Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 308

March 31, 2017Simon Pettet

Heads-up for next Friday! (Friday April 7) – Ginsberg Green – “A spoken word & musical gathering honoring the life and Green activism of Allen Ginsberg” – a unique celebratory event, organized by our good friend Patrick Warner, scheduled to take place at The Sprinkler Factory in Worcester, Mass, starting approximately 6 o’clock.

The event will include Ann Charters (reading from Lospecchio Press’ Best Minds – A Tribute to Allen Ginsberg),  Gordon Ball (reading from his Cherry Valley memoir, East Hill Farm), and  Warner himself reading  “selected Ginsberg texts & interviews that exemplify & manifest Ginsberg’s Green … 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 222

June 12, 2015admin

The Academy of American Poets, on the occasion of his 89th birthday, gave Allen a tribute (the key component of which is this wonderful video of him and Steven Taylor on the rooftop of his East 12th Street, East Village apartment, in his final year, 1997, performing “A Western Ballad” (“the first song I ever wrote”). This video was produced and directed by Leita Luchetti as a part of the Poetry Breaks. series.More kudos for Allen, he was posthumously inducted, in 2015, (alongside Isaac Asimov, Dawn Powell, Francine Prose, Colm Tóibín, children’s book author Ezra Jack Keats and … Read More

Friday Weekly Round-Up – 129

June 7, 2013Simon Pettet

Ginsbergian Zeitgeist – We’re, admittedly, a little late in putting this up – but here‘s (recently-deposed) Russian power-broker/politician, Vladislav Surkov reading Allen Ginsberg (in English!) – “Sunflower Sutra” (the English begins approximately two minutes in) – [thanks too to “Cloudpine” – we should point out, entirely unrelated – for his fantasy Alexander-Rodchenko-inspired Howl cover!]

“No hope Communism/No hope Capitalism” – Here’s another surprising sighting, Gary Silverman’s “I saw the best taxes of my generation..”, [sic], an extended Ginsbergian metaphor in..(of all places) The Financial Times!

So, looking back on last week, birthday week… First, the New York

… Read More