Herbert Huncke got formally buried the other week in Woodstock in the cemetery. Harry Smith did too.
Shiv Mirabito reports on the event:
“Thanks to Raymond Foye & Rani Singh the ashes of Harry Smith & Herbert Huncke were buried at the Woodstock Artists Cemetery on 6.28.25 Ed Sanders & Steven Taylor of The Fugs performed, Eli Smith performed songs from The Harry Smith Folk Music Anthology, & Bill Breeze the head of the OTO performed a magick Thelemite ritual. Over 100 people attended & then we had a wonderful after party in the Woodstock Shivastan Bookshop secret garden which was part wake & part poetry-happening, featuring Hungarian Beat Poet Laureate Gabor Gyukics, plus an informal open mic sharing circle & bonfire.”
– For Shiv’s collection of images from the occasion – see here
Robert Lavigne‘s 1954 painting of Peter Orlovsky, “Nude With Onions“, the one that caught Allen’s eye when he first glimpsed it in the studio and which pretty much precipitated him falling in love with him, recently came up for sale. A key-note painting (Allen always harbored wishes of owning it), it was happily sold to one of Lavigne’s old Seattle friends (a fitting and fortuitous provenance)
Allen recollected one time that first meeting with LaVigne:
“(We) talked about Cézanne – I had a theory of space ellipse in Cézanne which I manufactured in the basement of NY Museum of Modern Art hi on “T” looking at the View of Garonne drawing – he understood all that ….. we had a long interesting theoretical conversation, I was amazed at his seriousness, almost religious, toward his art & thought him a sure & trustful brother. First picture I saw in his Gough Street house was a huge naked portrait of Peter Orlovsky – I looked in its eyes and was shocked by love”….”(S)omething happened sort of between me and it – that is, like I fell in love with it, and so I was delighted a few minutes later when Peter actually walked in the room.”
“This was”, as the catalog notes, “one of the key aesthetic events in Ginsberg’s life and one he remembered till the day of his death”.
City Lights Pocket Poets books. Donald Heneghan has made and published two studies of them. Jonah Raskin reviews them (now noted as “Chief Book Reviewer” for the ever-insightful Rock and The Beat Generation) – “The compiler here does know a thing or two or three about the series and the authors”, he writes, “though he is not, on the evidence of these books, a bibliophile or a bibliographer. He is strictly an amateur, which is to say that his books are a labour of love not of significant research or scholarship”. Raskin regrettably discovers and points out a number of significant omissions and missed opportunities – “”I wish Heneghan had taken more care with the information he presents.”
David S Wills in an important response writes back noting significant error and confusion in Raskin’s take too. “Wills feels”, Simon Warner, Rock and The Beat Generation’s editor, remarks, “that our critique of those publications invites an alternative view but he also wants to address wider questions about the original reception of Allen Ginsberg’s first reading of ‘Howl’ in October 1955.” (For more on this we direct you to Wills’ deeply-researched essay from 2024 “First Draft Best Draft?” (digested by us here) and, as Warner points out, there’ll be more in his forthcoming volume A Remarkable Collection of Angels: A History of the 6 Gallery Reading (due for publication in the Fall of 2026)
Ana Condo (ex-wife of painter, George Condo (who illustrated Allen’s Selected Poems) has some kind words to say about Allen in the current Interview (interviewed by Vittoria Benzine):
“Allen and me, we became very close, even though he was friends with George. They (her and Keith Haring) were the only two that I can say did not have that attitude of like, “Oh, we’ll hang with you just because we want to hang with George.” Allen taught me how to meditate, to find my inner peace. When he moved into his loft, he just kept calling me all the time to go over there. I helped him set up a video screen and showed him Pasolini films and he would cook for me. He wanted me to blossom, to do my thing. He was very subtle about it, but clear.”
Poet-editor, Michael Andre has an interesting observation about Allen and about Andy Warhol – and about Bob Dylan:
“Forty years ago I mansplained to a friend the difference between Allen Ginsberg and Andy Warhol. I’d say five words to Allen and he’d talk for fifteen minutes. I’d say five hundred words to Andy and he’d break me up with a ten second riff. “That’s nothing,” she said. “I was at a party with Bob Dylan. No one would speak to him.”