Terry Gross Interview, 1994

[Terry Gross. 1987 in the studio on NPR's "Fresh Air"]





"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix"

TG: Allen Ginsberg, reading his now classic poem "Howl". Ginsberg was a cultural hero to several generations. He was one of the leading Beat poets in the (19)50's, in the (19)60's he was an icon of the counterculture, through the (19)70's and (19)80's, he continued to write and to explore Eastern religions. By the (19)90's, he was an inspiration to up-and-coming performance poets. Ginsberg died of liver cancer in 1997 at the age of 70. His work has since been revived through documentaries, CDs, biographies and poetry collections. When I spoke with Allen Ginsberg in 1994, we talked about his poem "Howl". It was partly inspired by his mother who had been in a mental hospital

AG: She had been there for several years and I had put her there after a breakthrough of some very violent behaviour towards her sister and a cousin she was staying with. And then I had gone out to San Francisco but the grief was very much on my mind. I had a friend, Carl Soloman, with whom I had been in a mental hospital six years before, and he was back also in Pilgrim State too. So I addressed a poem ostensibly to him but the emotions were I think were directed towards my mother, both grief and a sense of solidarity.

TG: Yeah, I know, Part 1 begins with one of your most famous lines

AG: Yeah

TG: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.."

AG: "..starving hysterical naked.."  The original phrase was "starving mystical naked", but I figured that was a little too simple-minded, because the problem was not all the problem of society, was also the neuroses of the people, so there's a certain ironic edge to it which I don't think critics of the time realized. So I said "starving hysterical naked". So it wasn't just a one-dimensional protest for the safety of madmen, you know. It was also, like a, like, trying to give a..quick sketches of a series of cases that I drew from real life

TG: I want to move on to another poem, "America"

AG: Yeah

TG: ..which was read the same night as "Howl", at the same reading..

AG: Yes. And at the very first unveiling of that poem. It's really funny. The text in the recording differs a little from the text that I wound up with. There are a few extra lines, some very funny lines actually..  

TG: It really is very funny. You get a lot of laughs from the audience

AG: Well, it sounds like a stand-up comedy routine. That's the era, actually, of Lenny Bruce around San Francisco. He was playing, I think, at the Purple Onion, I went down to see him and watch his act, actually. But I hadn't expected that kind of reaction, and I didn't think the poem was that good (nor did (Jack) Kerouac), it was just sort of, like, a joke, like, a take-off, a send-up of America, very light-hearted, but it's done with many different voices in a kind of schizophrenic persona - you know, one minute serious, one minute faggoty, one minute desperate, one minute religious, one minute patriotic, one minute "I'm outting my queer shoulder to the wheel"   

TG: Why don't we hear the beginning of "America", as you read it in 1956 at Town Hall in Berkeley

"America, I've given you all and now I'm nothing/America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956. /I can't stand my own mind. /America when will we end the human war?/ Go [bleep-sic] yourself with your atom bomb/I don't feel good don't bother me./I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind./America when will you be angelic? /When will you take off your clothes?/When will you look at yourself through the grave?/When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites? /America why are your libraries full of tears?/ America when will you send your eggs to India? /I'm sick of your insane demands./ When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?/America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world./ Your machinery is too much for me./ You made me want to be a saint. /There must be some other way to settle this argument.         

TG: Allen Ginsberg recorded in 1956. You must have seen yourself as a provocateur, in a way, at a very young age. I was thinkingthat you were.. you were just coming from a place that was not average, you know, your mother was mentally ill, your mother had been a Communist, you were gay, you were an intellectual, you loved poetry, you know, everything about your life kind of set you apart.

AG: But also you..but you've got to realize that by this time I had already known William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac twelve years. This is not some sudden discovery of a community or ideas..

TG: Right

AG:  ...We had had a long period of privacy and silence to ripen our art, to know each other and to amuse each other and to understand each others language and intelligence and sort of enlarge our own consciousness with the experience of others. Also I had already had some sort of natural religious experience and we had all by this time tried out some of the psychedelic drugs (in addition, on top of the natural religious experience that was without drugs) and already had traveled a bit, and so we were.... I wasn't a young kid then, I was twenty-eight years old, you know. It was quite a ripe time.

TG: Was it surprising to you to find people like Burroughs and Kerouac, who you felt this kind of friendship and aesthetic closeness with?

AG: No. It was just some sort of natural kinship that we felt, almost felt instantly, on meeting

TG: But did you expect you'd ever find that?

AG: Not exactly. But I hadn't even conceived of such a thing. I'd conceived of friends, and had had friends at high-school, but I was still in the closet. Kerouac was the first person I was able to come out of the closet to and tell him about it and actually slept with him once or twice (tho' he was primarily straight - but he was very tender toward me and saw that I was in solitary and in a great deal of confusion and anguish and he took a sort of kindly view. Burroughs was always out front and clear and lucid and intelligent (as he is now, at the age of eighty, he was so at the age of thirty-four, I think he was then). So I was lucky when I was seventeen that I met people whose genius sort of ignited my own talents to..sort of up-graded, I think, my own natural intellgence. But I'm really a student of Kerouac and of Burroughs and in some respects an imitator. I've had a steadier life and so I'm perhaps more on the scene (as of now), on the air, going around, giving readings, but I feel myself basically a pupil of Kerouac's ear and his intelligence in language and his awareness of the pronunciation of consonants

TG: When you talk about being a student of Kerouac's, I've never been able to tell how much your style of reading influenced him and how much his style of reading influenced you

AG: Oh, I think his style influenced me. It was way back in (19)47-48, I heard him read (William) Shakespeare aloud and it was such an interesting intonation that he put into the soliloquy of..Hamlet, I think, where Hamlet is sitting down on the steps saying.."What am I? ..What am I doing? ..I'm nothing but a John O'Dreams?" [" Yet I,/A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak/Like John-a-dreams.."] - and the way Kerouac said "John O'Dreams", it was like his mind went off into a little dream n that phrase. So i began seeing that there were intonations, differences of pitch, possible. You know, most poetry was..still is.. pronounced in a montone or duotone..way (it's like I'm talking now, in a sort of monotone) but there's possibilities in conversation where you go from, you know, a little high woodle, when you're talking to a little baby, down to very serious heart tones, when you're talking to your grandmother in her last days on earth..

TG: Of course with your readings. I always felt that there was a sort of Hebraic intonation, even though I know that Buddhism was probably an even greater influence on you and you certainly hear that in your voice too, but there is a kind of Hebraic sound

AG: The Hebraic thing is very real. My grandfathers were rabbis and one of the most strong musical influences I ever had was hearing a recording of Sophie Braslau, a great operatic singer, singing Eli Eli (Lama Sabachthani), with a kind of melisma, I guess you would call it,  sort of,  a very beautiful way of bending the notes that's characteristic of the Hebrew melody.

TG: Now when did that start to enter your reading style?

AG: Well, certainly with "Kaddish" because I was imitating the dovening motion of Kaddish, with, you know, the sound of "Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba b’alma di-v’ra khir'utei" -  da-da-da, da da-da, da-da-da - "Magnificent  mourned no more, marred of heart, mind behind, married dreamed, mortal changed"  - That  is.. The whole rhythm of the poem has a kind of combination of Ray Charles'  "I Got A Woman"  -  "Yes indeed, yes indeed, yes indeed"  (which I'd been hearing the morning before I wrote the poem) and a rhythm of the original Hebrew Kaddish that was still running through my mind and body. The first time I heard it, actually, a Jewish friend played it to me in dawn-light, the morning I started writing the poem

TG: And the Kaddish is the Hebrew prayer for the dead.

AG: Yes it's a kind of mass and prayer for the dead in the synagogue. And (for) a minyan, a group of elders, that can get together and moourn for the dead

TG: So I guess you didn't say the prayer when your mother died

AG: Well, I didn't know it as well, but I did try and do it actually. I wandered around San Francisco with Jack Kerouac and Philip Whalen and we went into various synagogues bu tthere was no minion so that we couldn't do it. So this is a way of making up about a year, a couple of years, later

TG: And this is a couple of years after your mother died

AG: Yeah, my mother died in (19)55. Incidentally, you know, I sent her the original.. a copy of the original manuscript of "Howl", which she received about a week before she died, and she wrote me a letter which was postmarked the day she died, which is quoted in "Kaddish", in which she said (that) she got my poems, she can't tell whether it's good or bad - that my father should judgem beacuse he's a poet, but.. judging from the.. that I should.. she'd read it obviously, and said "get married, Allen, and don't take drugs".  And she said, 
"I have the key. The key is in the window. The key is in the sunlight in the window". And then she died of stroke, I think, (within)  perhaps hours, or within twenty-four hours, of writing the letter. So I received that letter after I heard that she died. It was like a message from the Land of the Dead, so to speak

TG: Is there a particular section of Kaddish that you've had the most problem with controlling your emotion?

AG: Yeah. There's a section that begins… When I'm visiting my mother in the mental hospital for the last time and I walk in and I see that she has had a stroke, and then, suddenly, there's a break in the poem and there's kind of a lyrical rhapsody -  "Communist beauty, sit here married in the summer among daises promised/ happiness at hand..." - And then the section that ends "O beautiful Garbo of my karma". It's really a nice, exquisite, poetic passage, and it's also full of feeling,  and it's like a flash-back in the midst of tragedy to a happier day. And so there's a lot of emotion buried there from childhood. 
Also, at the very end, the section, "O mother/what have I left out?/O mother/ what have I forgotten?..".. "with your eyes/with your eyes/With your Death full of Flowers" - That has a sort of cumulative emotional build-up that's quite great

TG: I want to play an excerpt of Kaddish and, you wrote this in the late 1950's, the recording that we're going to hear was made at Brandeis University in 1964

AG: Yes

"with your eyes running naked out of the apartment, screaming into the hall/with your eyes being led away by policemen to an ambulance/with your eyes strapped down on the operating table/with your eyes with the pancreas removed/with your eayes of appendix operation/with your eyes of abortion/with your eyes of ovaries removed/with your eyes of shock/with your eyes of lobotomy.with your eyes of divorce/with your eyes of stroke/with your eyes alone/with your eyes/with your yes/ with your Death full of flowers"

TG: That's Allen Ginsberg reading an excerpt of "Kaddish"  
Your mother was institutionalized several times.

AG: Many, many times. All during my childhood I had to go out to visit her at Greystone Hospital

TG: Were you frightened by her madness?

AG: Sometimes. Sometimes sorrowed, sometimes frightened, sometimes stuck with the responsibility I  couldn't carry out as a kid, going out alone to see her alone in a mental hospital when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen, that I was a..  or having to stay at home and take care of her while my father was at school, teaching,  and getting into crisis situations with her that I couldn't handle, actually, It kind of broke my brain, broke my spirit, to some extent.

TG: Now when you started doing hallucinogenics, like LSD, did your hallcinations ever scare you because you'd seen you r mother have hallucinations and illusions because of her mental illness?

AG: Well, no, not really. I realized that if everybody began disagreeing with me, I'd better look around twice!,  and think three times, and be pretty sure I knew what I was doing. And so I've been able to be in situations where everybody disagreed, but at the same time maintain my sanity, so to speak, by simply following my heart, really . I have as much a tendency to paranoia as anybody in the United States at this point but at least I can see its paranoia, and most people don't see their own paranoia

TG: That's interesing. So your mother's delusions actually helped you figure out what was real and what wasn't?

AG: Well, yeah, I sort of went through the mill already so I was kind of innoculated

TG: Huh

AG: Yeah, I would say that the experience of having to deal with someone who was a..sort of deluded and hallucinating (and also (hearing) voices and all) helped me deal with my own psychic disturbances and also the psychic disturbances of other people ( I seem to have a kind of tolerance, you know, "in one ear and out the other", for.. you know..like.. so that I can be with people who are qite disturbed, get disturbed myself but not so much so that I  have to turn my back, until, you know, all hope is lost.  

Saturday September 17 - William Carlos Williams

                                                 [William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)]

Today we celebrate William Carlos Williams birthday, born September 17, 1883   

We'd like to draw your attention to the extraordinary resource of the William Carlos Williams page on PennSound 

Here's a key text of Williams. His 1955 introduction to Allen's "Howl & Other Poems" - "Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell" - 

"When he was younger and I was younger, I used to know Allen Ginsberg, a youg poet living in Paterson, New Jersey, where he, son of a well-known poet, had been born and grew up. He was physically slight of build and mentally much disturbed by the life which he had encountered about him during those first years after the first world war as it was exhibited to him in and about New York City. He was always on the point of "going away" where it didn't seem to matter: he disturbed me. I  never thought he'd live to grow up and write a book of poems. His ability to survive, travel, and go on writing astonishes me. That he has gone on developing and perfecting his art is no less amazing to me

Now he turns up fifteen or twenty years later with an arresting poem. Literally he has, from all the evidence, been through hell. On the way he met a man called Carl Solomon with whom he shared among the teeth and excrement of this life something that canon be described but in the words he has used to describe it. It is a howl of defeat. Not defeat at all for he has gone through defeat as if it were an ordinary experience, a trivial experience. Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.

It is the poet, Allen Ginsberg, who has gone, in his own body, through the horrifying experiences described from life in these pages. The wonder of the thing is not that he has survived but that he, from the very depths, has found a fellow who he can love , a love he celebrates without looking aside in these poems. Say what you will, he proves to us, in spite of the most debasing experiences that life can offer a man, the spirit of love survives to ennoble our lives if we have the wit and the courage and the faith - and the art! to persist.

It is the belief in the art of poetry that has gone hand in hand with this man into his Golgotha, from that charnel house, similar in every way to that of the Jews in the past war. But this is in our own country, our own fondest purlieus. We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of  the angels. The poet sees through and all around the horrors he partakes of in the very intimate details of his poem. He avoids nothing but experiences it to the hilt. He contains it. Claims it as disown - and, we believe, laughs at it and has the time and effrontery to love a fellow of his choice and record that love in a well-made poem.

Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.

Studs Terkel 1959 Radio Interview - Part 5

Studs Terkel's 1959 radio interview transcript (courtesy PennSound)  continues. See previous transcripts here, here, here and here

ST:  While the discussion goes on in the background. I was trying to whisper to the audience that I think there’s a seriousness and semi-seriousness, but we’ll see if you can sort of discern the chaff from the wheat.

AG:  No, I'll talk over him (Gregory Corso)., I'll talk over him.
Now, the end of the poem ["Howl"] – which is where - "I'm with you in Rockland", (which is a bug-house). I’m saying, "I sympathize, I am with you." In other words, I’m not saying  “Go to the bug-house, stay there, and don’t bother me anymore!" – Dig?  Are you following me?

ST:  Well, vaguely...

AG: No, no, I’m saying something very simple.

ST: Go ahead

AG:  Like, I’m writing a poem about a friend who’s in a bughouse..

ST: Yeah

AG: and I’m saying “I’m with you in the bug-house”.

ST: That’s Carl (Solomon)

AG: Yeah – I’m with you, in the sense that, you know, I’m not putting you down for being there. I’m not saying I’m going to go get myself a job on Madison Avenue and keep away from the accidents and irrationalities of life. What I’m trying to say is, ok, ok,  it’s necessary to have some compassion for a brother. So.. 

"...where we wake up electrified out of the coma/ by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the/ roof" - (in other words, "our own souls' airplanes", not the enemies, but friendly), "they’ve come to…" (that's, in other words, some great explosion of  soul internally, or feeling of our own, or of compassion of our own, so, come "roaring over the roof/ they’ve come to drop angelic bombs/ the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse/O skinny legions run outside/O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here, (Now. With us. We’re in...)

ST: I dig you now. I see. You're using it figuratively here.

AG: "O victory.." - "O victory, forget your underwear we’re free". See, that’s the point. So all the (walls collapse).

to be continued

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately twenty-four-and-a-half minutes in, and concluding approximately twenty-six minutes in]

Studs Terkel 1959 Radio Interview - Part 4

                                     [Peter Orlovsky - Photograph by Allen Ginsberg]

courtesy the ever-extraordinary PennSound
Studs Terkel interview continues . For earlier segments see here, here and here 

ST: Peter Orlovsky, what were you about to say?

Peter Orlovsky: The Howard Johnson's..when we were going along the highway, we stopped at the Howard Johnson's. And they had (have) these little cards, you know – What’s your waitresses number? Did you like the way she served you? What did she serve you? Was it enough? Was it too small? Was it too large? Do you have any comments about Howard Johnson's? (the inside – how it look?)

So we filled out our cards in each Howard Johnson's we stopped 

GC: But the frightening thing was “What is your waitresses number?”

And that scared us, you know

AG: So we kept answering that by saying  “This is a Gestapo question”

GC:  It is you now

AG: It’s a real mean question

GC: Terrible question

AG: Incredible question -  

GC:  What is your waitresses number? 

AG: Spying on the waitress

GC: As if we would do that,  squeal or something.

AG Like stool-pigeon questions 

And they encourage you know, middle-class American families to come out and be stool-pigeons on theit waitresses.

GC: Yeah, nobody should be…

AG: So we filled it out. We filled it out. We participated in the world. We were the only ones that were participating in this particular project . Nobody else filled it...

GC:  We filled out the cards. Thousands of cards, we filled out, thousands of comments!

ST: I see, but you won’t participate in something you consider immoral. Is that the idea? - basically

AG: Well, no, I won’t participate in something that I don’t  like participating in. And I certainly don’t like participating in turning in the waitresses or something.. like that.. Would you?
ST: No, that sounds fair enough

AG: Would anyone? That’s inhuman.

ST: It's inhuman

AG: What we did do is filled out cards criticizing their art because they had lousy art all over the walls..

ST: Yeah, yeah…

AG: Disgusting. Sort of big sexy English shepherdesses done in a style that never existed on land or sea but an imitation style..

GC:  Yeah, with sheeps - but you’re not supposed to say "sheeps" - "sheep"

AG: "Sheeps"

GC: "Sheep" – not an "s" after it 

AG: "Sheep", that’s right, plural.

                                                 [William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)] 

ST: Lets forego Howard Johnsons for a moment if we may. There’s something that William Carlos Williams, a distinguished.. I  know "distinguished” is a square term to use..

AG: He’s a great poet

ST: He’s a great poet  

GC: No, “distinguished” is a great word
ST: You like the word?
GC: Yes, I think it's lovely. Yes he is distinguished
AG: We're all distinguished, in fact.
ST: We are.
GC: Even you.
ST: Even I..
GC: Well, they're talking about the grey hair..
ST: Oh, outwardly..
AG: Just to see how profoundly nervous you are
ST: I see, that's it. 
GC: You are nervous, aren't you?
ST: Nervous?
AG: Profoundly
ST: But I must admit…
GC: Do you love us. See, we automatically give you our love. We feel it right away 
ST: I don’t know you well enough.

GC: You just can’t get into us.

AG: Well, he’s putting up with us.

GC: He’s putting up…. 

ST: I’m curious. Let’s put it that way – and curiosity is a sign of flattery, of interest…

William Carlos Wllliams, if I may for a moment..

AG: He's talking about Williams

ST: ..wrote a preface to Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl and he said this – “It is a howl of defeat, not defeat at all because he’s gone through defeat as if it were an ordinary experience, a trivial experience. Everyone in this life is defeated but a man if he be a man is not defeated” – Now, what does this mean to you, Allen?

GC:  It sounds like...

AG: Well it sounds to me like.. well, he’s a very old man, you know

ST: He’s paying you a tribute here

AG: Yeah, I know. But he’s a very old man. So he’s looking at it from the point of view of a man actually whose feet are washed, and (who) is about ready to go, looking back on life. I had written a long poem which is full of a lot of complaints (among other things!) – among other things, a poem full of complaints.

ST: It's filled with complaints, but wait, coming back to William Carlos Williams. He wrote this as an undefeated man. He says, he says that you are not defeated is what he says.

AG: Well, he’s saying, like, everybody in life, is defeated, really. Everybody is defeated, in this sense. I mean, we all die. So, in that sense, if you want.. Until you get to a point where death is, like for (Walt) Whitman, a beautiful experience or, you know, a great gate, that you pass through, until you get to a point where you can accept death, everyone is..

ST: But don’t you feel that life, don’t you feel that life itself is a memorable experience. 
You speak of death.

AG: Well, I don’t think I’ll remember it after I’m dead.

ST: I know but you are alive now.

AG: Yeah

                                          [Allen Ginsberg, 1959 - Photograph by Chester Kessler]

ST: See, I was hoping, perhaps you aren’t, the three of you, very alive young poets, are you not? – Well, a lot of people would agree or disagree with you

AG:  Well, once and for all, the corny journalistic conception of the Beat Generation being (quote) “negative” (unquote), or putting down life, I think, is ridiculous. It simply reflects the shallowness of people who comment on our poetry and the lack of perception. Like, the end of my poem there’s a great big thing all about how "the eternal war is here", hurrah for mercy, and everything. Angelic bombs dropping all over the place, it’s a big cry of “Hooray!

STL You mean that sardonically?

AG: NO !!!!

ST: You say “angelic bombs” 

AG Yes

ST: Did you mean angelic bombs?

AG: Yes, certainly.

ST: Why, you consider bombs angelic, that destroy?

AG: Oh no no no no. I’m  not speaking of...

GC: I do. I think of them angelically.

AG: At the end of the poem I…

ST: Then you’re anti-life. Is that it?

GC:  Oh, all life!

AG:  Oh, you’re just confusing the issue again, (with your lies!) (be alive!)

ST: Go ahead, Allen, come back to Howl for a moment, come back to Howl

AG: He isn't talking to me anyway. A  microphone-eater

ST:  You see...now I know the  audience may be a little confused...

GC: He’s yelling. at me!
AG: Shut up!

ST: Now, while this discussion goes on in the background…

to be continued

[Audio for the above can be heard here beginning at approximately nineteen-and-three-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately twenty-four-and-a-half minutes in]  

Friday' s Weekly Round-Up - 284

[Allen Ruppersberg - from The Singing Posters - Allen Ginsberg's Howl (Part 1 & 2) (2003) (detail) -- from the work included in the exhibition Beat Generation - New York, San Francisco, Paris at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, June 22-October 3, 2016]

Jeremy Harding in the London Review of Books:

"In the Beat constellation, Allen Ginsberg's star now shines more brightly than the rest…There would have been no Beat phenomenon without Ginsberg, logorrhoeic poet and protester, illustrious, predatory queer, inventor and supporter of colleagues and hangers-on, impresario and self-appointed hero of a tradition that he put together from all kinds of sources - Buddhist, Hebraic, European, pre-Columbian - in order to loosen the American grain and leave a lasting trace….He had all-consuming ambition, and a promiscuous sense of the poetic canon, which included much of the new American work on offer…"

Harding, in his review of the still-ongoing Pompidou show, focuses on Allen as the center of the Beat movement (provocatively, not Kerouac or Burroughs?). His overview of the retrospective is a challenging and worth-reading one (and one, finally, respectful and complimentary)

"Philippe-Alain Michaud has covered as many bases as a curator can hope to do. His show at Beauborg is planned in the manner of a defensive shield - incoming criticisms probing for gaps will simply bounce off, detonating in the ether, once they encounter his dome of contingencies and associations, fashioned from a wealth of manuscripts, published texts, paintings, drawings, photos, sound recordings, experimental films, home movies, typewriters, phonographic players, tape recorders, even a Burroughs adding machine, invented by the big man's grandfather…"  

More on Allen:

"Ginsberg's libertarian urges fed naturally into the hippie movement, and his politics led fluently from a horror of nuclear weapons to staunch opposition to the Vietnam War and the American imperium…His standing as a poet was assured in 1965 by an invitation to the Berkeley Poetry Conference…as a colleague rather than a Beat figurehead. He was given a Guggenheim grant that year and bought a VW camper van. His idea, I guess, was that he and his lover, Peter Orlovsky would achieve tantric sublimation as they trundled around America from sea to shining sea, and from there to the rest of the universe…"  

The  piece may be read in its entirety - here

David Cope  (who we've featured previously on The Allen Ginsberg Project (here, here, here, here and here - and also here) appeared recently on the Charlie Rossiter program, Poetry Spoken Here, to discuss his long-time friendship with Allen, his forthcoming collection of their correspondence, and to read an elegy (two elegies, in fact). 

That conversation may be listened to - here   

William Burroughs' more obscure work continues to be unearthed and celebrated on Dangerous Minds. We noted last week their revival of an old Oui magazine article - "My Life In Orgone Boxes" (on his Reichian experiments). This past week they followed up with "William Burroughs - Scans of His Porn Mag Articles" (with a tip of the hat to the source - the irreplaceable Reality Studio and the indefatiguable Jed Birmingham).  
Reality Studio for all your Burroughs needs.

and here's "That Time Jack Kerouac Finked Out On Helping Allen Ginsberg Promote Junkie

A selection of Burroughs reading from Junkie is included and is available here 



We noted also last week the Elliott Sharp-Steve Buscemi "Rub Out The Word" William Burroughs celebration. There will be a performance and special release party this coming Wednesday in Brooklyn (for those of you in the vicinity) at the Issue Project Room (an official 2016 Brooklyn Book Festival event)

Errol Morris' documentary on Elsa Dorfman had its opening at Telluride. Here's Stephen Farber's review in The Hollywood Reporter

and here's Benjamin Lees in The Guardian 

The great Chilean poet (anti-poet), Nicanor Parra was 102 last Monday - 102! . Here's an article (in Spanish) on his relationship with the Beat Generation.

Parra, Miguel Grinberg, Allen Ginsberg (by an unknown photographer), in Cuba in 1965:

Tony Perrottet's recent profile of  Boulder, Colorado, in the New York Times, has, naturally, some intriguing Ginsberg moments. He tracks down Allen's old "long-term residence..in the quiet back blocks of the town":

 "Stone steps led up from a sleepy lane to a quaint cottage with a "Bernie for President" sign in the window. The current owners, Steve and Jennifer Hendricks, welcomed me in for iced tea.. They admitted that they had known nothing of Ginsberg's life here before moving in five years ago. "We do get a few poetry fans every year", Mr Hendricks said. "Not many". The interior of the house has been renovated they said, but its exterior has barely changed since the glory days…." 

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 280

Summer-time reports. In Paris, at the Pompidou, the Beat Generation show continues
(and don't forget (in its last weeks now) the Velvet Underground New York Extravaganza exhibit at the Philharmonie, Paris, (also, as it turns out, pretty Beat-centric), up until August 21st).   

This year's European Beat Studies Conference in Manchester, a couple of months back, did we mention it/review it/get back to you on that ? - shame on us - Fortunately, the EBSN has provided some substantial documentation on its web-site - see here 

including Oliver Harris' convivial introduction - here
C P Lee's key-note address ("In The Image of the Beat") - here, here and here
and Andrew Lees illuminating Burroughs apomorphine research presentation here, here and here 

One highlight (one of many) was Jim Pennington's mimeo workshop, (where he, along with many others in attendance), got down and dirty and were able to produce a small facsimilie edition of the original Howl, (Howl was first published, prior to its City Lights edition, as a mimeo) - possibly the first such edition, as he points out, since Gotham Book Mart's reprint from the masters, circa 1977
- "that little blur on the inking, the soft age to the paper..a touch of rust on the staples  and some inadvertent authentic typos  here and there here and there.." - Ah! Mimeo!

[Jim Pennington & others, hard at work at producing a facsimilie Howl in a small limited edition at the European Beat Studies Conference, Manchester, England, June 2016]

Anselm Hollo's posthumous book of poems, The Tortoise of History, just out - highly recommended.  More here - and more on that title later.

Duncan McNaughton, Clark Coolidge, Nathaniel Dorsky, Joanne Kyger and more remember Bill Berkson in San Francisco - here

A further memorial event for Bill Berkson is scheduled for New York at the St Mark's Poetry Project on September 14