“Who Will Take Over The Universe?”
November 12, 2018
Allen Ginsberg continues on the influence of Blake’s “The French Revolution” on his poetry  AG:  Another version, a couple of years later, directly inspired by the (William Blake’s) “French Revolution”, is the first poem[…]
“Theatrics” During the Vietnam War
August 2, 2018
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[…]
Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 375
July 20, 2018
The Beat Scene – Photographs by Burt Glenn – edited by Tony Nourmand and Michael Shulman (with an essay by Jack Kerouac), a dazzling portfolio of images shot between 1957 and 1960,  both in New York and San Francisco – close up, contemporaneous, and at the heart of the Beat phenomenon –[…]
May Day (Kral Majales)
May 1, 2018
May Day. May Day. Revolution in the air. We welcome today this guest posting from Czech Beat scholar and Allen’s good friend, Josef Rauvolf The King of May Revisited When, on May the first, 1965, a thirty-nine-year-old Allen Ginsberg drove through the streets of Prague, observing the atmosphere in the crowded streets[…]
Friday’s Weekly Round-Up -346
December 15, 2017
Amanda Petrusich, writing in The New Yorker “The membrane between poetry and“song,” as we think of it in 2017, has always been flimsy and permeable; once all poems were songs. Ginsberg’s weird, wobbly singing [in “The Complete Songs of[…]
Allen Ginsberg 1974 San Francisco tv Interview – “I Believe” – part 2
October 8, 2017
continuing from yesterday – (transcript of Allen Ginsberg and Father Mike S Riley’s 1974 conversation picks up approximately sixteen-and-a-half minutes in) MR: What’s a nice Jewish boy like you doing with all of the Christian metaphors and analogies?. It’s just “Christ,” “Jesus, “”the Church”, “Crucifixtion”… AG: Well, what I’ve been talking (except[…]
60th Anniversary of the Howl Verdict
October 3, 2017
Today is an historic day.  The 60th anniversary of the landmark Free Speech verdict. On this day in 1957, Judge Clayton Horn declared that “Howl” was not obscene. As he announced: “I do not believe that “Howl” is without redeeming social importance. The first part of “Howl” presents a picture of a[…]
Allen Ginsberg, Salman Rushdie, & Meditation
July 6, 2017
Salman Rushdie, describing a moment, in 1989 in New York, in protective custody, following the issuing of the notorious fatwa  that followed on the publication of his novel, The Satanic Verses “I spent that day in a fourteenth-floor suite with at least twenty armed men. The windows were blocked by bullet-proof mattresses.[…]
The 1973 Glasgow Review Interview
July 1, 2017
We featured here last week, Allen’s interview in 1973 in Scottish International. Featured today is a companion piece from The Glasgow Review  (drawing from the same press conference).  The piece was initially titled “Of Burns and Watergate” (referring to the two main topics). Interviewer;[…]
1974 – Scottish International Interview
June 24, 2017
We’ve previously featured here footage from Allen’s 1973 visit to Scotland     ( a reading for the Center for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow). We also featured some grainy footage (and some transcription from his press conference). Here (with some duplication) is the interview that appeared in[…]