Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 601

Congratulations City Lights!  The second-ever recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Toni Morrison Achievement Award, which “honors institutions that have made lasting and meaningful contributions to book culture”, and which since its founding in the early 1950s has, as they say, “introduced American audiences to audacious new voices, inviting us to lunch with Frank O’Hara, wander with Marie Ponsot, and howl with Allen Ginsberg.”

This year, 2023, incidentally, City Lights (established by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D Martin in 1953) marks its 70th Anniversary.

Nanao Sakaki (1923-2008)

This year is also (as we informed you on The Allen Ginsberg Project last month) the Nanao Sakaki Centennial.  More Nanao updates:

Hi Nanao, a 64-page collection of poems by Carol Merrill based on her time spent with him – memories, anecdotes, quotations, dreams (which was mentioned in passing there) – is now out and available from his US publisher, Blackberry Books in Maine – see here

For an early taste of Nanao, don’t miss Terri Gross riveting 1987 interview – here

and don’t miss out on Nanao Global –  the recently-formed and on-going Nanao Sakaki website.

 

Alfred Leslie, who passed away, aged 95, last week, will forever be remembered for his Beat connections via his iconic collaboration with Robert Frank Pull My Daisy

but don’t overlook this remarkable document, from 1960 –  The Hasty Papers,  (contributions by Allen ( his poem, “Aether”), Jack Kerouac (“Flying Horses Of Mein-Mo”),  Gregory Corso (“Triptych”) –  and so, so, much more.

A millenium version of this historic publication came out in 1999, containing some 400 new photographs, an introduction by the poet David Lehman, “The Story of the Hasty Papers” “related by Leslie in Pushkin’s sonnet form”, and “Brother Can You Spare a Dime”, “an epistolatory novel of sorts, documenting the making of The Hasty Papers in 111 letters to and from the authors and the editors”.

 

Roberto Tejada

The Allen Ginsberg Visiting Fellow at Naropa.   Over the years, there’s been a number of these since the program was instigated, in 2011, with Lyn Hejinian.  Alice Notley followed her, followed by Harryette Mullen, Lisa Robertson, and Hoa Nguyen (five women in the first five years), then Kevin Killian in 2016, Rosa Alcala in 2017, Fred Moten in 2018, Juliana Spahr in 2019, and Brian Teare in 2020. The program continues into the current decade – Cedar Sigo was the Visiting Fellow in 2021 and D.A. Powell had the honor last year. And now this year’s Allen Ginsberg Visiting Fellow is – Roberto Tejada, who will be giving the customary Fellow’s Address this coming Monday (February 6) at 7pm at the Performing Art Center in Boulder.

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