Previous Laki-Huncke birthday footage – here, here, here, here,here, here, here, here and here.
We reported on Huncke’s interment at Woodstock Artist’s Cemetery this past July
Ann Charters, doyenne of Beat Generation scholars, has a new book Beatniks Look Like Spooks soon out from Beat Scene Press
For more information – contact Kevin Ring and Beat Scene – here
Ann, alongside Gordon Ball, Stevan Weine and Regina Weinreich, will be speaking at the MLA Conference in Toronto this weekend, (“Allen Ginsberg as Photographer”), the first of a number events acknowledging the Allen Ginsberg Centennial. Saturday afternoon’s panel will be hosted by Hassan Melehy, Gordon will speak on “Allen As I Knew Him”, Regina, ‘“Remembering Allen Ginsberg: Guilt by Association”, Stevan’s talk is entitled “Blessed, Blessed, Blessed In Sickness”.
The conference opened yesterday with an earlier panel (hosted by John Whalen-Bridge<), Jericho Williams spoke of ““A Prescription for Patriotism: Ginsberg and Censorship in an Era of Book Banning and Challenges”, Deborah R. Geis, ““Yelp! – The Parodic Afterlives of Ginsberg’s Howl”, Eric Keenaghan – “‘When You Change Someone’s Language’ – How Beat Poetry Helped Shape ‘Gay Sensibility’ and Liberationist Discourse after Stonewall” and Whalen-Bridge himself (remarks on ““Late Ginsberg and Queer Temporality”)
More academic recognition to come. This April see the much-anticipated Allen Ginsberg in Context, edited by Erik Mortenson) for Cambridge University Press. We’ll keep you posted.
David S Wills does it again! We continue to be impressed and grateful for his “deep dive” (sorry, cliche-watchers!) immersive, informative, deeply-researched, Substack posts. There’s another one this week – on the seemingly unlikely Maya Angelou-Allen Ginsberg connection – “Maya Angelou and the Beat Generation – Documenting connections between “the people’s poet” and the Beats”
“One does not typically think of Maya Angelou as having any particular connections to the Beat Generation”, Wills writes, “but during the research for my recent book, A Remarkable Collection of Angels: A History of the 6 Gallery Reading, I had to look through many archival documents and was surprised to see her name alongside Allen Ginsberg’s in newspapers from 1955. They do not appear to have known each other and she was not exactly part of the Beat poetry or San Francisco Renaissance scenes but certainly there were connections. The purpose of this essay”, he explains,”is to explore those and to show how close their lives were at one point and what Angelou and the Beat writers thought of each other.”
The oft-neglected Gerd Stern was it seems a potential intersection-point (Gerd was romantically linked with her for a brief period, living on a houseboat in Sausalito (“evidence strongly suggests that they lived together in 1955-56”). He may or may not (Wills thinks probably not) have been instrumental in her early singing and dancing career at the legendary San Francisco boho spot, The Purple Onion. Allen and her paths, he speculates, might have conceivably crossed there, (or later, when both participated on successive nights at the September of 1956 San Francisco Arts Festival) – “There is no evidence that Ginsberg was there on the 15th”, Wills writes, “and none to say that Angelou attended on the 16th, but it’s a tantalising prospect”)
He singles out “the one quote I could find from Ginsberg concerning Angelou” (“Perhaps..unfair. It does sound a little dismissive”) – In 1994, before reading to an audience of 30,000 baseball fans, (throwing out the ceremonial first pitch at Candlestick Park), he was asked to choose something “with universal appeal” . Allen’s response, somewhat tart – “I’ve read to a stadium with 40,000 people in Prague. No one wanted to tame me. I don’t want to be polite to national television. I ain’t going to be no Maya Angelou for you (sic) – “Maya Angelou” i.e. ingratiating, dumbing down, reductively populist? The two poets, Wills notes, at this stage, ” were about as different as it gets poetically,” but had “earned millions of fans and became iconic” (each in their own way) “in a way that few poets have been in the last half-century.” Two famous figures with differing engagements with fame.
Jonah Raskin‘s review of Alystyre Julian’s Anne Waldman documentary. We missed it with the year’s turning – see here
and following from last week’s (obituary edition):
Todd Richmond’s notice on the AP wire on Michael Schumacher –
and Simon Johnson on James Grauerholz (for the European Beat Studies Network
and Rosa von Praunheim’s obituary in the New York Times