Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 342

November 17, 2017Simon Pettet

[Paul Blackburn and company, from the Paul Blackburn papers, Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego]

More big news, archival news, the Paul Blackburn audio collection, long in the safe-keeping of the Archive for New Poetry at the University of California, San Diego, the great trove of New York City poetry recordings (“the most comprehensive oral history of the New York poetry scene between the late 1950s and 1970.”, in the words of Blackburn editor and scholar Edith Jarolim), has finally been digitalized and is now available on line.

The first release of this collection includes … Read More

Philip Glass’ 80th Birthday

January 31, 2017Simon Pettet

screenshot-2017-01-27-08-51-00

[Philip Glass in 1990 – Photograph by Allen Ginsberg]

Today is Philip Glass‘ 80th birthday. We salute him at The Allen Ginsberg Project

See our last year’s  Philip Glass weekend here and here

and our recent transcription of Studs Terkel‘s interview with him and Allen here and here

See our previous birthday celebrations here, here and here

He was interviewed last week by Fiona Maddocks in The Guardian – here

NPR has been celebrating with a Philip Glass week – appreciations by Errol Morris, Nico Muhly, David Lang, Paul Simon and Laurie Anderson can … Read More

Studs Terkel Interviews Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass on WFMT, Chicago 1990 – part 2

September 25, 2016admin
 
Philip Glass – Photograph by Allen Ginsberg – Kiev Restaurant, NYC, 1993 – Photo  c. Allen Ginsberg Estate

continuing from yesterday

ST: Resuming with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass, poet (and) composer working together. We heard just a piece of the very haunting “Satyagraha – the Evening Song“, earlier, that opened the Lyric Opera season. It was a pip of an opening. Critics and audience both (raved). That was three years ago… Liquid Days?  (Songs from) Liquid Days) is what?

PG: Well, it’s a collection of songs I did. In a way, it’s kind of … Read More

Studs Terkel Interviews Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass on WFMT, Chicago, 1990 – part 1

September 24, 2016admin

[Studs Terkel, 1912-2008

Jewel Heart Center, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Philip Glass, Gelek Rinpoche & Allen Ginsberg, November 17, 1989]

[Philip Glass]

[Allen Ginsberg]

Studs Terkel Interviews Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass, 1990

We featured, a week or so back, Studs Terkel’s hilarious 1959 radio interview with Allen, Gregory Corso, and a mostly-silent Peter Orlovsky. Here’s another Terkel interview with Allen (alongside composer-collaborator, Philip Glass), this one recorded over three decades later. Ginsberg and Glass are in town (Chicago) for a benefit performance for Gelek Rinpoche‘s Jewel Heart organization (as Terkel periodically reminds his listeners), an event … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 245

November 20, 2015admin

 

 [Allen Ginsberg’s desk in his bedroom in New York, 437 East 12th Street , 1986 – Photograph by Dave Breithaupt]

Michael Schumacher’s  The Essential Ginsberg has not been getting the attention we had hoped for, so we were pleased to find this notice in Ralph magazine this week.  That word “essential” isn’t used lightly. Buy this book!

And here‘s a “sneak preview” (from Harpers)  from the next Ginsberg book – “1/29/84” , one of the poems in Wait Till I’m Dead, a volume of uncollected poems that will be published by Grove-Atlantic this coming February. … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 244

November 13, 2015admin

            [Howl & Other Poems – Allen Ginsberg – recent edition –  Mojo Publishing House, Taipei,Taiwan (2015)]

All this talk about Allen Ginsberg‘s ubiquity. “Did you know”, I said, “Did you know that there are Columbia students, Columbia undergraduate students, who don’t know who Allen Ginsberg is!”  (Betsy Ladyzhets, writing in Bwog, Columbia Student News)

 
[Steve Silberman, Allen Ginsberg and Marc Olmsted, San Jose, California, 1986
 – Photograph by Marc Geller]

Steve Silberman might also be considered ubiquitous these days. A wonderfully positive response to his new book on autism – “Neurotribes – The Legacy

… 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’s Weekly Round-Up – 221

June 5, 2015admin

 

The David Olio “Please Master” case (our focus last week) remains in the news (as well it should). Here’s Jerry Aronson, director of The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg reading recently-unearthed transcriptions of Allen explaining his intentions and inspiration for writing the poem:  “Some situations are exuberant, like “Howl” or “Plutonian Ode”. Some situations are “Gee, I feel so good, I think I’ll write down what I see at this moment”. Some situations, I’m trying to locate what is my erotic imagination and write it down as a sample, like “Please Master”, you know, to … Read More

Happy Birthday Philip Glass

January 31, 2015admin

[Jewel Heart Center, Ann Arbor Michigan, Philip Glass, Gelek Rinpoche & Allen Ginsberg, November 17, 1989″ – Photo inscribed “for Philip” by Allen Ginsberg]

Philip Glass is 78 years old today

Words Without Music, his long-awaited memoir, will be published this Spring

As a teaser, Philip Glass is interviewed here, last January, by Marc Zisman for Qobuz, the French commercial music streaming and downloading service, on the occasion of Le festival Nouveau Siècle de Saint-Étienne, organized jointly by l’Opéra Théâtre and the Museum of Modern Art

Some previous Glass-on-the-Ginsberg-Project here and here

Happy Birthday, Philip!… Read More

Meditation and Poetics – 37 (Wales Visitation)

January 27, 2015admin

 

 [Allen Ginsberg – Autograph and Typescript Working Draft of a portion of the 1967 poem “Wales Visitation“]

AG: I want to follow that up [that reading and discussion of Wordsworth’s “..Tintern Abbey”] with a poem of my own related to that, taking off from Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”, approaching a similar problem, or taking a similar approach to the problem – in this case, how to deal with phantasms, thought-forms, furies, monsters, of an acid trip, in poetry.  First of all, how to deal with the problem of in that exalted, or high, state of acid … Read More