Ginsberg did not limit himself to the California scene. He taught at the University of British Columbia, appeared in twenty movies, formed a lifetime relationship with mate Peter Orlovsky, and recited verse in the British Isles, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, India, Peru, and Chile. During his residency in Greenwich Village, New York, he shared a 7th Street apartment with Kerouac and William Burroughs while completing Kaddish and Other Poems (1961), a verse biography of his mother. Ginsberg's correspondence with Burroughs appeared as The Yage Letters (1963). He drew police surveillance while picketing the Vietnam War in New York and the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and authorities ejected him from Cuba in 1965 for protesting antigay treatment at state schools. The Fall of America: Poems of These States (1973), a lament for the poet's deceased mother, won a National Book Award.
While living on the ultraliberal university campus at Berkeley, California, Ginsberg published First Blues: Rags, Ballads, & Harmonium Songs, 1971–1974 (1975). As Ever (1977) reprises his letters to fellow Beat poet Neal Cassady. His Journals Early Fifties Early Sixties (1977) covers travels in Greece and reveals an anti-establishment bent, which he celebrated with poetry readings at the Second Bisbee Poetry Festival in Bisbee, Arizona, in 1980. In a wacky but sincerely rebellious spirit, he cofounded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado, where he codirected curriculum and taught poetry each summer.
Following Ginsberg's death on April 15, 1997, his funeral at Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco turned into a media circus. Old friends and admirers exulted that the poet would have loved it.
