Next Tuesday in Chicago – a symposium on Stevan Weine‘s groundbreaking book, Best Minds – How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry From Madness. Panelists include the author, University of Illinois Chicago scholar, Ann Marie McManaman, Ginsberg biographer, Michael Schumacher, and long-time Ginsberg secretary (and also Chicago alumnae!) Bob Rosenthal – “This symposium explores the complex relationships among mental illness, psychiatry, trauma, poetry and trauma. As a young man, the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg experienced visions and connected with dimensions most people cannot see.He embraced the madness in and around himself and turned it into powerful poems and cultural explosions. These poems tell evocative stories about madness. In “Howl” madness is liberation, whereas in “Kaddish”, madness is more injurious, both to those afflicted by mental illness and to their loved ones. Yet despite the suffering madness imposes, Ginsberg demonstrated that madness also creates possibilities in its survivors and witnesses for new meaning, identities and outcomes” Zoom registration is available – here
Cathy Cassady, the eldest of Neal and Carolyn‘s two daughters, (we featured Jami here with recollections of her father) remembers Allen when she was a child – Allen’s compassion and what she recalls as his “tranquil demeanor”:
“Allen has always been warm and kind. He was one of the calmer friends of our parents (as was Jack (Kerouac)) and that appealed to me, being the timid soul I was. His interest in me seemed sincere and it meant a lot..
…one memorable moment…was when I was in junior high. I was pathologically shy and withdrawn and most of the time wished I could drop through the floor and disappear. To say I was anti-social is a major understatement. In those days I was labeled as having an ‘inferiority complex’. The reason I remember this particular meeting with Allen is because I was astonished and pleased that he was interested in ME and what my life was like. He actually sat with me on the daybed in the family room of our little house…asked how I was doing. We talked for a bit and I was happy that he would take the time to find out about me. No one ever did that. (Not even my parents. Dad would on the rare occasions when he was home or when he wrote us ‘kiddies’ letters. Dad was curious about everything and everybody, but Mom was too busy trying to hold down the fort.)”
April 14th – the anniversary of the death of (suicide of) Vladimir Mayakovsky
“The bullet that penetrated Vladimir Mayakovsky’s heart also shot to pieces the dream of Communism and signalled the beginning of the Communist nightmare of the 1930s.”
(Bengt Jangfeldt – from Mayakovsky (2014), the first non-Soviet biography of the great poet)
More Mayakovsky on the Allen Ginsberg Project – here, here and here
See also Ann Charters appearance in Allen’s 1981 Naropa Expansive Poetics classes – here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here
Here‘s a Russian-made film on the death of Mayakovsky