Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 572

Interested in a t-shirt? – willing to spread the word?  One of the ways you can help us in maintaining this site (Allen Ginsberg dot org and The Allen Ginsberg Project) is by contributing via a purchase.

“Typewriter Tee”, Peter Nevins‘ linocut rendering of the classic 1956 photo of Allen, poised at the typewriter, editing “Howl”, is one of a number of items currently available.  We’ll be announcing and spotlighting various exciting new items in the coming months. Please help us out, if you can, and support this site (also do yourself a favor and get yourself a natty piece of clothing!)

 

Library of America’s Collected Gary Snyder (noted here last week), a welcome thousand-page gathering of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet (and national treasure!), will be celebrated this coming Wednesday (July 20) 6-7pm EST with an on-line tribute (the event is free but click here to RSVP). Gathering to salute Gary will be ex-California Governor Jerry Brown, actor Peter Coyote, novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, poets Wang Ping and Robert Hass, and other friends and special guests. Gary himself will also be appearing.

 

Michael Minzer‘s exemplary Paris Records have over the years released some remarkable recordings – For example, see here and here – and here and here – (and Allen reading from Terry Southern – here).  Here’s another recent new/old gem –  Allen reading his great poem from the ‘Fifties,  “Siesta In Xbalba”, accompanied by the always-inventive, always-sensitive collaborator,  Bill Frisell,

“Siesta In Xbalba” is coupled with this – Gregory Corso with the Aftermath Marching Band – “Take Me Gambling!! (for HW)” (from the album “Take Me Gambling!!” produced by Michael Minzer & Mark Bingham) – a tribute track from Mark Bingham and Steven Bernstein to Minzer’s associate & friend, the late great Hal Willner)

 

Simon Warner on his Substack reminds us that it’s been one full year since the passing of “British Beat poet and Allen Ginsberg friend and ally, Michael Horovitz” – “He sometimes struck me”, Warner writes, “as a British Ginsberg”. Warner pens a touching memorial-note on the ubiquitous and irrepressible Horovitz – here

Another monumental volume just recently published, Jim Cohn‘s Treasures For Heaven – Collected Poems 1975-2021

Allen praises Jim’s poems: ” Jim Cohn has good imagination and direct perception, facts, details, Whitman ambition, his poems are inventive, profuse, concise, improvisational”

Gary Snyder chimes in too: “Cohn cuts back and forth between the human heart and home, and the spaces and surprises of the wild. He does it beautifully”.