Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 348

January 12, 2018Simon Pettet

Reposting and restating last week’s big news – “Howl’,  a newly-assembled red vinyl  box-set will be available soon – next month – from Craft Recordings.  February 23 is slated as the release-date. Hold your breath!

A couple of weeks back,  Chris Agg uploaded a scattering of short Beat-related video-clips onto You Tube. See here (a few selected examples). We start off with Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading his prose-poem “Look Homeward, Jack – Two Correspondences”  from the book Wild Dreams of A New Beginning. (Ferlinghetti can also be seen here, reading “Constantly Rising Absurdity”, from A Coney Island of the … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 347

January 5, 2018Simon Pettet

Looking forward and looking back, with the year’s first “Weekly Round-Up”, starting off with Allen Ginsberg – Fotografìa y Poetica Beat at the Photology Gallery in Garzon, Uruguay –  the first ever showing of Allen’s photographs in South America!  (this show is coming to a close, closing-date is next Tuesday, January 9).

And more photo news – Opening January 29, and up through 27 April, at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto – ‘Fleeting Moments, Floating Worlds, and the Beat Generation – The Photography of Allen Ginsberg” 

“This exhibition”, the Library states, in its preliminary … Read More

Eric Mottram (1924-1995)

December 29, 2017Simon Pettet

 

Our focus today – Eric Mottram, (1924-1995), author of  (among many other titles)  the brief survey, Allen Ginsberg in the Sixties – a poet, critic and scholar, a central figure in the English/transatlantic connection, one of the earliest, most astute and most passionate, readers and observers and commentators on Allen’s work.

Mottram on Ginsberg, from a lecture, given  at Kings College London, circa 1970

“He [Allen]’s very conscious now of finding strategies for being very very private in public.”

He goes on:

“But if you are going to say, “okay, private life is primary, the body is primary, … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up -346

December 15, 2017Simon Pettet

[Allen Ginsberg in the studio, recording William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience”]

Amanda Petrusich, writing in The New Yorker

“The membrane between poetry and“song,” as we think of it in 2017, has always been flimsy and permeable; once all poems were songs. Ginsberg’s weird, wobbly singing [in “The Complete Songs of Innocence and Experience” CD] is sometimes dissonant, but it gets at something essential to Blake’s work. It’s as good a narration of the phases of a life as I can think of..”

Might we recommend, as a holiday gift, this holiday…?

The re-release of Allen’s William Blake … Read More

USA Poetry – Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, 1965

December 9, 2017Simon Pettet

We’ve been featuring, these last few months, video from the Stanford University Archives (a number of intriguing videos of Allen reside there, though curiously, not this one – Allen and Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1965, from the ground-breaking WNET television series, USA Poetry, directed, as they all were, by the remarkable poet and filmmaker, Richard O Moore).

We’ll be featuring more from USA Poetry in the weeks ahead. But to start off with, Allen (filmed on two occasions, July 18 and December 14, 1965 – the broadcast went out the week of March 7 1966) .

The video begins with … Read More

More on Metrics – 4

November 16, 2017Simon Pettet
AG:  Well, so we have “Go lovely..” and I was thinking – “Tell her that wastes her time and me” – “Tell her that wastes” (da da da da)  – “her time and me” – “Tell her that wastes her time and me”  – seems to be two halves, equally cadenced –  “Tell her that wastes her time and me” – and that would be da da da-da – That’s the epitritus tertius – “Tell her that wastes her time and me.”   If you were going to emphasize the more… not so much.. if you were going to be dwelling
… Read More

More on Metrics – 2

November 14, 2017Simon Pettet

[Allen Ginsberg, San Francisco, 1956 – Photograph by Harry Redl]

Allen Ginsberg continues, lecturing his Naropa students on metrics

AG: “Moloch who’s eyes….. da da-da da, da-da da da , da-da da ,da-da da-da da, da-da.. And if you have a gang of choruses going bop-pa-pa-bom, bop-pa-pa-bom, you’ve got something very powerful going on And so, in.. without knowing it, just intuitively, I was using choriambic and variations of choriambic meters, in the Moloch section of “Howl” – “Moloch-who’s-eyes-are-a-thous-and-blind-wind-ows” – (da-da da da-da da da-da da da-da) – “thousand-blind-windows”, “thousand-blind-wind..” “Moloch-who’s-eyes-are-a-thous-and-blind-wind-ows” – So it’s a combination of choriambic … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 338

October 20, 2017Simon Pettet

[Michael McClure, at Jerry Brown rally, Washington Square Park, New York City, April 1992. Photo: Allen Ginsberg]

It’s Michael McClure’s birthday. The legendary Beat poet turns, astonishingly, 85 today. Happy Birthday, Michael!

Some of our previous McClure postings here, here and here.  Michael on Bob Dylan here.  Reading  with Allen in 1976 at Naropa, and with Diane di Prima in Golden Gate Park here. 

Lowell resident, and erudite maverick Jack Kerouac scholar, Paul Maher Jr, has a new book on Kerouac that we want to spread the word about, I Am The Revolutionary: Young Jack Kerouac, & … Read More

60th Anniversary of the Howl Verdict

October 3, 2017Simon Pettet

Today is an historic day.  The 60th anniversary of the landmark Free Speech verdict. On this day in 1957, Judge Clayton Horn declared that “Howl” was not obscene.

As he announced:

“I do not believe that “Howl” is without redeeming social importance. The first part of “Howl” presents a picture of a nightmare world; the second part is an indictment of those elements in modern society destructive of the best qualities of human nature; such elements are predominantly identi­fied as materialism, conformity, and mechanization leading toward war. The third part presents a picture of an individual who is … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 334

September 22, 2017Simon Pettet

[Patti Smith and Allen Ginsberg, c. 1977]

Patti Smith‘s new book Devotion has just come out (from Yale University Press) to mixed reviews. Here‘s Michael Lindgren’s review in The Washington Post .Here‘s Megan Volpert at Pop Matters. The book is an expanded version (though not so expanded) of her 2016 Winham-Campbell Lecture at Yale (for a section of that lecture – see here)

Grant Hart, drummer, vocalist and songwriter, who died a little over a week ago, on William Burroughs from an interview from back in 2000 for The Onion AV Club:

Interviewer:   … Read More