Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 177

May 23, 2014admin

[Allen Ginsberg – c.1989 – Photograph by Marc Geller]

Next weekend (next Sunday, June 1st) in New York City, Elodie Lauten‘s Ginsberg opera, Waking In New York, will be given a rare in situ public performance. Prior to that (Friday May 30) the opera will be recorded and simulcast from the National Opera America Center, after which it will be made freely available on line. “Waking In New York is very special piece”, Lauten notes. “It started when I approached Allen Ginsberg about a libretto..I wanted a piece about New York and he selected a set … Read More

New Years Eve (Looking Back on 2013 & Forward to 2014)

December 31, 2013admin

[“Buddhist (and one non-Buddhist) Action Figures” Photograph by Reverend Danny Fisher 2013]

Last posting of 2013, we thought we’d list a few of our “greatest hits” from the past year – January – Nanao Sakaki and Allen Ginsberg singing “Birdbrain” in Osaka, Japan, February – William Burroughs’ 99th (next year will be Burroughs centennial), March – (speaking of nonagenarians) Ferlinghetti was 94, April – the Beats and the rock muse – “Text and Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll, May – our Bob Dylan birthday posting, (this year – “The Night Bob Came Around” (and the night… Read More

Ron Padgett’s Collected Poems

November 24, 2013admin

It’s a red-letter day!  (or, to be accurate, a red-and-black letters day, on a plain cream-white background!). Coffee House Press have just published, in one 800-plus single volume, The Collected Poems of Ron Padgett. “Ron Padgett‘s poems”, writes Anne Waldman, “are essential and Ron Padgett is a genius”. She goes on,”His poetry is masterful for its panoramic humanity and mind-stopping verbal wit, its breathtaking power and beauty. We want to stay with the person in these poems all day long, to be changed by the possibilities palpitating from the smallest increments of our existence to the most … Read More

Ted Berrigan’s Birthday

November 16, 2013admin

[Ted Berrigan (1934-1983)]

Ted Berrigan‘s birthday. Ted adored Allen. Alongside the late-lamented Frank O’Hara, he was the one. Ted had this embarrassingly patriotic poetic tribal conceit, and in that context Allen was “the President” of Poetry (analogous to Allen’s own gleeful imaginative “shadow cabinet” – “Vachel Lindsay Secretary of the Interior/Poe Secretary of Imagination/Pound Secty. of Economics..” (Death to Van Gogh’s Ear)

a particular poetic form (a quintessential “New York School” form) – the list poem

OUR FRIENDS Ron: the tight-ass Dick: the insignificant Pat: the dowdy old lady Anne: the superficial sentimentalist Bill: the spoiled … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 151

November 8, 2013admin

Allen Ginsberg – Bloodsong – (edited by James Grauerolz) – Italian paperback, published by il Saggiatore, 2013]

Continuing from last week, (we can’t seem to leave it alone!) Kill Your Darlings (see earlier digests here and here) continues to garner reviews (mostly positive ones) – Michael O’Sullivan in The Washington Post takes up the debate over the blurring of fiction and fact (in particular, the presentation of Lucien Carr – wait a minute, “the Lucian Carr character”) – “You’d better like it complicated”, he writes, “The film is awash in delicious and difficult ambiguities”.  These “delicious and … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 150

November 1, 2013admin

[Lucien Carr and Allen Ginsberg at Lucien’s wedding, January 4, 1952]

Kill Your Darlings – We mentioned last week the dissenting position, eloquently voiced by Bob Rosenthal in his post from last February – here. – “The film takes its..title too seriously”, he wrote then. “The large fabrications in the film are not so worrisome as the small ones. In any case, when the truth is stepped on and the nuance of truth is denied, the message becomes moribund”. Both Marc Olmsted in Sensitive Skin  and Brian Hassett in Brianland have taken up the cudgels and gone, perhaps, … Read More

Charles Reznikoff’s Birthday

August 31, 2013Peter Hale

[(1894-1976) – Photograph by Abraham Ravett, 1975]

It’s Charles Reznikoff ‘s birthday today. We’ve featured him here before, with great pleasure, quite extensively.

Previous “Rezzy” postings on the Ginsberg Project: here – here, here, here and here, here andhere.

Today, the recording of a memorial gathering held for him at St Mark’s Poetry Project, March 20, 1976.

Audio notes from the Internet Archive, via Other Minds:

“A veritable who’s who of American poets, many hailing from New York, read their favorite poems by Charles Reznikoff and others, during a memorial for the … Read More

Spontaneous Poetics – 55 (Edward Carpenter 2)

March 28, 2013admin

[Edward Carpenter (1824-1929)]

AG: A poem (by Edward Carpenter) that I’ve always liked is “From Turin to Paris”

[in Towards Democracy]

 He’s riding in the train from Italy to Paris and it’s a long detailed description of the entire train trip. I got turned on to that kind of travel-detail poetry by a book that Kenneth Patchen lent me called “Voyage Trans-Siberian”

[“The Prose of the Trans-Siberian” in Ron Padgett’s translation]

  by Blaise Cendrars (which was translated by John Dos Passos in the (19)20’s, actually  – an odd combination). It’s a travel diary poem, a poem … Read More

Kenneth Koch (1925-2002)

February 27, 2012admin

[Kenneth Koch and Allen Ginsberg, St Mark’s Church, NYC, 1977. Photo courtesy the Poetry Project]
Kenneth Koch‘s birthday gives us an excuse to reprint this wonderful interview with Allen. It appeared in October 1977 in The New York Times.
Allen paid back the compliment, interviewing Kenneth the following year – (on “Writing For The Stage” – on the occasion of a 3-week run of his play, “The Red Robins”, at New York’s St. Clemens Theater). It (that interview) is included in Koch’s collection The Art of Poetry. It’s also, happily, available on line here… Read More

On Charles Reznikoff’s Birthday

August 31, 2011admin
[Charles Reznikoff reads a William Carlos Williams poem on a Brooklyn bus, “sometime in the mid ’60’s” – photo c. Modern American Poetry – photo uncredited]
Allen’s great modern master hero, “Objectivist” poet Charles Reznikoff, (1894-1976), was born on this day, August 31st, in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Here are the extraordinary resources of PennSounds and its Charles Reznikoff page to help you celebrate this fact (readings from 1967 in New York, and 1974 in San Francisco, interviews with Reinhold Schiffer, and with Susan Howe (on Poetry Today, her 1975 radio show), Abraham Ravetts’ recordings, made in
… Read More