Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 283

September 2, 2016admin

 

Edson cemetry, Lowell, Mass. The exact location. Bob Dylan and Allen visiting Jack Kerouac’s grave. We’ve featured Bob Egan‘s conceptual recreations – Popspots – before –  here.  Here’s his re-staging of two of Ken Regan’s iconic photos.

Here’s another of his Popspots ( “Pot Is A Reality Kick” – Benedict J Fernandez‘s much-circulated image of Allen at the LEMAR (Committee To Legalize Marijuana) protest, Christopher Street at 6th Avenue, New York City, January, 1965

 

Oscar Wilde !854-1900

Patti Smith reading Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol ? Reading Gaol (HM Prison, Reading) … Read More

Eliot Katz – The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg

December 17, 2015admin

Eliot Katz‘s new book, The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg is now out from David Wills’ Beatdom books.  For more details, see here  Read his earlier response – (an unpublished letter to the New York Times)  “Ginsberg Apolitical?  I don’t think so” – hereMore of Eliot-on-Allen here and hereKurt Hemmer writes:

“The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg is the most engaging and rigorous analysis of Ginsberg’s political poetry yet attempted. We find in these psges the astuteness of a literary critic, the contextualization of a social historian, the knowledge of a veteran political activist, … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 248

December 11, 2015admin

 

  

Allen Ginsberg, June 1959 – Photograph by Joe Rosenthal

Peter Hartlaub‘s engaging article for the San Francisco Chronicle‘s sesquicentennial history project, (on the Beat Generation), is well worth reading, (as are the photographs (like the one above) worth perusing) – Allen reading Doctor Sax.  Here‘s a posting from earlier in the year on the Ginsberg Project (Robert Creeley’s 1982 remarks on that book) Open Culture features the Jack Kerouac recordings

                                                        

Jack Kerouac on The Beat Generation – Verve LP, 1960

Here‘s, on the subject of Kerouac, the Ginsberg Project posting of Allen reading from … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 221

June 5, 2015admin

 

The David Olio “Please Master” case (our focus last week) remains in the news (as well it should). Here’s Jerry Aronson, director of The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg reading recently-unearthed transcriptions of Allen explaining his intentions and inspiration for writing the poem:  “Some situations are exuberant, like “Howl” or “Plutonian Ode”. Some situations are “Gee, I feel so good, I think I’ll write down what I see at this moment”. Some situations, I’m trying to locate what is my erotic imagination and write it down as a sample, like “Please Master”, you know, to … Read More

Wednesday June 3 – Allen Ginsberg’s Birthday

June 3, 2015admin

Every year it blossoms. The tree planted in memory of Allen in the back yard at St Mark’s Church – the flowering dogwood, the good old Kousa dogwood. It did it again this year (See previous flowering dogwood here, here and here) HAPPY BIRTHDAY ALLEN!  Birthday celebrations tonight and a stellar reading in New York City at Poets House to launch the eagerly-anticipated publication of The Essential Allen Ginsberg. Readings and performances of the poet’s work included in the collection by Bob Rosenthal, Eliot Katz, Steven Taylor, Eileen Myles, Sharon Mesmer, Lee Ann … Read More

Friday Weekly Round-Up – 209

February 20, 2015admin

 

 

Linda Cronin and Linda Hillringhouse – first-prize winners at the annual  Paterson, New Jersey. Passaic County Community College Allen Ginsberg awards – Congratulations you two! Tonight, in NYC (at the Cornelia Street Cafe) – Eliot Katz, Bob Rosenthal, and others – an hommage to Allen Ginsberg (the first of a series of readings, organized by Gordon Gilbert, that will be focusing on a variety of Beat writers) Manuel Agnelli (of Afterhours), a few weeks back at Sala Verdi Conservaorio di Milano, reciting Allen Ginsberg ( “Moloch! Solitudine! Sudicio! Bruttura! Pattumiere e inottenibili dollari!..”) … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 114

February 22, 2013admin
[Neal Cassady & Natalie Jackson, San Francisco, 1955. Photo c Allen Ginsberg Estate]

Another notice (see the flood of notices last week) of Allen’s photographic Beat Memories show – Tim Keane (on Hyperallergic) – “”I Noticed My Friends” – Allen Ginsberg’s Photography” – “At best these pictures are a celebration within a rite of mourning”, Keane astutely notes. “And if photography prolongs a lived moment that vanishes as soon as it arrives,  [and surely it does] Ginsberg sensed how better suited [perhaps?] photography than writing can be to that impulse..” [Tho’ he was hardly a slouch, we might … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 108

January 11, 2013admin

Next Wednesday, January 16 in New York – Join Allen Ginsberg’s friends, collaborators, relatives and co-conspirators – Lou Reed, Steven Taylor, Anne Waldman, Ambrose Bye, CA Conrad, Andy Clausen, David Amram, the Arthur Russell tribute band, Arthur’s Landing, & others for “a night of poetry and song” in one of the quintessential downtown New York Spaces, the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, to breathe new life into “First Blues”, Ginsberg Recordings new special edition/limited vinyl reissue.

A tad overly tongue-in-cheek, but ultimately “won over” – (“sharp insight and analysis of one … Read More

Eliot Katz

March 4, 2009admin

We’d like to point out Eliot Katz‘s new collection of poems – that definitely merits mention here – Love, War, Fire, Wind: Looking out from North American’s Skull, published by Narcissus Press with illustrations by William T. Ayton. It covers work from 2000 on.

Allen & Eliot became friends beginning with Eliot’s apprenticeship under Allen at Naropa in 1980, and they remained close, due in part to their kindred spirit for activism for humanitarian causes.

Here’s Eliot’s “Recalling Allen,” a brief note that gives a vivid glimpse of Allen’s interaction with students and his energetic activism.

For … Read More