Vojo Sindolic’s 1986 Belgrade Interview – part one

February 24, 2018Simon Pettet

[Allen Ginsberg in Belgrade, 1986]

Vojo Sindolic‘s 1986 interview with Allen in Belgrade (in two parts – the second part will follow tomorrow) is our focus on The Allen Ginsberg Project this weekend.

Vojo’s translation of Cosmopolitan Greetings  (Kozmopolitski pozdravi ) has just appeared from Hrvatskoga društva pisaca  (h,d,p) (the Croatian Writers Society) 

Here, he introduces the interview:

“Allen Ginsberg and I were very close friends for twenty years from 1977 until his death in 1997. I felt and still feel deep love for his poetic insight, or as one may call it – it was literary … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 349

January 19, 2018Simon Pettet

Opening tonight in New York, at the New York Public Library, You Say You Want A Revolution – Remembering the Sixties – a comprehensive exhibition, drawn from the library’s holdings, “exploring the breadth and significance of this pivotal era—from communal living and forays into expanded consciousness to tensions around race, politics, sexuality, and the environment”.  Items on display, include manuscripts from Allen, (and from Burroughs and Kerouac), “Changing of the Guards”, (an original typescript by Bob Dylan),  and notations from Timothy Leary on his LSD research, (alongside much else).

It’s Edgar Allan Poe‘s birthday today! – … Read More

Allen Ginsberg Reading at St Marks Poetry Project 1977

August 5, 2017Simon Pettet

[Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell, St Mark’s Church, February 23, 1977. Photo: Martin Wechselblatt]

We featured one, from the extraordinary trove of recordings of Allen readings, last week, from PennSound (from the Robert Creeley collection – 1971 at Intersection, San Francisco). Here‘s another, six years later- from the St Mark’s Poetry Project in New York. The occasion was a now-legendary coupling of Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell (it was on this occasion that Lowell was memorably heckled by Gregory Corso). Allen reads a variety of works, referencing his recent visit to Australia, his Vajrayana Buddhist … Read More

Buddhism and The Beats (Ginsberg 1993 – I – Introduction)

July 15, 2017Simon Pettet

A real treat this weekend – with gratitude to Robyn Brentano and students from the NYU Ethnographic Film Program – “Buddhism and the Beats.”. “In 1993, Allen Ginsberg spoke to a gathering of students of the Tibetan Buddhist monk, Lobsang Samten, about the impact of Buddhist thought and practice on himself, the Beat writers, and American culture at large”. The full hour-and-a-half tape is transcribed below (continuing tomorrow, and with the Q & A session to be featured here next weekend)

AG: Well, good evening, Rinpoche [Lobsang Samten Rinpoche] and I met very recently at the house … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 288

October 7, 2016admin

 

Gregory Corso‘s Painting of Edgar Allan Poe

October 7, 1849 –  the death of Edgar Allan Poe. More Allen-Ginsberg-on-Poe postings here, here and here

October 2017 marks the Centennial of the English poet David Gascoyne. Enitharmon, his English publisher, have taken the occasion to reprint a 1986 letter/memoir/note he wrote to Allen – See here

October in the Railroad Earth – October is Kerouac month… (every month is Kerouac month! – but this month (this weekend) in Lowell, Massachusetts, it’s the annual Lowell Celebrates Kerouac). Full details about the weekend’s activities – here… 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

Allen in the ‘Sixties – Portland State College Readings

June 27, 2014admin
[Allen Ginsberg, April 23, 1969, at Portland State College – Photograph from Viking (PSU Yearbook, 1968-69), courtesy Portland State University Library’s Special Collection]

The big news last week, the discovery, initially, by Portland State University archivist, Christine Paschild, (with additional assistance by PSU library technician Carolee Harrison) of a remarkable collection of reel-to-reel audio tapes (275 hours, now transfered to digital format and made publicly available) – the historic and extraordinary Oregon Public Speakers Collection, featuring the voices of such singular cultural (and counter-cultural) figures as Robert F Kennedy, Carl Sagan, Linus Pauling, Stokely Carmichael, … Read More

Expansive Poetics – 35 – (Hart Crane 3 & Poe)

March 5, 2014admin

Edgar Allan Poe AG: And then there’s another funny passage right after that from (the section of “The Bridge”called) “The Tunnel” where (Hart) Crane also picks up on the image of Edgar Allan Poe, whom we’ve already dealt with a little bit. Weird Poe – Poe of the weir, or weird. And he sees a vision of Poe in the subway. Poe, as you know, at the end, his last day – or you may know – was dragged from place to place, voting, from voting-place to voting-place. He’d drunk a little, and was found in the gutter, and was, like, … Read More

Expansive Poetics – 9 (The Bells and Annabel Lee)

December 17, 2013admin

The Bells Edgar Allan Poe birthday Then, in America, the most interesting person around (at) the same time (as Pushkin, in the nineteenth-century), born 1809 and died early, 1849, is Edgar Allan Poe. Are most of you familiar with Poe? How many here are familiar with Poe? How many here are not? [Students raise a show of hands] – Yeah. How many have read “The Bells” by Poe? And how many have not? Poe’s “..Bells”  Well, that’d be kind of interesting to do. “The Bells” was the earliest poem that I knew, and that determined my rhythmic system, probably, because my father would go … Read More

Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman Reading (Naropa, April 1977)

November 23, 2013admin

Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman

We’ve already featured them reading together before – from 1974 here, and from 1976, here, but here, from 1977 is vintage audio of Allen and Anne Waldman reading. Allen begins, thanking his sponsors and setting out his plans. AG: We owe thanks to Naropa and Peter Lieberson and Meg for arranging this luxurious space for us to orate in, because, actually, it turned out to be a nice situation. I’m going to begin where I left off last summer (1976) in poetry reading with a series of poems on my father’s death – called  “Don’t Grow Old”  … Read More