Beat Scene, a long-time essential in the Beat eco-system (#105, the most recent edition – and that doesn’t include the countless chapbooks), seems a good way to start this weekend’s Round-Up –
Editor Kevin Ring recalls a passing encounter:
‘He (Allen) was always very friendly and supportive over the years. Used to send him copies of Beat Scene and various chapbooks. I think, sometimes, he gave them to poets he met, Anne Waldman, David Meltzer… Stood talking to him outside a bar in Lowell, Massachusetts once, along with a group of people. Might have been The Worthern. If you ever go to Lowell go to this bar. My young son was with me and it was in the small hours and it was cold despite being Summer. We talked about John Clellon Holmes, he had died earlier in the year. Allen mentioned a few ailments he was suffering with. He seemed frail to me, lightweight, but with a lot of endurance about him. Told me it was too late for my son to be awake. Believe it was 1988. The year the Jack Kerouac Memorial park with the giant monolith sculptures by Texan Ben Woitena was opened up…”
The Beat Hotel, the legendary Beat Hotel. Next week in Rome at the Teatro Trastevere, a special presentation. Giancarlo Cori is Allen Ginsberg
Charles Shuttleworth, the editor of the new (posthumous) Jack Kerouac volume, Desolation Peak, is interviewed on Simon Warner’s Substack this week
Patti Smith was interviewed at length in The Guardian a few weeks back – about her new book and projects (just in case you missed that)
Anne Waldman will be giving the T.S.Eliot Memorial Reading at Harvard this Thursday (December 8) (with an introduction by Eleni Sikelianos) – Full details (including a link to the 6PM EST live-streaming – can be found here)
more Bernadette Mayer notices – here and here
& it’s the anniversary today of the birth (1909) of the great balladeer and collagiste, Helen Adam
Here’s Helen (from Ron Mann’s Poetry In Motion film) performing her classic “Cheerless Junkie’ Song”