Wieners/Duncan – 2 – Wieners

January 7, 2018Simon Pettet

[John Wieners (1934-2002)]

Richard O Moore’s WNET’s USA Poetry transcript continues. Today – John Wieners

For a period during the 1950’s, Robert Duncan, along with the poets Charles Olson and Robert Creeley taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina (In) 1954 John Wieners, the founder and editor of the magazine Measure was a student of Robert Duncan’s at Black Mountain. Weiners work deeply reflects that exploration which is so common to the work of Duncan, Creeley and others, the very personal inward exploration of the mind and body of love.

John Wieners reads from his ”Address of … Read More

Wieners/Duncan -1 – Duncan

January 6, 2018Simon Pettet

This weekend marks the birth dates of two important figures in American poetry – John Wieners (born January 6) and Robert Duncan (born January 7). The two were featured together in 1968 in Robert O Moore’s groundbreaking WNET Poetry USA series.

Here is the video and a transcript of this particular episode (arguably, in the”wrong” order – Robert Duncan today, John Wieners will follow tomorrow)

“This program is dedicate to the work of Robert Duncan and John Wieners

This is the poet Robert Duncan born 1919, Oakland, California. Of his work, Duncan has written, “I make poetry as other men … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 337

October 13, 2017Simon Pettet

[Herbert Huncke and Louis Cartwright, at Indian restaurant banquet for Hanuman Press, November, 1989 Photograph by Allen Ginsberg, (c) The Estate of Allen Ginsberg]

This coming Wednesday, next Wednesday, October 18th, at The Beat Museum,  “Huncke and Louis” – A Film Screening with Laki Vazakas, a rare chance to see Vazakas’ tender and intimate documentary on the legendary Herbert Huncke  and his longtime friend and companion Louis Cartwright.  Tate Swindell will be on hand, joining Laki in a discussion of the film, after the event, and meditating on Huncke’s remarkable life and work.

Kerouac Celebrations last weekend in Lowell… Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 298

January 6, 2017Simon Pettet

pompidou

The 2016 Pompidou Center Beat Generation show (currently up, in a revised version at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany) made it as number three in the art-site Hyperallergic‘s years-end list of the  “top 15 exhibitions around the world” . The artist-critic Joseph Nechvatal writes:  “The entire airy layout of the Centre Pompidou’s retrospective of the Beat Generation was flawless, delicately and luxuriously balancing the dim lighting requirements needed to show the mix of texts,paintings, photography, collages, ephemera, historical documents, magazines, book publications, jazz music, spoken-word recordings, and fantastic underground films. Its content was a hard rejection of American right-wing … Read More

Jim Carroll workshop continues – 3 – (Bob Dylan)

August 20, 2016admin

This weekend,  following on from last weekend, transcription of  the 1980 Jim Carroll music and poetics workshop at Naropa continues.   For the two previous segments – see  here and here  

JC: And also I mean, like, people, eventually, knew where his [Bob Dylan‘s] influences were coming from, whereas they didn’t know where Lou (Reed)’s influences were coming from. Not as many people had read Delmore Schwartz as Allen Ginsberg and Rimbaud. And so, I don’t know, there were certain songs of Dylan’s which just got…I lost faith in, for a while, you know. And then … Read More

John Wieners Birthday

January 6, 2014admin

[John Wieners in Gloucester, MA – Photograph c. Jim Dunn]

It would have been John Wieners’ 80th birthday today. For previous Wieners birthday shout-outs, see here and here. See also this posting, and here and here.

A guest posting today from poet, Jim Dunn, our friend and John’s long-time friend and companion:
It is fitting today, on the Twelfth Day of Christmas, the Epiphany, the Visitation of the Three Kings, we commemorate John Wieners’ 80th birthday. It is fitting considering his Irish Catholic Jesuit upbringing and his belief in the spiritual quality of poetry. Although he
… Read More

Allen Ginsberg on John Wieners – part two

January 5, 2014admin

 

[John Wieners, Gloucester, MA. 1999 – Photograph c. Jim Dunn]

Allen Ginsberg on John Wieners part 2 – continues from here 

[Allen continues reading from “The Hotel Wentley Poems” beginning with a reading from  “A poem for early risers”] –  “I’m infused with the day” – Well, this is for people who’ve been up all night, “early risers” means people who’ve been up all night or (are) getting up at five a.m and going out to score on the streets for either ass or cock or junk or whatever, amphetamine(s).. – “I’m infused with the day/I’m out … Read More

Allen Ginsberg on John Wieners – part one

January 4, 2014admin

 

[Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, John Wieners, and David Meltzer in North Beach, San Francisco, 1958 – Photograph by Gui de Angulo (included in “Literary San Francisco – A Pictorial History from its Beginnings to the Present Day” (edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy J Peters), 1980]

Today, from 1982 and Allen’s “Literary History of the Beat Generation” Naropa class, Allen on John Wieners (tho’ he begins with a somewhat lengthy background-setting, Frank O’Hara, the Cedar Bar, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Yugen.. Given the length of this piece, we’ve decided to (somewhat arbitrarily) split in … Read More

Ezra Pound’s Birthday

October 30, 2013admin

Above, courtesy the singular trove at Yale’s Beinecke Library, a five-dollar cheque written by Ezra Pound to Louis Zukofsky. Today is Ezra Pound’s birthday. Our extensive (and popular) 2011 Pound Birthday posting can be accessed here (our last year’s, 2012, update can be found here) – “To have gathered from the air a live tradition/or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame/This is not vanity” – “What thou lov’st well, shall not be reft from thee” 

[Lawrence Ferlinghetti on Ezra Pound at Spoleto]… Read More

Spontaneous Poetics – 79 (Ed Marshall)

May 23, 2013Simon Pettet
AG: I got turned onto that partly by Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, which were divisions of thought into the spaces of a notebook page, but for larger draughts of thought, or larger breaths of thought, I got turned on to this form of open-page broken phrasing arranged in series out on the page by a long poem called “Leave the Word Alone” by Edward Marshall, which is [was – sic] in the Don Allen anthology, and was, I think, the first, about 1958, breakthrough of this kind of block form, where thoughts were spread around on the page … Read More