Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 366

1 week ago May 18, 2018Simon Pettet

[Allen Ginsberg in Benares, India, 1963]

Allen Ginsberg in Asia – another early taste of David S Wills’  World Citizen – Allen Ginsberg as Traveller, (due out later this year – his fourth book, and another must-read from Beatdom‘s spirited editor).

Also from Beatdom this year (we mentioned these titles last week), The Buddhist Beat Poetics of Diane di Prima and Lenore Kandel  by Max Orsini, and, Straight Around Allen – On The Business of Being Allen Ginsberg by Bob Rosenthal.

Must-read, certainly, would also be Sudarsan Raghavan‘s piece (first appearing in The Washington Post… Read More

Musical Archetypes and Natural Rhythmic Measures

May 9, 2018Simon Pettet

[Ravi Shankar (ninety-one years old!) plays Raag’s Bhiairvi (Bhiairvi Raga)]

Allen Ginsberg’s 1980 class in  Basic Poetics continues from here 

AG: ..And I’m not sure, actually. I’m just posing the question, whether the continuous repetition of a fixed structure and memorization of it will then begin to collect emotions around it, and whether you’ll begin casting your own personal emotions into that slightly different emotional cadence, as in a Sapphic – or, is it possible that a stanza such as the Sapphic is so archetypal as far as breathing and emotional spurt, that anybody might breathe, or thin , … Read More

Barry Farber Interview – 2

April 8, 2018Simon Pettet

[Barry Farber]

Barry Farber’s 1975 radio interview continues. In this second segment, Allen engages with two studio guests (unlikely cohorts), the open-minded and wonderfully out-of-fashion “Bullets” Durgin, and Robert Goodman, “a young reporter, no longer just a collegiate reporter”

[George “Bullets”  Durgom ( 1915-1992)]

BF:  Poets, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Jonathan Robbins (are here) with us, (and)  “Bullets” Durgin, the hero-manager, who began driving a truck for a big-name band and wound up driving big names with truck-driver power to success that, sometimes they gave him credit for, and sometimes they didn’t (his cases where they … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 357

March 16, 2018Simon Pettet

[Howl & Kaddish & a selection of Allen Ginsberg Interviews (translated into Bengali by Malay Roychoudhury and edited by Utpal Bhattacharjee and published by Kabitirtha)]

[Malay Roychoudhury]

Allen Ginsberg in India – Allen and the Hungryalists (we’ve pointed out this crucial connection before) – Rima Bhattacharya’s “The Common Thread Between The Beats and The Hungryalists“, (the abstract of a PhD thesis), can be read here (from the same site, another doctoral abstract – Marina Reza on The Hungryalists – here). Essential listening on this topic – Jeet Thayil’s  BBC radio documentary (now available on the … Read More

Buddhism and The Beats (Ginsberg 1993 – Q & A)

July 22, 2017Simon Pettet

Following on from last week’s “Buddhists and The Beats” video -the Q & A, the final segment.

Do we have time for questions.?

AG: Yes, sure

Q: You said that your poetry is a practice as well, so..is it..do you meditate every day? do you use poetry as a practice?

AG: It’s a form of practice. I sit now about forty minutes to an hour every day. There have been long periods where I’ve sat for an hour, two hours, every day, and there have been long periods where I have been on retreats where I would sit all day, … 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

Allen Ginsberg at Cheltenham 1993

May 27, 2017Simon Pettet

Allen Ginsberg, in 1993, reading at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in England. The feature today on The Allen Ginsberg Project. Allen reads a selection of poems, (mostly from White Shroud and the, subsequently-published Cosmpolitan Greetings

Introduction: Good evening everybody and some of you I’m sure came to the event where Allen Ginsberg was being interviewed by John Calder here today and will have suffered as Mr Ginsberg did the problems of the weather and British Rail. Years ago Allen Ginsberg wrote of Jack Kerouac that he was the sole full-moving thing, earlier today I’m afraid Allen Ginsberg was the sole … Read More

Allen Ginsberg in Austin – Interview – 1978

March 18, 2017Simon Pettet

Interviewer: So we want to figure out what’s best, you know, what will be most comfortable for you. What I want to do is an oral history of the ‘Sixties and Austin’s an interesting area because there’s a major university with a lot of anti-war… There was a segregtion case, a very famous law case here in 1959. There’s been an awful lot of work with the valley farm workers and Chicanos, plus we”ve got the Rothschilds here [sic], we’ve got all of LBJ‘s legacy. Basically, Austin’s sort of conservative but with the university and the State Capitol here, … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 300

January 27, 2017Simon Pettet

[“Ground Zero for the Beat Generation” – Unidentified Woman reading from “Howl” inside the 7 Arts Coffee Gallery in New York City, c.1957 – Photograph by Dave Heath]

No Friday-Round Up last week, so a little catch up today, starting with Sean Elder’s Gary Snyder interview, “National Treasure,” in Lion’s Roar.

 [Gary Snyder at the Center For Interfaith Relations’ 2014 Festival of Faiths: Sacred Earth, Sacred Self]

GS: “The first time I met Allen Ginsberg was at Rexroth’s house—Allen had just come up from Mexico. The first time I saw  Kerouac was when Allen brought him to … Read More

Herbert Huncke’s Birthday

January 9, 2017Simon Pettet

Celebrating Herbert Huncke‘s birthday today. “Godfather of the Beats”, he would have been one-hundred-and-two! – See here for our posting on the occasion of his Centennial. Today, courtesy of our friend Laki Vazakas , footage of the great story-teller, raconteur, recorded in New York, at the Chelsea Hotel,  February 7, 1994. Evoking the notion of “the invisible body”, Huncke recounts and recalls his time in India, witnessing the burning ghats.

HH: Well, it’s sort of strange, you know, one is always I think intrigued by the idea of the invisible body at a funeral (I’ve always felt that … Read More