Friday's Weekly Round-Up 61

Leading off with the sad news, this week, of the untimely death of Christian Ide Hintze, poetic and multi-media experimentalist and founder and director of the remarkable Schule fur Dichter (Vienna Poetry School). Here's the obituary notice (in German) in derStandard. Here's another local (Viennese) report. Pierre Joris, on his always admirable Nomadics blog, quotes Anne Waldman's fond remembrance of him - "I remember Ide's visit to the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University in the 1980's with other brilliant poets and thinkers, [fellow Austrian poets] Christian Loidl and Christina Huber, how (he) sat at the feet of Allen Ginsberg to receive "transmission" for his work and creation..." (the full text of her memorial note, alongside footage of Hintze in performance, may be viewed and perused here).

His 1995 Naropa lecture on the founding of the school can be read here.

His "poe:tik revolu:son" (poetic revolution) - for Allen (alongside Sappho, most probably, his favorite poet?), we featured a few months back - "One subject between us is this sense of messianic poetic revolution.."

We'll have more on it next week, but Feb. 23rd (as part of the Tune-in Music Festival) is the world premiere of Bill Frisell (or rather, Hal Willner)'s "Kaddish" - a "multi-media extravaganza" (based on the poem), produced by Willner, and featuring him and director Chloe Webb reading the text, short films by Webb, art by Ralph Steadman, and a unique original score by Frisell.

Here's a short preview.

And a heads-up - opening March 30, Alan Govenar's feature-length documentary, "The Beat Hotel" - "1957. The Latin Quarter, Paris. A cheap no-name hotel at 9 rue Git le Coeur became a haven for a new breed of artists fleeing the conformity and censorship of America. The hotel soon turned into an epicenter of Beat writing that produced some of the most important works of the Beat Generation..". We'll have more on that in the coming weeks too.

We'll second Jerry Cimino's recommendation over on Kerouac.com, check out, Last Man Standing, Al Hinkle's self-published memoir.

Michael Sloan's piece in Slate this week had us chuckling (how will you score?)

- "Westminster Champion or Line from Ginsberg's Howl?".

Friday 's Weekly Round-Up 39

We've directed you before to the Schule Fur Dichtung (Vienna Poetry School)

and its instigator, Ide Hintze. Here is "poe:tik revolu:son", an hommage, featuring the recorded voice of Allen.

Here's a cosmic evocation of "Footnote to Howl" from Galician Spain ("dous fragmentos de "Musica para un Ouveo""). Poet-translator Xoan Abeleira joins composer Borja Costa (with improvised piano accompaniment by Jose Ramon Garcia Vasquez)

Here's the famous William Buckley, 1968, "Firing Line" t.v. appearance, acted out with sock-puppets (that's right, acted out with sock-puppets!)

An all-videos "Friday Round-Up" this week on The Allen Ginsberg Project.

Poetry and Meditation

[Allen Ginsberg, Boulder Colorado, June 1994. photo c. Steve Miles]

In the upcoming months we're hoping to publish, here on The Allen Ginsberg Project, a number of transcriptions of, previously-unpublished, lectures and talks given by Allen. Let's begin this week with a 1993 class given at the Schule Fur Dichtung (Vienna Poetry School), initially transcribed by Christian M Katt, with further revisions by Ide Hintze and Juergen Berlalovich - Allen on Meditation and Poetics.

The talk is given prior to a showing of two classic "Beat" movies - Pull My Daisy and Renaldo and Clara (Renaldo and Clara is a Beat movie? - most certainly!) Allen comments briefly, at the end of the piece, on both films).

He attempts here "an about three or four minute description of the practice of sitting meditation". "(If) you can be patient for those five minutes or so", he tells his students, "then, when you leave this theater, you will have a trick that you can take home and use for the rest of your life". Furthermore, "in the course of (this) you might find out that you become more and more familiar with your own thought-productions, and so this turns out to be useful in poetry".

These were lessons that he learnt, of course, from his own teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Here is rare footage of Trungpa lecturing on meditation at NAROPA in 1974.

A transcription (made by Allen) of a visit by Trungpa to his "Meditation and Poetics" class in 1978 can be found here.

And here is Allen at NAROPA in the '80's (1987, to be exact) lecturing on Charles Reznikoff and William Carlos Williams, and others, in the context of the mind in operation - meditation practice and "ordinary mind".

Perhaps best, and most distilled, however, is this - "If you want to know how to meditate/I'll tell you now 'cause it's never too late".."If you can't think straight and you don't know who to call/it's never too late to do nothing at all."