World Poetry Day today – We’ll begin with this article by Constant Méheut and Daria Mitiuk, which appeared back in August in the New York Times.
– Celebrating all the world’s poetry.
Another blockbuster essay from David S Wills this week on the Beatdom Substack – “The Berkeley Town Hall Reading – Remembering one of the most important nights in Beat poetry on its 69th anniversary”. (The essay is a spin-off from his own upcoming book on the fabled Six Gallery Reading) – “Alas, early Beat historians”, he writes, “made some big errors, (in their reporting of this event) and others” – (mea culpa, including us!) – “have simply quoted them in later works, trusting that the earliest scholars somehow knew best..”
Wills thus sets out to present ” the basic facts and explain what really happened.. so that people no longer need to rely on inaccurate or incomplete earlier accounts”. “There will”,
he declares, “be a little background and also a very short section at the end of this essay that explains why so much of what has been reported before now was wrong (but) I have tried to avoid too much discussion in the body text and confined those parts to footnotes.”
The essay is broken down into four distinct sections – “Some Background Information”, “Organizing Another Reading”, “The Town Hall Theater Reading”, and “Reasons for Errors”
Regarding the latter – Wills enumerates his discoveries
“Mistakes that were made include – the date, details of the venue, descriptions of the art on display, the order of poems read, the clothes the poets wore, the poets that read, the poems read, and how the event ended.”
even the famous postcard!
The initial account, he writes, “mixed together the texts for the postcards sent out to publicize the 6 Gallery and Town Hall readings, creating a made-up text that was given as the postcard for the first reading, and even today is typically used even though the real one emerged – thanks to the same biographer—in the mid-eighties”
A reconstitution of the “corrected text”. (so this is for the Town Hall reading):
No recordings of the Six Gallery were made (or at least appear to have survived), as Wills points out, although “The audio recordings of all poets at the Berkeley Town Hall except Ginsberg are on a digitized tape hosted at Stanford” – (see here and here (Ginsberg’s section is hosted separately), erroneously listed as having been recorded at the Six Gallery).
Wills digs deep. Once again this is an invaluable piece of sleuthing, exemplary research. The whole thing is highly recommended, no, is essential reading!
Also on Beatdom (regular Beatdom) Wills reviews Rethinking Kerouac
and El Habib Louai reviews Ira Cohen‘s A Certain Kind of Wizard
The Art of William S Burroughs – Andrew Wilson and Barry Miles in Conversation tomorrow (Saturday) at the October Gallery in London (3.00p.m-4.30pm BST)
John Giorno – A Labor of Love opened March 15 at the Triennale in Milan – This exhibition “explores varied forms of friendship, dialogue and support within the world of culture through materials from (his) extensive archive”. It features “approximately 100 documents, most of which date from 1967 to 1974, focusing on the earlier part of Giorno’s life, including unpublished manuscripts, event posters and flyers, private correspondence, contracts, archival video footage, and materials related to Dial-A-Poem and to the AIDS Treatment Project“. – See also here
Simon Warner on Rock and the Beat Generation this week remembers the great Sam Charters and interviews his widow, eminent Beat scholar, Ann Charters
Bradley King reviews Ron Padgett on Dick Gallup – this month in the Brooklyn Rail
We’ve been featuring these past weeks, a few selections from Malakoff Kowalski‘s unique concept CD, Songs With Words, matching Allen’s words with classical pieces. The completed album gets an official release today. Here’s another (a third) selection – “Until They Try” (originally published as “The Eye Altering, Alters All“) – Johanna Summer is on piano. (The piece she’s playing, Germaine Tailleferre’s beautiful Valse Lente)