Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 374

July 13, 2018Simon Pettet

[Allen Ginsberg in the War Resisters League office, May 1978 – photo: David McReynolds (c) David McReynolds]

Allen Ginsberg celebrations last night in Salerno, Italy – a collaboration between Casa della Poesia and La Locanda del Mare, presented by Sergio Iagulli, Raffaella Marzano and Giancarlo Cavallo, and drawing from the extensive audio and video archive of Casa della Poesia. (The event also featured a screening of the classic Beat film, Pull My Daisy, with Marzano’s appreciative and sensitive Kerouac translation)

Allen in Cuba in 1965 – Manuel Diaz Martinez’s  suppressed newspaper interview – “Y…no les dije a mis escandalizados superiores … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 353

February 16, 2018Simon Pettet

[Allen Ginsberg in his kitchen, 1988 – Photograph by Brian Graham]

The Toronto photo show, “Fleeting Moments, Floating Worlds..,“ that we mentioned last week continues. What we omitted to mention was the accompanying catalog (printed and designed by the legendary Coach House Press). As curator, John Shoesmith writes in the forward – “The accompanying catalog attempts to further the story behind the Ginsberg photographs. It contains the voices of several key individuals who were crucial to the poet’s “second coming” as a photographer, beginning in the mid-1980s; from the person who planted the seed within Ginsberg to … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 352

February 9, 2018Simon Pettet

Opening this past week, and on through April 27, at the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library  – Fleeting Moments, Floating Words, and the Beat Generation – The Photography of Allen Ginsberg.

[“Fleeting Moments , Floating Words and the Beat Generation – Photographs by Peter Hale]

 

from Thomas Marks’  interview with the Italian painter  Giorgio Griffa  (in Apollo) – (Griffa’s current one-man show at London’s Camden Arts Centre, currently up, is up until the 8th of April):

“The work of Allen Ginsberg has also provided a touchstone; Ginsberg’s elegy for his mother, ‘Kaddish’, is … Read More

Nicanor Parra’s 100th Birthday

September 5, 2014admin

 

[“Nicanor Parra Anti-Poet, professor of Newtonian physics, University of Santiago Chile, my host a month 1960. We couldn’t get a cab downtown from his daughter Catalina on 110 St. N.Y.C. so took Subway to N.Y.U.– here  stopped between stations, September 5, 1984 – Nicanor Para Anti-Poet on Subway from 110 Street Broadway downtown to N.Y.U. September 5, 1984”- Photo: Allen Ginsberg]
[Nicanor Parra, Miguel Grinberg, Allen Ginsberg, Maria-Rosa, Havana, February 1965. Photographer unknown]

 

[Allen Ginsberg and Nicanor Parra, National Arts Club, New York City, January 1984. Photo: Beryl Sokoloff]

Today’s a momentous day –  it’s Nicanor Parra‘s … Read More

Fidel Castro’s Birthday

August 13, 2011admin

Fidel Castro was born August 13, 1926. That makes him 85 years old today [August 13, 2011]
The Beat Generation’s particular involvement in Cuba, and in the Cuban Revolution, has been comprehensively explored by Todd Tietchen in his 2010 book, The Cubalogues – Beat Writers in Revolutionary Havana. From the publisher’s description:
“Immediately after the Cuban Revolution, Havana fostered an important transnational, intellectual and cultural scene. Later, Castro would strictly impose his vision of Cuban culture on the populace, and the United States would bar its citizens from traveling to the island, but for these few fleeting years, the … Read More