June 13, 1865, the poet W.B. Yeats‘ birthday. Check out our 2022 birthday posting here
also (we’ve feature it before) the incredible pleasure of hearing Yeats’ voice, reading
and Philip Whalen, alongside Allen, back in 1976, guides the Naropa students through the oeuvre, in a series of postings – here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here
David S Wills’ Beatdom Substack continues to provide illuminating Ginsberg research.
We’ll draw your attention to some of his earlier postings here, here here and here. This week he does it again. The focus of his latest installment is the dream at the heart of Allen’s early poem “Dream Record: June 8, 1955.”, first manifest as journal entries.
Wills writes:
“He would later turn this journal entry into (the) poem… However, it was not a simple process. He did not merely pick words and images from his dream and then add a few line breaks. As we shall see, he struggled for some time with the problem of accurately conveying the “sensations” of his dream. Whilst he did manage to write a good version of the poem, upon which only relatively minor changes would later be made, in the space of a few days, he continued to tinker with it and seek feedback from friends for several months.”
Wills provides a close in-depth examination of the revision process
[first lines of an early draft sent to Kenneth Rexroth]
and speculates on both the nature and the dating of the emendations.
In so doing, he delves into contemporaneous writing by Allen – notably, a July 5 query to Jack Kerouac (“What did Lucien (Carr) say about Joan poem dream? I wasn’t being mad at him I was saying your father in laws moustache via that paragraph I did hope he’d be impressed by theory..”). His father-in-law’s moustache? – Huh? – but Wills sleuths this note further and extracts more information, significantly more information. You’ll have to read the essay (as ever, well worth reading) to find out more.
An illuminating interview this week (here) with Barry Miles in Simon Warner’s Rock and The Beat Generation. Leon Horton interviews him and elicits details (the myths and the realities) of the legendary 1965 Royal Albert Hall, London reading, the International Poetry Incarnation
LH: I read somewhere that the organisers soon split into two camps and that Ginsberg was griping about the suitability of some of the other poets. Was it a rocky road to the Albert Hall?
BM: The original idea was to present the Beat Generation poets to the British audience for the first time as Allen had just done a fantastic reading at Better Books, Ferlinghetti was due in London the next week to stay with Julie Felix, and Gregory Corso was on his way to London from Italy. That was the original idea.
Then Michael Horovitz naturally wanted to read and so did a bunch of other poets, many of whom had never performed at a venue any bigger than the upstairs room of a pub. In the end there were seventeen poets, all of them men, most of them bad, and the American Beats were allotted very little time.
Allen was very disappointed in the reading and wrote a long, unpublished letter to the Times Literary Supplement about it which they declined to publish but which appears, along with a detail account of the reading itself, in my book In the Sixties.
LH: Alexander Trocchi acted as MC for the evening, an interesting choice by any standards. It’s no mean feat juggling seventeen poets. Do you think he did a good job?
BM: Alex was Allen’s choice. He was laid back because he was smacked out on heroin.
He did a good job.
also, Jonah Raskin reviews Black Surrealist, Steven Belletto‘s recent Ted Joans biography, in Rock and The Beat Generation, with an even-handed but absolutely necessary critical eye. “Black Surrealist”, he writes “is part biography and part hagiography…On balance the book is perhaps more hagiographical than biographical, but perhaps iconoclastic figures like Joans, who was a legend in his own lifetime, deserve reverential treatment”. “The book”, he acknowledges, is “a welcome addition to the library of modern American literature and culture..the product of prodigious research.” Belletto, though “adoring and worshipful” certainly, “at times.. aims to be balanced and to explore Joans’ flops as well as his achievements, his flaws (egocentricity) and his strengths (identification with the oppressed)”.
Hot news – the Harry Smith Kabbalistic Tree of Life, that we featured here last week, far outstripped the estimated $3000-$5000 auction price, fetching, yesterday, the princely price of $17,160!
Vintage Allen. His 1965 essay, “Demonstration or Spectacle as Example, As Communication, or How To Make A March/Spectacle” (included in the 2001 collection, Deliberate Prose – Selected Essays 1952-1995), given these current times, is, (it perhaps hardly needs to be pointed out), well worth revisiting.
Poet Sharon Mesmer reflects on Allen Ginsberg’s compassion.