Centennial Celebrations continue. Looking forward to events in London next month. Mark your calendars (if you haven’t already) for Sunday 12th of July Allen Ginsberg at 100 at The South Bank Center, a smorgasbord of music, poetry, visual and vocal reinterpretation. Not to be missed.
Extracts from Ginsberg’s landmark poem “Howl” will be performed by Mark Leipacher, who is joined by bassist, Gary Crosby, who leads a trio of performers.
Allen’s “Elegy for Neal Cassady” gets an expansive musical interpretation by pioneering British composer and artist Scanner (Robin Rimbaud) and photographer and video performance artist Antonio Pagano. (For more on that creation – see here)
Tony Award-Winning musician and writer Stew will perform a dazzling Ginsberg tribute
and Thurston Moore and internationally-acclaimed poet Anne Waldman will be performing readings from Ginsberg’s iconic catalogue.
The following two days (July 13 and 14), celebrations continue at The Swedenborg House – On Monday, “Blake, Ginsberg and Ah Sunflower! – Film Music and Conversation
There will be a showing of Iain Sinclair and Robert Klinkert‘s 1967 film “Ah! Sunflower“, followed by a conversation around the William Blake-Allen Ginsberg lineage featuring Sinclair, Barry Miles, Camila Oliveira, and moderated by Stephen Coates. Steven Taylor, who worked closely with Ginsberg on his settings of Blake to music, will close the evening with a short set of Blake songs and also join Oliveira for conversation on Ginsberg’s recordings of Blake.
All attending the event will receive a copy of Allen’s recent Blake publication, AH!MERICA
and on the Tuesday, the UK premiere of Outrider (the showing will be followed by a panel discussion with Stephen Coates, Anne Waldman, and filmmaker Alystyre Julian (for more on that film see here)
AH!MERICA, transcriptions of some of Allen’s Blake observations (and much besides), continues to get an enthusiastic response – “an uncovered treasure” observes Conor Williams, in his review for The Whitney Review of New Writing – see here
More UK Ginsberg – a niche, but nonetheless a valuable, publication, Roger Bygott‘s Ginsberg and Manchester is due for publication in time for the South Bank festivities.
Bygott writes about it in Rock and The Beat Generation – here
and Oliver Harris follows up with the Oxford connection – here
Looking back, well there was the New York St Mark’s Poetry Project celebration. Here’s the link to the You Tube video – here
& Jonah Raskin reviews the San Francisco Counterculture Museum event (one of them) & the showing of Jerry Aronson‘s film – “The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg – here
& (from back in January) Allen celebrated in India
The photo exhibit (currently up at the Howard Greenberg Gallery (through till 12th of September) is reviewed here for the forum, Aesthetica
An over-view of Allen as photographer may be read here
and looking forward – to September – Craft Recordings are set to release a special vinyl reissue of the original (1959) Howl and Other Poems album – read more about it here
– (and more (much more) from Harvey Kubernik about Allen)
Allen abiding – Ekaterina Petrova in the online Russian newspaper Realnoe Vremya provides a simple description of his history – and continuing importance – “A hundred years after (his) birth, many of the questions that concerned the Beats remain relevant. Debates about freedom of speech, the right to cultural dissent and independent art continue today. The poet himself saw one of the main tasks of his generation in the fight against censorship, militarism, and excessive social control.”
Ira Silverberg’s assessment of Allen in Rolling Stone is, we’d contend, essential reading.