Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 369

June 8, 2018Simon Pettet

 “The Lost Ferlinghetti Tapes” is a mini-documentary by Paul Iorio that presents audio excerpts from an exclusive interview he conducted with Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 2000 — inter-spliced with segments about Ferlinghetti, City Lights, the Beats, Allen Ginsberg, “Howl” and the “Howl” trial.

And the big news (announced in the New York Times this week) –  the upcoming publication of Little Boy, ninety-nine-year-old Ferlinghetti’s surprising new novel (due out from Doubleday next year, to coincide with the occasion of his one-hundreth birthday) – ““It’s not a memoir, it’s an imaginary me,”, Ferlinghetti is quoted as declaring – ““It’s an … Read More

More Vintage Ginsberg Footage/Ferlinghetti – Assassination Raga

March 28, 2018Simon Pettet

More vintage footage of Allen here (and also, more prominently, of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and of the San Francisco Mime Troup Gorilla Band, courtesy the Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operario e Democratico (AAMOD)

1968 Vietnam War protest – The San Francisco Mime Troup Gorilla Band begin with “When The Saints Go Marching In“ and follow it with a protest-laden rendition of the U.S. National Anthem – Ferlinghetti then reads from the podium his recently-composed “Assassination Raga“ (in memory of Robert Kennedy)

(“…..United States of America/takes off/& wings away with that Body/Tune out the tv … Read More

Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s 99th Birthday

March 24, 2018Simon Pettet

[Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Adelaide, 1973. Photo: Allen Ginsberg, courtesy Stanford University Libraries]

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is ninety-nine years old today! – We’re happy to present this personal assessment from bibliographer, biographer, friend, Bill Morgan

LOOKING BACK ON A CENTURY – WELL ALMOST.

Nearly 50 years ago, when I was a student in Pittsburgh, I wrote a paper about Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a poet who had recently visited our campus.  For some reason my professor liked the paper and thought that if I worked on it some more, it might be something he could publish. I wrote to Ferlinghetti and asked him a few … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 358

March 23, 2018Simon Pettet

[“Lawrence Ferlinghetti in his office with pooch, Whitman photo, files, coatracks, bookbags, posters, at City Lights up on balcony, B’way and Columbus Avenues, San Francisco, October 1984.”]

Tomorrow is Lawrence Ferlinghetti‘s 99th birthday. There’ll be more about that tomorrow. Meanwhile, for today…

Lawrence Ferlinghetti interviewed by John McMurtrie in the San Francisco Chronicle – don’t miss it!

[Bai Juyi (772 AD – 846 AD)]

Don’t miss too David S Wills of Beatdom and his fascinating research into Allen’s “great China poem” – “Reading Bai Juyi” – “The Mystery of Allen Ginsberg’s “Reading Bai Juyi”

“It is the final … Read More

Doctor Sax and the Great World Snake

March 10, 2018Simon Pettet

Doctor Sax and The Great World Snake – In honor of Jack Kerouac’s 96th birthday (coming up on Monday) – we present Jim Sampas‘ version of his uncle’s original screenplay, featuring the voices of Robert Creeley, Jim Carroll, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and a host of talented others.

The double-disc CD of a reading of this initially-lost text (with a newly-commissioned score by John Medeski, and an accompanying book with illustrations by Richard Sala) was released back in 2003

Here‘s the announcement in Rolling Stone

Here‘s a transcript of  NPR’s Bob Edwards, talking to Jim Sampas

A … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 354

February 23, 2018Simon Pettet

[Allen Ginsberg, Venice, Italy, 1995, Enzo Eric Toccaceli,  “Beat Generation, Travels in Italy” exhibition, Rome]

“Beat Generation, Ginsberg Corso, Ferlinghetti Viaggio in Italia”, (Beat Generation, Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti Travels in Italy), a show of over 200 black-and-white photos (accompanied by an apparatus of over 600 documents (books, first editions, printed ephemera, etc)  curated and presented by photographer Enzo Eric Toccaceli, opened at La Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Roma (The National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome) last week, and will be up until April 2nd.. For more images from the show see … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 353

February 16, 2018Simon Pettet

[Allen Ginsberg in his kitchen, 1988 – Photograph by Brian Graham]

The Toronto photo show, “Fleeting Moments, Floating Worlds..,“ that we mentioned last week continues. What we omitted to mention was the accompanying catalog (printed and designed by the legendary Coach House Press). As curator, John Shoesmith writes in the forward – “The accompanying catalog attempts to further the story behind the Ginsberg photographs. It contains the voices of several key individuals who were crucial to the poet’s “second coming” as a photographer, beginning in the mid-1980s; from the person who planted the seed within Ginsberg to … Read More

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

Lawrence Ferlinghetti 1965 on WNET

December 10, 2017Simon Pettet

continuing from yesterday’s feature

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is profiled as the companion poet to Allen in Richard O Moore‘s “USA Poetry” series

Introduction: “Allen Ginsberg was once called “the Abominable Snowman of modern poetry” . The man who used this phrase was his publisher, a poet himself, a man of international fame and the owner of the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Like Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti is very much concerned with what is going on in the world today, the very opposite of the popular image of the poet as someone disengaged or, removed from reality.”

LF: I’ve … 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