Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 328

August 11, 2017Simon Pettet

[Allen Ginsberg among the boxes and archives at Stanford]

The treasure-trove that is the recently-digitalized Stanford archive is starting to unpack itself. Last week, Jay Barmann at the SFist, spotlighted a particularly choice gem (two gems, in fact) – Ginsberg and Bob Dylan, talking backstage, on December 11, 1965, in San Francisco, and then Dylan performing an entire concert with a band. “It comes”, he notes, “via Dylan fan and YouTuberist Keith Gubitz, who, simultaneously, has uploaded a second, similar recording, from December 12, 1965 in San Jose — the latter includes some chatter at the beginning between … Read More

Larry Fagin (1937-2017)

May 28, 2017Simon Pettet

Larry Fagin, poet, editor, teacher, long-time leading member of the so-called “New York School” of poetry, died yesterday. He was 79 years old. An important co-worker with Allen at Naropa (and, coincidentally, upstairs neighbour in his 12th Street tenement in Manhattan), he was, (though not himself a Buddhist), alongside fellow St Marks poet, Anne Waldman, one of the key figures in the initial years of that on-going experiment. Allen himself was quite unequivocal – “I don’t know of a better editor and teacher of poetry and prose than Fagin”, he once declared. Larry’s early teaching there can … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 298

January 6, 2017Simon Pettet

pompidou

The 2016 Pompidou Center Beat Generation show (currently up, in a revised version at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany) made it as number three in the art-site Hyperallergic‘s years-end list of the  “top 15 exhibitions around the world” . The artist-critic Joseph Nechvatal writes:  “The entire airy layout of the Centre Pompidou’s retrospective of the Beat Generation was flawless, delicately and luxuriously balancing the dim lighting requirements needed to show the mix of texts,paintings, photography, collages, ephemera, historical documents, magazines, book publications, jazz music, spoken-word recordings, and fantastic underground films. Its content was a hard rejection of American right-wing … Read More

David Meltzer (1937-2016)

January 1, 2017Simon Pettet

[David’s Copy – The Selected Poems of David Meltzer – David Meltzer (2005)]

Remembering poet David Meltzer, who died yesterday, aged 79. following a massive stroke (he left “‘like a feather floating into the sky“, as his wife and creative partner Julie Rogers so poignantly described it)

Here‘s David reading from September 2015 at The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University. The full reading (illuminating and invaluable) may be viewed here

Here‘s David reading in September of this year “When I Was A Poet” (the title poem of his “Pocket Poets” … Read More

John Wieners Selected ( Supplication) and Journals (Stars Seen In Person)

August 13, 2015admin

Pub. date isn’t until October 6th, but we couldn’t resist putting out the word on the forthcoming Selected Poems of John Wieners – edited by a trio of editors, Robert Dewhurst, Joshua Beckman and the ubiquitous CA Conrad “About himself, the author writes; / he is a tireless worker, and has a very long memory./ Having forgotten what ensues, the anger of redundancy rises/a very lustful nature: he drinks like a fish/Crowded cupboards combine with scrap heaps disht!/ there is no man to be feared in judicial canon more than this male harlot” (!)

or – as Allen Ginsberg … Read More

Joanne Kyger’s 80th Birthday

November 19, 2014admin

Joanne Kyger and Donald Guravich

[Joanne Kyger and Donald Guravich in 2007 – Photograph by Cirrelda Snider-Bryan]

The remarkable, wonderful, Joanne Kyger, turns eighty-years-old today! – Impossible to believe! – Happy Birthday, dear Joanne!  Don’t miss our previous links-rich Kyger-birthday-postings on the Allen Ginsberg Project  here, here and here  Here’s Allen’s vintage (March 1962) photo – (his caption):  “Joanne Kyger, hills leading to Himalayan Peaks, studying guidebook on wall in Amora, we were on Pilgrimage to Buddhist sites, here visiting Lama Govinda..”

Some recent video(s) – Joanne on her colorful West Coast history (as part of a panel at the recent … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 191

October 3, 2014admin

Photo by Richard Friedman

[David Meltzer – Photograph by Richard Friedman]

“Poet, musician, critic, novelist, editor, bookseller and educator” – Garrett Caples, in a recent City Lights post, accurately nails it – David Meltzer is “nothing less than a national treasure”. But at 77, following recent surgery (succesful, it would seem) for the removal of a recently-discovered cancerous tumor on his liver, (and, “as a disabled senior citizen with numerous health issues, surviving on social security with no pension..”), things right now are pretty tough. We’re spreading the word about on-going efforts to raise money for him. An on-line fund-raising project has been initiated … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 133

July 5, 2013Simon Pettet
The Allen Ginsberg Festival kicks off next Thursday in San Francisco with a literary tour of North Beach by Allen’s biographer (and bibliographer) Bill Morgan. On Thursday night at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, you can learn more, as Bill is the guest in a conversation with poet, David Meltzer. Gravity Goldberg will be on hand to moderate the discussion. For the schedule for the following three days, see here.

Meanwhile, earlier (tomorrow in fact!), in England – in Canterbury (as part of the three-day Brainchild Festival) , the Poejazzi collaborative will be “working on a

… Read More

Text and Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll

April 27, 2013admin

The recent publication of Simon Warner‘s quaintly-titled, monumental (500+ pages) tome, Text and Drugs and Rock ‘N’ Roll, had us thinking again about lineage and connections and those issues – “Was rock culture the natural heir to the activities of the Beats? Were the hippies the Beats of the 1960s? What attitude did the Beat writers have towards musical forms and particularly rock music? How did literary works shape the consciousness of leading rock music-makers and their followers? Why did Beat literature retain its cultural potency with later rock musicians who rejected hippie values? How did rock musicians … Read More