More gems from the archives. Here‘s the recording from 1994 of the celebratory event in New York at the St Mark’s Poetry Project on the occasion of the release of Holy Soul Jelly Roll, the epic four-cd set covering the whole span (up to that moment) of Allen’s recorded work. Ed Friedman, director of the Poetry Project at that time, provides the introduction(s):
EF: Good evening, Welcome to The Poetry Project. Tonight we’re here to celebrate Rhino Records issue of Holy Soul Jelly Roll, Allen Ginsberg’s poems and songs 1949-1993 and we have a terrific cast of poets and musicians to celebrate with. Before we start I’d like to mention a few things about the space for those of you who haven’t been here. There are bathrooms, you go through this back door, hang a right, and go upstairs. There’s also a water cooler up there if you get thirsty. There’s no drinking or smoking in the sanctuary…. The way the program is going to run tonight is there will be three sets. In the first set there will be, you know, some poems, songs and music by Allen, by Tuli Kupferberg Gregory Corso, Jim Carroll, Lenny Kaye, David Amram, Ed Sanders. Steven Taylor and Coby Batty, then we’ll take a break followed by Wichita Vortex Sutra, which will be a large cast of musicians with Allen reading, and then we’ll take an intermission after that and they’ll be more songs with Allen, Steven Taylor, David Mansfield, Stephan Said & others. It’s always a great pleasure to welcome Allen Ginsberg here. We think of him as a friend of this place and one of the spirits of poetry that really guides the workshops and programs here. He has always done a lot of things but whenever I introduce him there are always ten more things about to happen – that in the Spring HarperCollins is going go be publishing Journals Mid-Fifties and reissuing the Annotated Howl .There’ll also be an Illuminated collection of poems and drawings that Allen’s doing with Eric Drooker and that’s going to be coming out from Four Walls Eight Windows (1994 – subsequent edition, 2006, from Running Press). It’s great to have him here tonight as always. Please welcome Allen Ginsberg.
Allen begins with his own introduction to the reading (at approximately two-and-a-half minutes in)
AG: Well I’d like to thank you all for coming and particularly all the musicians who’ve.. some of whom are very old friends that I’ve worked with for many many years back to 1958 at least. The occasion is the issue by Rhino of a box-set of four CDs of poetry and music covering the years 1949 to 1993, and many, or most, of the musicians tonight are collaborators in one decade or another on the music or the poetry of that set. So I’d also like to thank Rhino Records for putting out, while I’m alive, what I thought I was piling up treasures for heaven later on. And particularly Hal Willner, who spent several years working on the editing of the set, producing it, and going through hundreds of hours of music and poetry, and who is primarily responsible for the brilliant line-up of musicians this evening. He’s put in a great deal of time to present an evening which will be a benefit for The Poetry Project (thus killing a number of birds with one stone – introducing the box-set, making some money for The Poetry Project, getting all the musicians together for a party)
So I’ll begin the evening by reading a recent poem (how is the sound by the way?.. ok.), begin the evening reading a recent poem about the neighborhood (since this is a neighborhood church) – “Charnel Ground” -“Upstairs Jenny crashed her car & became a living corpse, Jake/sold grass, the white-bearded potbelly leprechaun silent/climbed their staircase….”… “”The whole point seems to be the idea of giving/ away the giver”))
So… I’ll retire and rest my voice a while. As you may notice, there’s a slight roughness to my voice. I had none yesterday. I have a cold and laryngitis for this illustrious occasion, so I’ve been…. I don’t know if my voice will last the whole night long with all the oratory, but there’s a good sound system and a good engineer.
to be continued