East Hill Farm

A memoir of the upstate New York getaway where the icons of the Beat Generation gathered.. During the late 1960s when peace drugs and free love were direct challenges to conventional society Allen Ginsberg treasurer of the Committee on Poetry Inc. funded what he hoped was a haven for comrades in distress in rural upstate New York. First described as an uninspiring dilapidated fourbedroom house with acres of untended land including the graves of its first residents East Hill Farm became home to those who sought pastoral enlightenment in the presence of Ginsbergs brilliance and generosity. . A selfdeclared member of a ragtag group of urban castoffs including Gregory Corso Peter Orlovsky Herbert Huncke and the mythic Barbara Rubin Gordon Ball tended to a nonstop flurry of guests chores and emotional outbursts while also making time to sit quietly with Ginsberg and discuss poetry Kerouac sex and Americas war in Vietnam. Here in honest and vivid prose he offers a rare intimate glimpse of the poetic pillar of the Beat Generation.. Only a masterful storyteller like Gordon Ball could turn a depressing tale of poets at rock bottom into a triumph of the human spirit . . . Ball has painstakingly traced his days as the farm manager who tried to plant the crops do the chores and keep on an even keel while the rest of the tribe were literally bouncing off the walls. It led him to tremendous joy sadness ecstasy and a black eye. This is a personal book that examines the period that changed Americafor better or worse? You decide. Bill Morgan author of I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg