Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 384
September 21, 2018
Leonard Cohen‘s birthday today. He would have been 84.  We start the Weekly Round-Up today with a beautiful woodcut of him and Allen by George A Walker and this note from Cohencentric – Leonard Cohen Considered – “Leonard Cohen Meets Jack Kerouac at Allen Ginsberg’s Home” Our 2014 posting on Cohen (well[…]
Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 359
March 30, 2018
Today, Friday March 30th. is Howl dedicatee, Carl Solomon‘s birthday. For last year’s Carl Solomon posting (“Remembering Carl Solomon”) – see here) It’s also the anniversary of Rimbaud‘s lover, the poet, Paul Verlaine‘s birthday.  (For a[…]
Gershom Scholem
December 5, 2017
Gershom Scholem,  from  On Jews and Judaism in Crisis – Selected Essays “The poet Allen Ginsberg once visited me. A likeable fellow. Genuine. Strange, mad, but genuine. I took a strong liking to him.My wife and I had a very interesting conversation with him, and in her inimitable way[…]
Pound and Waller (“Go dumb-born book”)
November 20, 2017
AG: Then (Ezra) Pound (on page one thousand and six). He thinks it [Waller’s “Song”} ‘s so good that it’s his high-water mark, so he wants a... And, in Pound, it’s amazing, it’s one of the few cases in the history of English poetry where somebody made an[…]
More on Metrics – 3
November 15, 2017
AG: Well, it’s not that that you need to be able to understand it  to write a poem. It’s not perverting your speech to get those rhythms. Rather, it is that speech does have those rhythms, and that you can follow the cadences with those rhythms, that when we were[…]
Allen Ginsberg – Richland College reading – part 2
October 1, 2017
Allen Ginsberg’s 1980 Richland College reading – continuing from yesterday AG: So I would say now move on to.. 1956- moving on from 1956 to 1976. I have a series of poems which will require some music also – “Father Death Blues” – if we can get together on the stage –[…]
Granelli & Sompa and basic rhythms
April 26, 2017
Student: (Rhythm.. rhythms) AG: But – wait a minute – but, if you did a little bit of work with Titos Sompa and Jerry Granelli in analyzing, not analyzing, just learning, the basic Afric rhythms that they use ( you’ve heard[…]
Breath Moves
December 21, 2016
AG: …However, it’s all shadow there, and so.. anyway, what we get from Samuel Daniel, page one-ninety –  “Are there shadows that we see?/And can shadows pleasure give?/Pleasures only shadows be/Cast by bodies we conceive/And are made the things we deem/In those figures which they seem/ But these pleasures vanish fast /Which[…]
Q & A – 2 – (Poetry and Revision)
August 4, 2015
Cover for “First Thought Best Thought “ Chögyam Trungpa’s book of poems, published in 1983 by Shambhala AG: Yeah? Student: ( I had some difficulty with your statement about poetry when you said (you advised not to) repeat again (that) you can’t go back and review) AG: Yes. (I’m just repeating for[…]
Plutonian Ode, 1978, (The Robert Creeley Recording)
April 25, 2015
  Last weekend, we featured Allen reading (from “Kaddish” and other poems) as part of the Robert Creeley audiotape collection, (now lovingly engineered and digitalized and made available on the incomparable PennSound site).   This weekend, we spotlight another one, a reading, some years[…]