Friday's Weekly Round-Up 45

Eric Drooker's Moloch image graces the cover of this week's New Yorker. With Illuminated Poems and Howl: A Graphic Novel, we're now familiar with the iconography of the terrain. All of a sudden, it just, apparently, got more urgent. He sent in the design "almost a year ago", according to his wife, quoted in their local paper, Berkeleyside, "but it was ruled too dark". Now that darkness is increasingly being acknowledged. Leading off with, once again, a shout-out to the Occupy Wall Street protestors.

We continue to solicit encounters with Allen Ginsberg. Here's a touching one from Eduardo Vega Colon, a sometime sailor deployed on Operation Desert Shield, and posted this past week on Karma of Dove, his web-site [2012 update, sadly, no more]- "Allen Ginsberg placed me on the path (that) I walk today. It all started with his "Sunflower Sutra".."Almost twenty years later (now), I continue to walk that path". Colon describes nervously approaching Allen at The Poetry Project at St Mark's Church to timidly offer his respect ("Hello, Mr Ginsberg", I said. "Call me Allen", he said. "Allen, I just want to thank you", I said. He looked surprised and somewhat confused when he asked, "What for?"

Another feature we like to include in our "Friday Round-Up"'s - parodies (or, at least some parodies - Len Anderson's Beep, perhaps - "a version of the history of the personal computer rendered in free verse in the manner of Howl by Allen Ginsberg" - or "iKaddsh" (for Steve Jobs, 1955-2011). Parody is flattery before it is anything else.

Looking ahead to Beat books on the horizon, Gerald Nicosia's One and Only: The Untold Story of "On The Road" looks like being a singular and major event. "One and Only.." includes "the never-before-published transcription of the 34,000-word taped interview" that Beat historian Nicosia conducted with LuAnne Henderson, "the woman who started Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady on their journey" (the original "Marylou" of "On The Road" - she'll be played, in the upcoming film version, by Kristen Stewart). It's also illustrated with 55 "rare archival black-and-white photographs", (including photographs of Allen), many of which have never been seen before.

Gordon Ball, meanwhile, has been looking at Allen and at the halcyon years he spent at Cherry Valley. East Hill Farm - Seasons with Allen Ginsberg is due out in December from Counterpoint. "An intimate portrait of Allen Ginsberg's upstate New York farm and its people - a place of communal living, poetic refuge, and interpersonal conflict". An early review of the book may be glimpsed and savoured here.

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up 11

[Allen Ginsberg & Neal Cassady, San Francisco 1955. Photo likely snapped by Natalie Jackson, Neal's girlfriend at the time. c. Allen Ginsberg Estate]

Neal Cassady

It’s Neal Cassady celebration today, both in San Francisco (at the 6th Annual Birthday Bash at the Beat Museum), and in Denver (Neal's hometown) at the Mercury Cafe. Al Hinkle (Big Ed Dunkel from On the Road) will be appearing at the San Francisco event, while Neal's children, John Allen Cassady and Jami Cassady, along with special guest David Amram, will be celebrating their father's birthday in Denver. The Denver Post has a useful piece on the unlikely local hero. And don’t forget to check out the Beat Generation/Neal Cassady pages at Tom Christopher.com, if you haven’t already and also, of course, the Neal Cassady Estate. Neal Leon Cassady was born February 8 1926 and died February 4 1968 at San Miguel de Allende,Mexico. We’ve spotlighted it before but Peter Ferry’s travel piece about hunting down the ghost of Cassady in that far-off spot is also well worth perusing.

Allen Ginsberg photo by Richard Nagler (courtesy George Krevsky Gallery)

“Visual Poetics”

Richard Nagler’s remarkable book Word on the Street has been out a few months now and we’re only just now getting around to commenting on it. Allen was a huge fan of the work and was going to write the preface (as it was he provides a pleasingly accurate blurb – “Everyone of these picture poems brings to my mind a haiku”), Nagler explains:

After two successful books of photography in which I had worked with two extraordinary writers, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Ishmael Reed, I thought the WORD photographs would benefit from a collaboration with an extraordinary poet. Allen Ginsberg immediately came to mind. It turned out I knew someone who knew someone who knew Ginsberg. It took two years of correspondence, but I finally got some pictures to Allen. He immediately grasped and “got” the pictures. As a poet and also as a photography-lover, he immediately agreed to write original poetry that would accompany the photographs. We met on several occasions in New York City and San Francisco to discuss the project, but in late 1996 I learned that he had just received a terrible medical diagnosis. He died just a few months later in April 1997. I was saddened and disappointed, but I did keep taking WORD images inspired by the word IMMORTAL in the window of City Lights Bookstore in a memorial to Allen’s passing. It was ten years later that I decided to try again to publish a book of this project.

Further work by the artist can be viewed here

[Eric Drooker and Allen Ginsberg. c. Arne Svenson. for the back cover of Illuminated Poems]

Speaking of the San Francisco Bay Area (Nagler’s from the Bay Area) and Allen-sympatico artists, next Wednesday, February 9, don’t miss Eric Drooker’s free lecture at CounterPulse, Eric Drooker -The Art of Animating Howl – CounterPulse, a lively local performance space, is at 1310 Mission

And finally, Allen as artist himself, there’s an interesting post up on Dharma/Arte neatly titled "An Innocent Moment of Surprise", about Allen’s signature “AH” doodle. That article sends you (as we do too) to the Museum of American Poetics’ extensive Drawings and Inscriptions Gallery for plenty more doodling (and we should also send you to the Gemini G.E.L site for even more sophisticated work - both sites can be accessed also via our “blogroll” on the right-hand side under the listing “Photography/Illustration".

Howl: A Graphic Novel Illustrated by Eric Drooker review in PopMatters

Fantastic review of Drooker's HOWL: A Graphic Novel in today's PopMatters

'Howl: A Graphic Novel' Wails Brilliantly Into the 21st Century

By Sarah Boslaugh 15 October 2010

Eric Drooker first met Allen Ginsberg in 1988 during the Tompkins Square Park Riots on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It was one of many skirmishes New York City would experience in the ‘80s, between the forces of gentrification and those who refused to give up territory they felt was rightfully theirs. The sympathies of both Drooker and Ginsberg were with the riffraff—the squatters, homeless, artists and other troublemakers whom the police were trying to evict from the area—and when they met again a year later the two discovered they had common artistic tastes, as well. Read full review >>

Werk Works to produce 'Howl'

[image: Frame from Howl. Eric Drooker]

We've been quietly holding our breath for a few years now on this one, so you can imagine our relief when we got the news that the film finally got the solid backing from Werk Works. Variety give a nice breakdown of who's what and what's who. Filming is set for March 16-April 2. The animation work by Eric Drooker can continue full speed ahead now.