Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 615

The new issue of Beatdom (Beatdom #23 – the Environmental issue) will be out later this month.
We’ve already mentioned Jonas Faust (on four of Allen’s ‘”pastoral poems”) and Alexandre Ferreres “Derridian Exploration” into Allen’s Archive(s)” . But there’s more, plenty more – articles on Ferlinghetti, Corso, Kerouac, Bob Kaufman – Gerald Nicosia on Jack Micheline,  interviews with Bill Morgan, Neeli Cherkovski..  Editor, David S Wills on William Burroughs – “Burroughs’ Ultimate Environmental Statement” (Ghost of Chance) – poetry, reviews..
For an annotated run-down of the Contents – see here 

It’s the anniversary of the birth today of the great experimental poet Bernadette Mayer, who passed away late last year, aged 77.  See our postings on her on The Allen Ginsberg Project – here, here, here, here and here

Bernadette’s life and work will be celebrated tonight in New York City at the St Mark’s Poetry Project – see here (and don’t miss the latest issue of the St Marks Poetry Project Newsletter, a special issue, given over to her, the Project’s one-time director – here

A new issue of Pat Nolan‘s  Black Bart Quarterly Review of Books  has (besides much else)
a tip of the hat to a long-gone-but-not-forgotten Denver-based poetry magazine, Ivan Suvanjieff‘s The New Censorship –  Monthly Journal of the Next Savage State  (1990-1997)

Here’s the issue that featured Allen on the cover (from July 1994)

New Censorship? – No need to comment on the resonance of that phrase!

Simon Warner’s Substack, Rock and The Beat Generation continues to be a vital place to go for anyone exploring that nexus.  Recent articles of note include three celebrating Carolyn Cassady’s Centennial – here, here and here,  and two further installments of the ongoing “Beat Meetings” series (Gottfried Distl and Ed Sanders and Jonah Raskin and Lawrence Ferlinghetti), as well as this week  an interview with Jerry Cimino of the Beat Museum

From Raskin’s interview (re his encounter):

“We often talked about Ginsberg. Ferlinghetti felt and I agreed with him that Ginsberg didn’t mature at a poet, though he also would say that Ginsberg performed poetry well into his 60s and 70s. I agreed with Ferlinghetti on that topic also. Ginsberg got to be repetitive, though some of his late poems about aging which are short are memorable. I think he got lazy as a poet and didn’t produce great poems in his old age as W. B. Yeats did.”

Really? – What about “White Shroud” (and “Black Shroud”, for that matter) to cite but two), or the gathering of poems that came out of his 1984 China trip?

Lazy? – Allen lazy? – that’s not a word that, frankly,  we would ever consider applicable to Allen!

Bill Morgan (from the Beatdom interview):

Interviewer: If there is one thing  people consistently get wrong about Ginsberg, what would you say that is?

BM: People who didn’t know Allen probably don’t realize how knowledgeable he was and how hard he worked. His life was his work and he spent every waking moment writing, thinking, photographing, teaching, reading and connecting with people who were interesting. He was generous with his time which meant that he often spent all night catching up on his own work. At the end of his life Buddhism helped him slow down and meditate, but even then his mind was constantly working something out.He was a genius when it came to literature, he knew more about the history of poetry than anyone I ever met.

And that’s the truth!

One comment

  1. Thank you for publicising my interview with Bill Morgan in Beatdom #23. It was a rare honour and a privilege. A fascinating man.

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