Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 309
April 7, 2017
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,[…]
Expansive Poetics – 62 – Nikolay Gumilev)
May 7, 2014
Allen reads Russian poet, Nikolai Gumilev’s poem “The Lost Tram-Car” Заблудившийся трамвай Шел я по улице незнакомой И вдруг услышал вороний грай, И звоны лютни, и дальние громы, Передо мною летел трамвай. Как я вскочил на его подножку, Было загадкою для меня, В воздухе огненную дорожку Он оставлял и[…]
Expansive Poetics – 44 – (Mayakovsky – 1)
April 7, 2014
  July 7, 1981, Allen Ginsberg’s class on Expansive Poetics continues AG: We were on (Robert)  Duncan (“A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar”),  and actually I read up to Duncan’s introduction of (Walt) Whitman, and I want to leave it there. Actually, when I first read that[…]
April Fools Day – “I Feel Like Zeus Walking Through Red Square”
April 1, 2013
“Where’ll this reach you? Got bounced out of Havana, landed in lovely Prague and stayed a month, now for the last couple of weeks I’ve been in Moscow and will go on to Warsaw and Budapest and London and see you in Berkeley this summer. Got drunk with Yevtushenko and waiting for[…]
Castelporziano
August 25, 2012
Castelporziano  Andrea Andermann’s film, “Castelporziano Ostia dei poeti“) (1981) immortalizes the chaos and extraordinary happening/event that was the Primo Festivale Internazionale dei Poeti, in 1979, the International Poetry Festival, at Castelporzia. Eleanor Mannikka (reviewing for the New York Times) writes: “This documentary was shot at a three-day celebration of poetry (a “Poets’[…]
Father Death Blues in Brussels, 1984
February 21, 2012
More footage  of Allen and Steven Taylor in Europe in 1984. This from the fourth “Nacht van de Poezie” (Night of Poetry) at the Vorst Nationaal performance space in Brussels, organized by Guido Lauwaert and Francois Beukelaers and featuring the Belgian poets,[…]
Ilya Kutik
November 2, 2011
“Fine-bearded Ilya Kutik & his wife, center, at home with his circle of friends, philologists, translators, poets & philosophy teachers, Moscow December 16, 1985. Dostoyevski-eyed youth in stripped sweater had gone absent without leave for the evening from the Army to meet me and ask after Neal Cassady, Kerouac’s hero, On The[…]
Little Fish Devours The Big Fish
July 27, 2011
Following on from yesterday’s “Capitol Air”, here’s another rock Allen, or more precisely, pop Allen – circa 1983, his collaboration with the Lawrence, Kansas, band, Start (from the album Look Around, on Fresh Sounds Records – another cut from the album can be sampled here). The poem Allen chooses to sing/recite is[…]