Spontaneous Poetics – 75 (“This Is Just To Say”)

May 15, 2013admin

[William Carlos Williams’ poem, “This Is Just To Say”, displayed as a tattoo]

July 2, 1976, Allen’s summer lecture at Naropa continues

AG: I’m going to continue with the different considerations of mindful arrangement of open verse forms, the original subject I was on before, which is how you arrange your mind on he page. We have covered the echo of syllabic count the impulse of accents, the tone-leading of the vowel, the breath-stop as a measurement of the line, measurement of units of phrasing from the mouth as a division of line, divisions of mental ideas (as parts of … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 114

February 22, 2013admin
[Neal Cassady & Natalie Jackson, San Francisco, 1955. Photo c Allen Ginsberg Estate]

Another notice (see the flood of notices last week) of Allen’s photographic Beat Memories show – Tim Keane (on Hyperallergic) – “”I Noticed My Friends” – Allen Ginsberg’s Photography” – “At best these pictures are a celebration within a rite of mourning”, Keane astutely notes. “And if photography prolongs a lived moment that vanishes as soon as it arrives,  [and surely it does] Ginsberg sensed how better suited [perhaps?] photography than writing can be to that impulse..” [Tho’ he was hardly a slouch, we might … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 19

April 1, 2011admin

So, more On The Road movie updates. It seems now almost certain that the movie will have a Fall 2011/early 2012 debut, not a Cannes May 2011 unveiling, as had first been thought. Similarly, director Walter Salles’ original vision of a film solely in black-and-white, something, according to Indiewire, he had “valiantly campaigned for”, seems to have been jettisoned for a full-color movie.

Jose Rivera, the screenwriter, let slip on Canadian television, shortly after the wrap-up in shooting, at the end of last year, that, “there’s a lot of the original book still in the screenplay, still in the

… Read More

Poetry Tattoo

February 28, 2011admin

america

[Photo via The Word Made Flesh]

The first time I met Allen Ginsberg was around 1991, when I was an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon. We had been studying Howl and he came to read. I was young and awestruck while standing in a small auditorium watching this crazy old guy with a big beard chanting “ohhhh, suck tit, suck tit, suck cock suck cock, suck clit, suck prick but don’t smoke nicotine.” He was dancing around like a loon and banging two sticks together. I remember giggling and thinking, “so THIS is higher education”. Afterwards he signed a book … Read More