October 2017 marks the Centennial of the English poet David Gascoyne. Enitharmon, his English publisher, have taken the occasion to reprint a 1986 letter/memoir/note he wrote to Allen - See here
Allen Ginsberg En Route to G(h)ent (from 1979) - another rare cassette just out from Counter Culture Chronicles- "An intimate look, Allen Ginsberg on tour in 1979 (in Belgium/ Holland), featuring Peter Orlovsky,Harry HoogstratenandSteven Taylor - Allen and his party travel by bus to Ghent after a successful reading at the Leeuwerik in Eindhoven. They are joined on the trip by organizer Benn Possett,Simon Vinkenoog and a clueless journalist. Harry's beau Suze Hahn is at the wheel. Allen talks about politics, his relationship with Jack Kerouac, recites poetry, and gives a crash course on traditional and modern verse. The conversation continues at a local bookshop. We follow Allen to the concert hall and the tape concludes with a couple of songs on stage."
Martin Scorcese's 2005 Bob Dylandocumentary, No Direction Home (featuring, amongst other things, this interview with Allen) receives a 10th anniversary digital/Blu-Ray box-set release (available in the coming weeks) - See more about that upcoming release - here
More anniversaries - October 7, 1955, Allen performs "Howl" for the first time at the Six Gallery (" I saw the best minds of my generation…")
"The work and not just the poetry of Ginsberg (1926-97), one of 20th-century America's most important and notorious literary figures has finally been given the career-arching overview it deserves. Schumacher (Dharma Lion) has compiled the poet's greatest hits into this volume, including the regularly-anthologized, "Howl", "Kaddish", "A Supermarket In California", "America", and "Kral Majales". What distinguishes this book from other posthumous Ginsberg collections is that it also presents small samples of his songwriting, essays, interviews, letters, journal excerpts, and understated photography. Ginsberg's position at the center of the Beat movement is made clear through Schumacher's selections which highlight his key relationships with Jack Kerouac, William S Burroughs, Neal Cassady, among others. Similarly his involvement in the burgeoning American counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s is at the heart of many of these selections. By making this volume similar to the ones in Viking's "Portable Library" series, Harper Perennial has all but ensured the book's place in university classrooms for years to come. VERDICT: An essential starting-point for any reader encountering the artist's still-controversial work for the very first time." - and, Wait Till I'm Dead: "Much more than a footnote to 2006’s massive Collected Poems, 1947–1997, this carefully chosen gathering of Ginsberg’s fugitive pieces, some unpublished and others long buried in obscure magazines, spans his college days in the 1940s through 1996, the year before his death at age 70. For five decades Ginsberg adhered to a personal ars poetica (“I must write down/ every recurring thought —/ stop every beating second”), which for better or for worse influenced generations of poets beyond the Beats. An example of this spontaneous aesthetic at its liveliest is the heretofore uncollected “NY to San Fran,” a 27-page Whitmanic reverie of hallucinogenic scope the poet set down in a notebook during a 1965 crosscountry flight. But Ginsberg could pivot when appropriate, as in the formal unpublished elegy to his father, the poet Louis Ginsberg, composed in 1976. VERDICT: Together with the editor’s informative notes, this volume not only complements its larger predecessor but similarly offers an impressionistic microhistory of the 20th-century American counterculture, its restless consciousness and broad emotional register filtered through the unbridled visions of one of its most outspoken icons. Ginsberg fans and scholars alike will appreciate the wealth of new material included."
Images of Allen and Peter (and a whole lot of Dutch, English, and American poets (& a few Russians too) - from vintage Amsterdam '79 (courtesy Harry Hoogstraten) - (scroll down here)
