Barry Farber Interview – 4

April 15, 2018Simon Pettet

[Barry Farber]

We continue with the transcription of Allen’s appearance on Barry Farber’s 1976 radio broadcast.

In this episode, a punk Jonathan Robbins appears to the consternation of Barry Farber, and Allen discusses, among other things, ecology (eco-consciousness) and the apparent difficulty (alleged impossibility) of translation. 

BF:  (The Beat Generation) ….was every feature-writer’s security blanket tranquillizer and pacifier. (I want to know, technically, how you attracted that much attention?)

AG:  I think, mainly, it was we said what we really thought, rather than what we were supposed to think or what we thought would be, you know, palatable for the … Read More

Baudelaire’s Birthday

April 9, 2015admin
[Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)  circa 1862 – Photograph by Etienne Carjat]

 
“Baudelaire would have liked Billie Holiday” (Allen Ginsberg journal note, December 1960). 
(Actually, we just finished celebrating Billie Holiday on the occasion, this past Tuesday, of her centennial, but today it’s Charles Baudelaire – April 9,the anniversary of the birth of Charles Baudelaire).
 
November 1957, three years previously, Allen’s in Paris, writing to Jack Kerouac: 
“Not yet explored Paris, just inches, still to make solemn visits to cemeteries Père Lachaise  and visit Apollinaire’s menhir  (MENHIR) and Montparnasse to Baudelaire.”
                                         
[Baudelaire’s grave in Cimetière de Montparnasse, Paris]
… Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 215

April 3, 2015admin

 

Next week (next Tuesday) is  Hal Willner’s LA “Howl” extravaganza.

The following day is Earth Day – courtesy WNYC’s Spinning on Air, in New York, at The Greene Space  there’ll be an Earth Day Special with Patti Smith, Anne Waldman, Laurie Anderson and others – A live web-cast of the event will be available here.    The following day –  Thursday April the 9th – (for all you poètes maudits) is Charles Baudelaire‘s birthday.

Tomorrow (April the 4th)  Chogyam Trungpa‘s Parinirvana.

This Sunday at City Lights, Marc Olmsted reads (in honor … Read More

Expansive Poetics – 99 – (Andre Breton – 4 – Andre Breton’s Surrealist Precursors)

August 18, 2014admin

 

AG: Let’s see what else he (Andre Breton) says (in his first Surrealist Manifesto) – “…(the) omnipotence of the dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends definitivly to ruin all the old psychic mechanisms and to take their place in the solution to the principal problems of life” – [(In other words, inspired automatonism as a response to a burglar or policeman or war) – After remarking that a number of poets from Dante to Shakespeare ‘in his best-days” (sic) might be looked on as “super-realists” (Surrealists), on genius, he says] –  “In the … Read More

Expansive Poetics 90 – (Apollinaire and TS Eliot)

July 28, 2014admin

[Allen Ginsberg’s Annotated Copy of The Waste Land]

AG: The comparison to “The Waste Land” of this (Apollinaire’s “Zone”), particularly, “You are alone the morning is almost here/The milkmen rattle their cans in the street” ( “Tu es seul le matin va venir/ Les laitiers font tinter leurs bidons dans les rues”) – does that remind you of (T.S.) Eliot? – “Wipe your hands across your mouth and laugh,/ In the vacant allotments women gathering garbage“,  or something. Do you know the line? [Editorial note – Allen is quoting here, (slightly misremembering), the concluding lines from Eliot’s “Preludes” – … Read More

Allen Ginsberg & Bob Dylan at the Grave of Jack Kerouac

December 23, 2013admin

This little excerpt, this classic excerpt, from Bob Dylan’s lost epic, “Renaldo and Clara” (courtesy of the essential “The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg“, Jerry Aronson‘s deluxe two-disc DVD set).  Bob and Allen, in 1975, in Lowell cemetery (Edson cemetery), on the occasion of a stop-over on the legendary Rolling Thunder tour, famously standing together, beside Jack Kerouac’s grave, musing, (Allen’s certainly taking the lead), in memento mori.  Allen (gesticulating towards the grave):”So that’s what’s gonna happen to you?”  Dylan: “No, I want to be in an unmarked grave.” The clip begins with … Read More

Investigative Poetics – 5 – (Drugs – 2)

November 6, 2013admin

Allen on “Investigative Poetics” continues AG: Well all this is simply to say that there was some kind of vast and large-scale weird conspiracy to interfere with people’s lives, to interfere with the doctor-patient relationship, to tell niggers (sic) to stop smoking grass, or tell white people to stop (emulating) the niggers smoking grass, for whatever reason. It entered into the poetry because there’s this old tradition of Theophile Gautier and the Club of the Hashashins (Club des Hashisihins), or Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, French poets of the 1870’s taking hashish, (Charles) Baudelaire’s writings on hashish, (Samuel … Read More