Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 383

5 days ago September 14, 2018Simon Pettet

[Allen Ginsberg at Capel-y-Ffin (“Wales Visitation”), 1967 – Photo: Tom Maschler]

“…rubber booted in soft grass, mind moveless, /breath trembles in white daisies by the roadside, Heaven breath and my own symmetric/ Airs wavering thru antlered green fern drawn in my navel,/ same breath as breathes thru Capel-Y-Ffin..”  (from “Wales Visitation”)

Eco-watch –  They’re thinking of putting a telecommunications mast in one of the most beautiful parts of the Llanthony Valley. Read more about the resistance here 

Allen Ginsberg and William Blake  (sic) – Luke Walker, at Hell’s Printing Press (the blog of the Blake Archive and … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 382

2 weeks ago September 7, 2018Simon Pettet

[Allen Ginsberg]

[Gordon Ball]

Gordon Ball (whose iconic photograph of Virginia military academy students in a classroom reading Howl we featured, here on The Allen Ginsberg Project, a few weeks back), is a photographer, filmmaker, author, and the accomplished editor of several volumes of Allen’s journals, (notably Journals – Early ‘Fifties, Early ‘Sixties, and Journals – Mid Fifties 1954-1958, as well as the earlier (1975) Pulitzer-Prize-nominated Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness.)

He is also, more recently, (2012),  author of  East Hill Farm – Seasons with Allen Ginsberg, a unique and wonderful memoir of his time … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 381

August 31, 2018Simon Pettet

[Allen Ginsberg & Kate Millett, Boulder Colorado, July 1978 (photo: probably snapped by Cynthia MacAdams with Allen’s camera, courtesy Stanford University Libraries/Allen Ginsberg Estate)]

The Beats and Women – that continually thorny topic (we noted last week Blair Hurley’s Paris Review article – You might also recall Lynnette Lounsbury’s piece in The Guardian, a few years back – and, indeed, Amy Newman’s “Howl” (sic)) – David S Wills’ piece in the current Beatdom, in this context, comprehensive and scholarly, is well worth a read – “Beats and Women – “The Personal is Political” –  tentative notes on … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 380

August 24, 2018Simon Pettet

[Bob Donlon, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Robert LaVigne and Lawrence Ferlinghetti – outside of City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco, 1956 – photo: Peter Orlovsky]

The esteemed Poetry Foundation has been working (consistently) on its web presence. It’s just recently consolidated and organized this useful resource – An Introduction to the Beat Poets.

While we’re on such overviews, here is the page on the Beats from the Academy of American Poets 

International Beats – Marc Olmsted in Empty Mirror reviews Erik Mortenson’s  Translating the Counterculture – The Reception of the Beats in Turkey Southern Illinois University Press are also the publishers … Read More

David McReynolds (1929-2018)

August 22, 2018Simon Pettet

[David McReynolds, March 18. 1960 (sic) letter to Allen Ginsberg]

[David McReynolds (1929-2018) with his cat, Shaman – Photograph by Ed Hedemann]

The great pacifist activist David McReynolds died on Friday August 17 (this past Friday), aged 88, following a fall he sustained at his New York City home. We deeply mourn his passing.

His obituary in The Washington Post, by Harrison Smith (“David McReynolds, gay socialist pacifist, who twice ran for president, dies at 88”), can be accessed here.  The informative New York Times obituary (by Jacey Fortin) may be found – here  (and Ellen Moynihan’s notice in the … Read More

Tom Clark (1941-2018)

August 19, 2018Simon Pettet

[Tom Clark (1941-2018)]

Distressing news just out of Berkeley,  Tom Clark, struck down and killed by a car on a particularly dangerous  intersection.

Here’s the account in the local newspaper, Berkleyside

“The coroner’s office said Clark’s official time of death at Highland Hospital was listed as 12:56 a.m. Saturday.”

His extraordinary and unique “blog”  Beyond The Pale, the singular devotion of these last nine years, filed its final post, Friday. One assumes there would have been a Saturday epistle (Clark was a phenomenon, writing well into the night), now there won’t be one.

That amalgam of rigorously selected photography … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 379

August 17, 2018Simon Pettet

[Ed & Miriam Sanders – Woodstock, NY, April 1993 – photo: Allen Ginsberg]

Today Friday August 17,  Ed Sanders‘ 79th birthday.  Is there anyone more maverick, indefatigable? – ““Noli in spiritu combueri” –  Salute! –  Refuse to be burnt out!”

Ed’s been featured many times here on The Allen Ginsberg Project – see, for example,  the two birthday postings here and here, our note on his voluminous archive – here, his notes on Allen here and here, a 1986 Naropa reading – here, a class on “Investigative Poetry” here and here, WNET footage of the ‘Sixties … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 378

August 10, 2018Simon Pettet

Michael Robbins on Book Post – on Gordon Ball’s iconic photograph

“What better image of.. institutionalized complacency could be imagined than the assigning of Ginsberg’s verse to the nation’s future military elite, who – far from being scandalized by lines like “Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb” (from “America,” perhaps Ginsberg’s finest poem)- approach the reading with the dutiful ennui of students everywhere. Howl, like Ulysses and Lolita, has become homework.

But the poem, Robbins notes, “still razzle-dazzles today, this run-on prophetic mode of drug culture and madness, Whitmanian catalogue tuned to Blake-inflected beatific visionary blab with … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 377

August 3, 2018Simon Pettet

[Allen Ginsberg Beacon Theater, New York, 1995 – photo: Michael Stipe]

Focusing this week on Allen Ginsberg-as-photographer, with a series of interviews. Our two-part interview with Raymond Foye here and here (which should on no account be missed) will be followed, next week, (Monday), with an interview with Allen’s sometime printer, Brian Graham.

And , yes, that’s right, that’s the Michael Stipe responsible for the image above.

Here’s another Ginsberg-with-camera photo we dig (from 1992).  The photographer is Bruce Weber

Here’s yet another Ginsberg-with-camera photo  (photographer, this time, Lynn Goldsmith)

 

Kerouac painting – Following on from the successful … Read More

“Theatrics” During the Vietnam War

August 2, 2018Simon Pettet

Allen Ginsberg on William Blake continues

AG: “That the Poetic Genius is the true Man. and that the body or outward form of Man is dervied from the Poetic Genius” (William Blake) –  “…it’s just a very simple point that he’s saying, (which) is that anything, any life lived, is lived according to the interpretation of the guy who’s living.  In that sense, “Poetic Genius”.  In that sense, poetic.  Poesis is making.  Actually “poet” means “maker”, interestingly enough. The root, etymologically, of “poetry” is “making”.  So, it’s like the universe is what we make up.  So … Read More