Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 367

May 25, 2018Simon Pettet

[Allen Ginsberg, photographed on the campus at Columbia University, 1968]

A nice little hat-tipping to Allen from Danny Goldberg, in an interview with Rob Couteau. in Rain Taxi, regarding his new book,  In Search of the Lost Chord – 1967 and the Hippie Idea

“My favorite poem by Allen is “Wichita Vortex Sutra.” That, to me, is his quintessential ’60s poem. It’s a fully mature commentary on what was happening in America at that time. I recently wrote a review of the Ken Burns documentary of the Vietnam War, and I said: “If you want to … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 365

May 11, 2018Simon Pettet

[Allen Ginsberg, San Francisco, September 1991. Snapped by Rick Dickenson with Allen’s camera, courtesy Stanford University Libraries/Allen Ginsberg Estate.]

Bill Morgan, archivist, editor, and Allen’s biographer, is interviewed by host Charlie Rossiter on the latest episode of the podcast Poetry Spoken Here. He gets to speak of his most recent book, The Best Minds of My Generation – A Literary History of the Beats (based on transcriptions of Allen’s lectures both at Naropa and at Brooklyn College). In addition, Rossiter reviews Wait Till I’m Dead, Bill’s edition of Allen’s posthumous poems, now fresh out in paperback.

Speaking … Read More

Bobbie-Louise Hawkins (1930-2018)

May 7, 2018Simon Pettet

Still saddened by the news of the death of the wonderful prose writer and long-time Naropa teacher, Bobbie-Louise Hawkins.  Previous postings on Bobbie on the Allen Ginsberg Project can be found here and here.  We miss you, Bobbie, your warm and wise insights, that wonderful Texan drawl!   We miss you!

[Anselm Hollo, Tom Raworth, Bobbie-Louise Hawkins, Jenny Dorn – photograph Jane Dalrymple-Hollo]

 [Anselm Hollo, Anne Waldman, Bobbie-Louise Hawkins, Jack Collom – photograph Jane Dalrymple-Hollo]

[Joanne Kyger, Allen Ginsberg, Bobbie-Louise Hawkins, Peter Orlovsky, Michael McClure and Diane Wakowski, at a poetry festival, Bisbee, Arizona, August 1980 – courtesy of the Allen … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 348

January 12, 2018Simon Pettet

Reposting and restating last week’s big news – “Howl’,  a newly-assembled red vinyl  box-set will be available soon – next month – from Craft Recordings.  February 23 is slated as the release-date. Hold your breath!

A couple of weeks back,  Chris Agg uploaded a scattering of short Beat-related video-clips onto You Tube. See here (a few selected examples). We start off with Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading his prose-poem “Look Homeward, Jack – Two Correspondences”  from the book Wild Dreams of A New Beginning. (Ferlinghetti can also be seen here, reading “Constantly Rising Absurdity”, from A Coney Island of the … Read More

Jack Collom (1931-2017)

July 2, 2017Simon Pettet

Following the death of Larry Fagin, news reaches us this morning of the death of another of the great Naropa poet-teachers, Jack Collom. When Allen and Anne Waldman set up the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in 1974 in Boulder, Colorado, Colorado already had one distinctive inventive joyful maverick poet at hand, Jack Collom. He was swiftly engaged in the experiment and soon (not soon enough, as we recall) became an integral part of the faculty. This page (from the Naropa University Archive) provides links to countless instances of Jack’s participation. We might, arbitrarily, single out … Read More

Naropa Summer Writing Program 2017

June 10, 2017Simon Pettet

Starting tomorrow – the 2017 session of the Naropa Summer Writing Program.

Here are all the details. From June 11 to July 1st – “The New Weathers” – Anne Waldman explains: “By The New Weathers, we intend to name the ramifications of climate change wrought in the Anthropocene. The luminous details evidencing these changes abound, and daily the case of inevitably grows. These are urgent days, and a new world is possible––and this world is yet worth struggling for. To face facts with creative and spirited resolve; to see through webs of ignorance and power; to witness and study, … Read More

Bobbie Louise Hawkins – 1976 – Novato

April 29, 2017Simon Pettet

A few weeks back we featured Joanne Kyger’s reading in the Spring of 1976 for the Bay Area Writers group. Here’s the other reader on that occasion, Joanne’s then-fellow-Bolinas resident, Bobbie Louise Hawkins.  Bobbie reads some early drafts of some of her celebrated short-stories (finished drafts, the only real change being the subsitution, in some cases, of some pseudonyms for some of the characters’ original names). She also reads a number of poems

BLH: I’ll read some stories out of a book that’s called Back To Texas. It’ll be out sometime..next..early..early in the Fall..if I can find a good … Read More

Mexico City Blues – 7

June 22, 2015admin

                   

[Gore Vidal]

                                                  

[“Dem eggs & dem dem/Dere bacons”]

[“..be boppy/be buddy/I didn’t took/I could think/So/bepo/beboppy..”]

                                                     

[William Carlos Williams]

AG: I’m just trying to check through the things (in Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues) that are exemplary of pure poetry

 
[74thChorus]
“”Darling!”/Red hot,/That kind of camping/I don’t object to/unless it’s kept/within reason” – You got that? – “”Darling!”/Red hot,/That kind of camping/I don’t object to/unless it’s kept/within reason./ “The coffee is delicious.”/
This is for Vidal./ Didn’t know I was.a Come-Onner, did you? (Come-on-er)/ I am one of the world’s/Great Bullshitters,/Girls/  Very High Cantos.” – It’s whatever he thought. … Read More

Meditation and Poetics – 92 – Haiku 5 (Śrāvaka Buddha)

May 18, 2015admin

[Hanging scroll of an Indian Buddhist arhat by Japanese painter,  Shiba Kokan (1747-1818)]

AG: Then there’s the Śrāvaka Buddha as part of the Hinayana.  The guy who just meditates for himself and never gets out of it into the bodhisattvapath.  So there’s an old Chinese poem deriding an aged monk for worshipping the sutras, for worshipping the books themselves.

“Burning incense, lighting tapers/ a white-haired old monk is chanting the ten-thousand-Buddha’s-names  Sutra/ For how many years has he been drinking the wine of Śrāvaka/Up to now he’s never wakened from his stupor.”
The Śrāvaka buddhas are … Read More

Meditation and Poetics – 56 – (Clear Seeing)

March 3, 2015admin

AG: (But) to begin with, you’ve got to begin somewhere, so that’s why you begin with the breath – or (William Carlos) Williams might begin with the Red Wheelbarrow, or, in his old age (a very interesting thing, he’s got his old age poem [“The World Contracted to a Recognizable Image“] about how he’s lying in bed and his mind’s fastened to a picture on the wall, like a fly clinging to a wall. As his consciousness was fading, he kept focusing just on this one picture on the hospital wall, from his hospital bed).

 

… Read More