Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 363

April 27, 2018Simon Pettet

An Allen Ginsberg Symposium coming up next week at the Poetry Project. Three days of events next Thursday through Saturday. Full details of the programming can be found here. Highlights include, “Allen Ginsberg: An International Poetry, Its Genius & Particles”, a keynote talk by Alice Notley, workshops with Anne Waldman and Ed Sanders, an opening-night (Thursday-night) reading with Anselm Berrigan, Rin Johnson, Patricia Spears Jones, Sharon Mesmer, Lara Mimosa Montes, Trace Peterson, and sam sax, and much more.

 

Allen Ginsberg’s Iron Curtain Journals (announced here a couple of weeks back), … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 246

November 27, 2015admin
 [Guillaume Apollinaire by Picasso]

Guillaume Apollinaire – Zone – Selected Poems – “The fruit of poet-translator Ron Padgett‘s fifty-year engagement with the work of France’s greatest modern poet” –   (a bilingual edition) – has just been published by the New York Review Books.  Don’t miss it.   For Allen Ginsberg on Apollinaire –  see (for example) his 1975 Naropa class here  (which includes, among other things, a complete reading and commentary on the title poem, “Zone”)   and here, here – (and, again, here)

 [Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918)]

“Guillaume, Guillaume how I envy your fame, your accomplishment for … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 224

June 26, 2015admin

 

Beatnik Shindig this upcoming weekend. We spotlighted it last week but are reminding you again. The place to be right now – Fort Mason Center, San Francisco

 

Hot hot news – Allen Ginsberg ‘s recently-(re)discovered pro-Bernie Sanders poem “Burlington Snow”.  Here’s the hand-written poem courtesy the University of Vermont Library  (written in 1986, when Sanders, current Denocratic Party Presidential candidate, was that town’s colorful and controversial mayor)

Burlington Snow Socialist snow on the streets Socialist talk in the Maverick Bookstore Socialist kids sucking socialist lollipops Socialist poetry in Socialist mouths – aren’t the birds frozen Socialists? … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 223

June 19, 2015admin

                           

[Rosebud Feliu-Pettet (1946-2015) and Allen Ginsberg]

Rose “Rosebud” Feliu-Pettet,  a long-time friend of Allen’s, author of the definitive account of Allen’s passing,  passed away herself this week. She’d been suffering from a particularly virulent form of cancer, bile duct cancer. She was 69  For more of Rosebud on Allen – see here:  “Well, I met Allen a long time ago, about 1964,  I was living in this crazy dinky kind of collective called Kerista, a sort of benign Manson family [sic] . There were about eighteen people living in a store front on Ludlow Street … 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 – 204

January 16, 2015admin

Herbert Huncke Centennial Celebrations at the Beat Museum today – Laki Vazakas, Hilary Holladay, Ben Schafer, Dennis McNally, Brenda Knight, Regina Marler and Tate Swindell look back upon and discuss Herbert Huncke’s genius.  Two weeks since the last Friday Round-Up, so a bit of catching up to do.  Here’s (talking of the Beat Museum), the meeting-up of Gerd Stern (the man erroneously accused of losing it) and Mike McQuate, the man largely responsible for saving it – tho’, as others have pointed out, Jean Spinosa should also be credited with exemplary dispersal of her … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 200

December 5, 2014admin

The anniversary today of  the suicide of Vachel Lindsay 1931 -Eighty-three years ago.. His doctors at the time discretely reported his death as having been the result of heart failure,  but it was actually suicide – from drinking, in manic despair, an almost-full bottle of domestic cleaner, Lysol  His famous last words? –  “I got them before they could get me” Allen’s 1958 poem  To Lindsay Vachel, the stars are out  dusk has fallen in the Colorado Road a car crawls slowly across the plain in the dim light the radio blares its jazz the heartbroken saleasman lights another cigarette … Read More

The Cassady-Kerouac “Joan Anderson letter” – “the seminal piece of literature of the Beat Generation” rediscovered

November 24, 2014admin

joan-anderson-letter-catalog

Catalog cover for the upcoming (December 17 2014) auction of the Golden Goose Press Archive Collection at Profiles in History, Calabasas, California

The legendary Joan Anderson letter (the Beat Generation’s so-called “holy grail”)  has emerged! – in its entirety! – after a sixty-or-more year hiatus! 

AP’s John Rogers reports today that the “16,000 (word) amphetamine-fueled stream-of-consciousness” note to Jack Kerouac from Neal Cassady will be part of a December 17 auction at Joe Maddalena‘s Southern California auction house, Profiles in History.

 “It’s the seminal piece of literature of the Beat Generation”, Maddalena is quoted as saying, “and there are … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 136

July 26, 2013Simon Pettet
[Allen Ginsberg’s old shoes (a pair of sneakers made in then-communist Czechoslovakia) and a letter from Lawrence Ferlinghetti – part of the Allen Ginsberg Archives at Stanford University]

An interesting review/profile/spotlight, coming off Bill Morgan’s recent talk at Stanford, the home of Allen’s Archive – and an enthused response (to that curious thing – the poetry archive) lead off the Friday Round-Up this week.

and we mentioned already Peter Orlovsky’s archives, right?

Pat Nolan’s “The Quantum of Kerouac” in the current Poetry Flash is definitely worth a read.

… Read More

Friday the 13th – Friday Weekly Round-Up – 56

January 13, 2012admin

[Frames from Thomas Edison’s 1896 film,The Kiss]

Some time since the last “Weekly Round-Up”, and we begin this, the first one of the New Year, with “Hollywood scoop” – more news on John Krokidas’ upcoming (2013) thriller, Kill Your Darlings (based around the David Kammerer murder). We (and everyone else) reported a while back on the inspired casting of Daniel Radcliffe (“Harry Potter”) as Allen Ginsberg, but wait, now we hear more – Jack Huston been slated for the Jack Kerouac part, Dane Dehaan to play Lucien Carr, Elizabeth Olsen (younger sister of tv’s “Olsen twins”) as Edie Parker… Read More