Part I
Somewhere between Seattle and New York City lies a town that is considered the mid-point of the American West. To pull a map from the shelf is to notice an obvious crossroads, an intersection for the country, in a small town called Boulder, Colorado. Sitting as a gateway to the American frontier, it is not difficult to understand the reason for the wandering bohemian classes that have been drawn to the small town. Known for the incredible beauty that surrounds the town, Boulder is known for the string of bike trails that criss-cross along the waters of Boulder creek. The Rocky Mountains approach the town from the Northwest and border the city limits. Huge slabs of rock called the "flatirons" hang from the sides of the mountains forming strange rock designs, as well as, challenges for hikers and campers. Among the snow flakes of winter and colorful leaves of spring rest many secrets.
It is in such an area that Allen Ginsberg sought to nurture his talent, and to start his Naropa-The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. It is also the town that he used as a haven, a refuge from his apartment in New York City, when he would travel to Seattle or San Francisco. There are hints that the town may have saved him from the madness of the city, as exemplified in his White Shroud poems of the eighties. Regardless, his footsteps still haunt the brick laned avenues along pearl street, and his rusted bicycle chain can still be heard dragging the ground, beside the green grassen lined lanes along the waters of Boulder's stream bed. There seems to be a little bit of Allen everywhere a person roams in Boulder. He seems to have left his inkstained mark drying into the fabric of historical memory in the town.
When I first heard that Ginsberg was in Boulder, it was rumored that he was working on his newest (now published) book called "The Illuminated Sun." I remember speaking to the owner of The Beat Bookshop, in late May of that year, his long hair blowing in the wind, surrounded by his most recent shipment of used books that had only recently arrived. He was sorting through several of the old boxes of hardbound texts; the dust slowly rising, forming a cloud around his smiling face. Characters of various assortments are allowed to roam freely in the bounding hills of the American West, for they have not yet been restricted by many of the confines found in the East; where chain stores
