New Year in New York and the venerable St Marks Poetry Project annual marathon event.
Allen, when he was in town (since he lived just down the street and “the poetry church” was his church) was, of course, a regular fixture).
This year marked the 50th anniversary of this extraordinary and celebratory occasion.
Happy to report, it was, once again, a remarkable, both cultural and financial, success.
Alex Vadukul writes it up in a profile for the New York Times – “Where Downtown Poets Go To Church To Greet The New Year”
The Poetry Project can be contacted here
and (recently completed), all of the issues of The Poetry Project Newsletter (all 274 of them! ) are on-line and now freely available.
& if you’ve not read it, don’t miss, “Insane Podium”, Miles Champion‘s definitive history of its early years – here
Simon Warner’s Rock and The Beat Generation Substack continues to be a go-to spot. This week, don’t miss his interview with US academic and music critic Casey Rae, author of the 2019 study William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock’n’Roll.
Warner interviews him about the background to that title and enquires about his current plans
“Well, I’m about halfway done with my next book, which delves into the spiritual-ecological aspects of Beat culture as it seeded and transformed the subsequent generation’s inner and outer explorations.”
O America! – the hideous (and frightening) spectacle of book-banning continues!
What a disturbing and undeniable indicator of cultural decline!
Archarna Sridhar’s op-ed piece, in yesterday’s, Florida’s (sic) Orlando Sentinel, is absolutely (and urgently) “must-reading” – “Revisiting Ginsberg’s Howl in a new era of book-banning”
“Back in 1957”, she recalls, “the lawyer defending “Howl” said, “The desire to censor is not limited to crackpots and bigots. There is in most of us a strong desire to make the world conform to our own ideas, and it takes all the force of our reason and our legal institutions to defy so human an urge.”
In this moment, when our fundamental rights are at risk, we need to use the force of our own reason to defy the GOP’s urge to censor us. Let’s read and recite Ginsberg’s precious poem “Howl” and other banned books. Let’s demand them in our schools and libraries. And let’s fight for the freedoms of authors, readers, teachers, and students everywhere.”
Disseminating Allen in the United States:
Next week (starting next Thursday at Stories Books and Cafe, Los Angeles) is the beginning of the Material Wealth book-tour. More on this next week.