Breath Poems

August 15, 2017Simon Pettet

[Zephrus. God of the winds (detail from “The Birth of Venus,” Sandro Botticelli]

AG: .. ..(I cited some lines)  from Hart Crane’s poem “Hurricane” as an example of dochmaic meter… and the whole poem is really interesting, and it’s just in the sequence of poems I’ve been referring to, one time or another, like William Carlos Williams’ poem about Thursday  (air – coming in and out of his nose) , Shelley’s “Ode To the West Wind – (“Make me thy lyre even as the forest is’”… “Be thou me spirt fierce (the wind)”, or, “The breath whose might I have … Read More

Allen Ginsberg Reading at St Marks Poetry Project 1977

August 5, 2017Simon Pettet

[Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell, St Mark’s Church, February 23, 1977. Photo: Martin Wechselblatt]

We featured one, from the extraordinary trove of recordings of Allen readings, last week, from PennSound (from the Robert Creeley collection – 1971 at Intersection, San Francisco). Here‘s another, six years later- from the St Mark’s Poetry Project in New York. The occasion was a now-legendary coupling of Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell (it was on this occasion that Lowell was memorably heckled by Gregory Corso). Allen reads a variety of works, referencing his recent visit to Australia, his Vajrayana Buddhist … Read More

Warwick 1979 (Ginsberg-Orlovsky-Taylor-Pickard)

January 14, 2017Simon Pettet

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[Steven Taylor, Allen Ginsberg & Peter Orlovsky. Photo: Saul Shapiro]

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[Tom Pickard]

Last week, we featured a 1979 reading (November 6 1979) by Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky (and Steven Taylor) in Warwick, England. This week a further concert from that same visit (this time at the University and featuring the active participation of the English poet Tom Pickard)

Audio for this occasion may be accessed here

Student/Organizer: We welcome to Warwick, Allen Ginsberg, Steven Taylor, Peter Orlovsky and Tom Pickard

AG: We’ll begin with music from a book called Mind Breaths, Poems 1972-1977, by myself, Allen … Read More

Allen Ginsberg Reading in Baltimore 1978 – 2

December 11, 2016Simon Pettet

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[Mind Breaths: Poems 1972-1977, the volume of poems by Allen Ginsberg published in 1978 by City Lights]

continuing from yesterday

AG: So, actually, I was in the hospital and I actually went out of my skull, I was full of antibiotics and fever and it seemed like it was about time to take a meat axe to that dirty Jew’s skull or something, (that was what I was telling my poor Jewish brother about Kissinger). So, finally, I wound up in a sort of state of punk ecstasy. So two poems about sickness, one a description and one a … Read More

The Ginsberg-Ferlinghetti Letters

July 25, 2015admin

 

The phrase is, of course, Emerson‘s, writing to congratulate Walt Whitman

“ I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely of fortifying and encouraging..”

This greeting was echoed by Lawrence Ferlinghetti after hearing Allen’s legendary Gallery Six reading of “Howl” in October of 1955 –  “I GREET YOU AT THE BEGINNING OF

… Read More