Barry Farber – 7 (interview concludes)

April 23, 2018Simon Pettet

The Allen Ginsberg-Barry Farber radio transcription that we’ve been serializing continues and concludes today

BF: I want (you) to read from the Table of Contents, like the virtuous… AG: (It’s) [“Wales Visitation‘] a bit long, like eight minutes or so. Something.. And I had been used, generally, on television, to be told to please make it one minute – “Please make it two minutes” – (because they don’t realize the power of poetry, they think, you know, that everybody’s going to get bored!) So I’ll read it again and I’d like to dedicate the reading to the absent … Read More

Barry Farber Interview – 4

April 15, 2018Simon Pettet

[Barry Farber]

We continue with the transcription of Allen’s appearance on Barry Farber’s 1976 radio broadcast.

In this episode, a punk Jonathan Robbins appears to the consternation of Barry Farber, and Allen discusses, among other things, ecology (eco-consciousness) and the apparent difficulty (alleged impossibility) of translation. 

BF:  (The Beat Generation) ….was every feature-writer’s security blanket tranquillizer and pacifier. (I want to know, technically, how you attracted that much attention?)

AG:  I think, mainly, it was we said what we really thought, rather than what we were supposed to think or what we thought would be, you know, palatable for the … Read More

Barry Farber Interview – 3

April 14, 2018Simon Pettet

[ Allen Ginsberg and Andrei Voznesensky]

The Barry Farber 1976 interview that we featured last week continues. Audio for the interview can be heard here and here 

BF: I’m Barry Farber, Peter Orlovsky is with us –  I think that means “the son of the eagle”

AG: Right…  Russian too.

BF: Allen Ginsberg, Jonathan Robbins, that’s the poetic part of the panel. The journalistic side, who can’t care if it rhymes or has soul just as long as it asks the desired questions, Robert Goodman, a new broadcast journalist and a good one, Bullets Durgin, just said goodbye, … Read More

The Barry Farber Interview – 1

April 7, 2018Simon Pettet

 

[Allen Ginsberg, San Francisco, 1966. photo: Larry Keenan Jr. ]

Drawing this weekend from the remarkable Stanford archives. We begin with a tape from 1976, Allen and company in conversation with conservative talk-show host Barry Farber, a two-hour radio appearance (We’ll be featuring it in segments – In the first, today, the opening salvos, he has to defend himself against Farber’s avuncular but also barbed and somewhat patronizing knee-jerk anti-Communism)

BF: Broadcasters all like to do different things with Allen Ginsberg. I’m going to copy what Bill Buckley did with him one time on television I … Read More

July 19 (Mayakovsky’s Birthday)

July 19, 2017Simon Pettet

[Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930)]

Today, July 19, the great poet, Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, was born in Baghdati, Georgia. We’ve featured Mayakovsky numerous times here on the Allen Ginsberg Project. For example, here and here.

The fourteen-part series, Allen’s 1981 focus (with in-class presentation by Ann Charters)  begins here, and continues  here, here and here  (Expansive Poetry) .

Further posts  here (Akhmatova and Mayakovsky), here (Mayakovsky on Esenin), here (Mayakovsky and Mandelstam), here (“The Bedbug”), here (“At The Top of My Voice“), here (Mayakovsky and the Revolution), here (Mayakovsky and … Read More

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

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 309

April 7, 2017Simon Pettet

The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of The Beats As Taught by Allen Ginsberg is just out (this past Tuesday) from Penguin Books in England. Next Friday, Grove Press will publish the American edition.  Interesting to compare the covers perhaps – the more sober UK edition, the more brash, more jazzy American? – Either way, it’s another essential Ginsberg book.   Reviews are already highly positive:

Publisher’s Weekly – “A gold mine for anyone interested in beat literature . . . Ginsberg reads and thinks like a poet; interested in language and style, he abandons narrative to … Read More

Surkov on Allen & Tupac (& Jackson Pollock)

March 18, 2014admin

                                                      [Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)]

 It’s not every day you get such a glorious global name-check!                                                       (new Cold War name-dropping/ name-calling?)

Vladislav Surkov, the Russian power-broker, eminence grise (and, now, under-the-sanctions-of-the-US  Russian power-broker)

File:Vladislav Surkov in 2010.jpeg
 

[Vladislav Surkov –  via www.kremlin.ru.]

 

whose rendition of Allen’s “Sunflower Sutra” we featured here last year.                            
 
 (Here it is again in case you missed it  (it begins approximately two-minutes in)) 
 So, his statement, made to the Russian newspaper, Moskovsky Komsomolets:
 
“…The only things that interest me in the U.S. are Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg, and Jackson Pollock. I don’t
… Read More

Expansive Poetics 26 – (Khlebnikov’s Menagerie)

February 18, 2014admin
File:Vélimir Khlebnikov.jpg

 

 [Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1920]

 

AG: Now, by  (Velimir) Khlebnikov, a poem called “Menagerie” [ “Zverinets“, also translated as “Zoo”], which would be 19.. let’s see, 1909. Russia (St. Petersburg, probably, among a group that were hanging around a coffee-shop called The Stray Dog Cafe, where Khlebnikov and his friends resided. [Allen then  proceeds to read Khlebnikov’s poem “Menagerie” in its entirety] Royal Menagerie, Exeter Change, Strand, London: 1813

“Oh Garden, Zoological Garden! /Where the iron is like a father reminding brothers to be brothers and stopping their bloody grapple/Where the Germans drink their beer and girlies sell their bodies/Where the eagles sit like an eternity … Read More

Expansive Poetics – 8 – Pushkin

December 16, 2013admin

File:Pushkin Alexander, self portret, 1820s.jpg

[Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) – Self-Portrait  c. 1820]

So, last session I was reading aloud some of (Percy Bysshe) Shelley as precursor to the heroic and expansive breath that we’ll try to follow for twentieth-century poetry. And there are a few other poets of the nineteenth-century that are worth noting. There’s a lot of them actually but I’m zeroing in on he ones that had a big impact on my own nervous system, which is what it boils down to. There’s a line of Antonin Artaud, the French Surrealist poet, who said that there are certain human sounds, certain sounds … Read More