Lucien Carr‘s birthday today. Poor Lucien. Dear Lucien. Destined to be carrying an awful lot of karmic weight in the coming months (courtesy the unsolicited spotlight of Kill Your Darlings)
See our 2011 posting about Lucien – Holy March 1st (Lucien) – here
Douglas Messerli on the Pip (Project For Innovative Poetry) blog reprints his 1977 Washington Post Book World review of Allen’s Journals (Early ‘Fifties, Early ‘Sixties) including some interesting addenda – recollections of his encounters with Allen – and this – “a poem (dated 7/5/96) for (a) “calender project” that never came into existence” (“Multiple Identity Questionnaire”, subsequently included in the posthumous collection, Death and Fame) – The poem, as Messerli points out, “clearly summarizes his (Allen’s) life”
“American by birth, passport, and residence/ Slavic heritage, mama from Vitebsk, father’s forebears Kamenetz Podolska near Lvov/ I’m an intellectual! Anti-intellectual, anti-academic/ Distinguished Professor of English Brooklyn College…”
Interesting interview-clips up, and worth checking out, over on Paul E Nelson’s blog – notably, Allen on “First Thought, Best Thought” (and the genesis of “First Thought, Best Thought” – “The monk lent down to lace his animal shoes”!)
– also poems and pondering from Michael McClure, Eileen Myles, Anne Waldman..
Our good friend, Hettie Jones is ably profiled on the Australian site Going Down Swinging.
Lisa Jarnot’s Robert Duncan biography is reviewed in the Washington Post