac’s books. Kerouac called Orlovsky George in “The Dharma Bums” and Simon Darlovsky in “Desolation Angels.” From the Times' obituary: "It was Ginsberg who encouraged Mr. Orlovsky to write poetry, and though he published only a few slim volumes, his voice was singular, and his early work was admired by the likes of William Carlos Williams and Gregory Corso. It had an outsider-ish originality (the spelling and phrasing were eccentric), a blunt, innocent earthiness, especially about bodily functions, and a Whitmanesque exuberance that communicated glee in the process of making poetry itself."

Clean Asshole Poems and Smiling Vegetable Songs was Orlovsky's third book of poetry. This is the first printing, published by the pillar of beat publishing City Lights Books in San Francisco in 1978.

Orlovksy and Ginsberg: