Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 320

June 16, 2017Simon Pettet

[Allen Ginsberg in the recording studio, 1989]

June 23, next Friday. We’re getting closer to the official release-date, but we’re already putting the word out  about this exciting Ginsberg re-release from Omnivore Recordings of Allen’s settings of William Blake.

Here’s more info (courtesy Aquarium Drunkard)

and here’s the official video just put out of Allen/Blake’s “The Garden of Love”

Speaking of William Blake, hats off to antiquarian bookseller, John Windle (“Windle’s connection to Blake is more spiritual than commercial”). Allen would, more than once, call Windle, Windle remembers, if he “needed a Blake fix”.

[William Blake ( 1757-1827] … Read More

Joanne Kyger, Novato, 1976 – 1

April 15, 2017Simon Pettet

Still mourning Joanne Kyger, who died last month, we feature today an extraordinary piece of tape (early black-and-white recording), Joanne reading and talking at an event put on by the Bay Area Writers in Novato, California, in 1976. Joanne read with (then-fellow-Bolinas resident) Bobbie-Louise Hawkins. We’ll be featuring Bobbie’s half of the reading in the coming weeks, but, first, Joanne.

She begins with an annotated reading of her Pacific Rim anthropology-history poem, “Up My Coast”

JK: “There’s a collection of stories that were done in about 1910, they are excerpted from a milieu, kind of a Miwok story … Read More

Vital Native American Eco-Resistance (1980 & 2016)

October 18, 2016admin

Standing Rock

Standing Rock 2

Native American-Led Protests Against Dakota Access Oil Pipeline,  October 2016

Some sort of synchronicity. We had scheduled this post (Allen at Naropa in 1980, announcing a Native American-led protest against the sacrilege and environmental disaster of the proposal for South Dakota uranium mining), prior to the breaking news of Amy Goodman‘s arrest (and yesterday’s acquittal) over reporting on demonstrations against the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline. For more on the Pipeline and for Democracy Now‘s full coverage of the issue – see here

Amy Goodman, hosting Democracy Now! from Mandan, North Dakota

Amy  isn’t the only … Read More

Basil Bunting’s Lectures on Poetic Origins – 2 (The One-Eyed Ford)

August 16, 2016admin

[Rusty 1941 One-Eyed Ford Coupe – Photograph by Jeffery Wells via flickr]

Student: Is the “one-eyed Ford” something you just made up now?

AG: No , the “one-eyed Ford” is a famous American-Indian twentieth-century.. It’s a great line! – It’s one of the great lines in America .. of the, as-yet, unacademicized poetry. The many many versions of the “one-eyed Ford” song (South-West – Oklahoma, actually – I heard it last year… last heard it (with Harry Smith) in Anadarko, Oklahoma) – “My one-eyed Ford”! – It’s a great line!

So… I don’t know. He [Basil Bunting… Read More