Allen Ginsberg in London 1965

                ["Allen Ginsberg Reading At Better Books", LP cover, 1965 - Illustration by Alan Aldridge]

A rare and important Allen Ginsberg reading in London - his famous reading in the basement of Miles'  Better Books bookshop - in the Spring of 1965

"Recorded on a Ferrograph (reel-to-reel tape-recorder) by Ian Sommerville"

"The reading originated after Ed Sanders provided Ginsberg with Miles' name as manager of Better Books, a connection he followed up on his arrival in London from Prague in May 1965. The impromptu reading, though unannounced, was packed (the audience included Donovan, (who provided the pre-reading entertainment) and Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga and Edie Sedgwick, (in town on their way to Rome), and its success provided the catalyst for the upcoming International Poetry Incarnation  (Albert Hall poetry reading)." 

From the sleeve-notes (of the limited edition LP, released 1965 - from which the following recordings were taken);

"Many of the poems Allen Ginsberg read at Better Books were introduced by him with comments on their nature. He introduced the reading by saying; "What I will be reading here tonight, since most everybody here is an editor of a little magazine or a friend, is caviar in a sense, which is to say writing which is not published, and which I do not know whether or not to publish because I do not know whether or not they are concerned. Also some poems written in the last five years and some written in the last few months in Czechoslovakia and Poland."

"The first four selections on side one  ["Who Will Take Over The Universe?" - "From Journals" - "Women" - "From Journals"] - "Most of these I'll be reading are writings from journals and so are not poems. they are writings, with the faults of writings rather than the perfection of poesy"]  

"From Journals" continues ("Now I am brooding on a pillow with my arm resting on my head..") -  "Vulture Peak" ["Vulture Peak is in India near where Buddha pronounced The Diamond Sutra and the Flower Sermon"]   - "Poem Around The Greek Jukeboxes" [Paerama is a small village outside of Piraeus, near Athens with a great many jukeboxes and Greek boys dancing to the jukeboxes, mostly Bazouki music, which is the contemporary music of Greece"] - "The Olympics" ["There's a bugbeat group in Prague called The Olympics…in Czechoslovakia, like in London, there are young beautiful blonde kids, with long, long hair down to their shoulders and gangs of screaming twelve-year-old teenagers that come to theaters in the centre of Prague, and whistle and shriek and go into fainting ecstasies listening to them. This is a poem written listening to the Olympics, which also means Olympians or Gods, as you know."]



[Side two - "Mantra"- "Music of the Spheres" - "Morning"- "Why is God Love. Jack?" - "The Moment Return" -  ["The tracks (here) on side two had no introductions except the Mantra that opened the second half of the reading. This Allen called "an example of Tibetan concrete poetry""]  

Still to come - the last two tracks on side two - "The Spectre" and  (Kral Majales) "King of May" 

Ahimsa ("Returning To The Country For A Brief Visit")

Old-one the dog stretches stiff-legged,
soon he'll be underground. Spring's first fat bee
buzzes yellow over the new grass  and dead leaves
What's this little brown insect walking zigzag
Over the sunny white pay of Su Tung-P'O's Poem?
Fly away, tiny mite, even your life is tender -- 
I lift the book and blow you into the dazzling
                                                                 Void

Allen Ginsberg  4/20/73

Springtime 1973 Cherry Valley meditations (but also fitting for a long hot summer's afternoon). 

(on) -  "I do not know who is hoarding all this rare work." 

(from Allen's "Annotations to Amitendranath Tagore's Sung Poetry", one of nine such annotations - (the full poem-sequence is included in the 1977 collection, Mind Breaths))  

Allen, interviewed by Guy Amirthanayagam,  October 1997 -  (from Writers in East-West Encounter - New Cultural Bearings, 1982): 

Guy Amirthanayagam: Allen, the question I would like to begin with is, what effect do you think your interest in Buddhism has has on your recent poetry?

AG: Well, the title of my most recent book is Mind Breaths; and that relates to an increased awareness of mind, bodhi, awakening mind, through meditative attention to breath, which is the basis of zazen, or sitting meditation practice. So the poetry then becomes  conscious of mind and breath; poems as thought-forms rising in the mind, projected outward into the world on the breath. Breath is a basic notion in poetry. Buddhist interest also brought my attention to older models like Classical Chinese poetry – I’ll read you an example of that rather than talk about it. “Returning to the Country For a Brief Visit” was written on the margin of a book of poems by Sung Dynasty poets. I was imitating their style. 

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 273

                                         [Bernard Plossu - Mexique, Le Voyage méxicain, 1966 © Bernard Plossu]




Opening this week in Paris at the Centre Pompidou, another big Beat exposition (see our announcement back in April). This ambitious multi-media exhibition (up until October 3rd) comprises over six hundred different items - photographs, texts, documents, films, videos, paintings, drawings - and objects and devices for reproducing text, image and sound. A high point is, of course, the presentation of the famous "On The Road" scroll, the thirty-six meter- (one-hundred-and-eighteen foot-) long roll of teletype paper on which 
Kerouac typed up his fabled text. Another highlight, fitting for the Parisian location, is a focus on the so-called "Beat Hotel"  (one of its rooms is lovingly reconstructed, and a prominent feature is Harold Chapman's extraordinary set of photos from that period).

                                                          [The Jack Kerouac  "On The Road" scroll]

                                       [Allen Ginsberg at The Beat Hotel - Photograph by Harold Chapman]

The curators have orchestrated the exhibition around a geographical as well as historical framework, so the show traces Beat cultural manifestation not only in Paris - (and, obviously, San Francisco and New York, its spawning ground) - but also, significantly, (amongst other central locations), Mexico 

  
1953 finds William Burroughs writing to Allen (on the trail of ayahuasca) 
1959 (but written earlier) is the publication-date of Kerouac's seminal  Mexico City Blues 

               [Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, Lafcadio Orlovsky, Mexico City, 1956]

Light is shone on several neglected areas of Beat culture, the specifically West Coast muse (artists like Wallace Berman, Jay Defeo and Bruce Conner), the African-American Beat... Here's Bob Thompson's "LeRoi Jones and his Family" (1964), just one of the six hundred items on display    

 [Bob Thompson - LeRoi Jones and his Family (1964) © The Estate of Bob Thompson]

Previews and reviews are beginning to come in - Here's several - First, en francais - "la retrospective vibrant" (Laetitia Cenac in Le Figaro), the AFP announcement, Tiphaine Dubled in ParisBogue   - & here, a review/preview in Spanish - and here (and here) a notice of the event in German

and don't miss the catalog, now available from the Pompidou Center - "Les nombreux documents reproduits (photos, manuscripts, pochettes de disques, dessins et peintures) témoignent de l'euphorie creative des membres du groupe, ainsi que de la pluridisciplinarité du mouvement (arts visuels, littérature, jazz, poésie sonore..)…Une dizaine d'entretiens inédits avec des protagonistes du mouvement, ainsi que des extraits de textes et poèmes (Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, notamment) viennent enrichir le catalogue" - (The numerus documents reproduced (photos, manuscripts, album covers, drawings and pantings) testify to the creative euphoria of the members of the group - thus (also to) the multi-disciplinary nature of the movement - (visual art, literature jazz, sound poetry). Ten previously unreleased interviews with the  movement's protagonists, as well as excerpts of texts and poems ( (by) Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, in particular) (also) enrich the catalog)."  

Meantime, simultaneously, also in Paris, at the Galerie Semiose (up until July 23), there's an exhibition of the art of William Burroughs. Here's two reviews/previews on that - here and here.
That one also has a collectable catalog, "Pleased to Meet You"- (see here)


[William S Burroughs & Brion Gysin at Joujouka, Morocco (1992) -William S Burroughs - ink and collage on board - 50.8 cm X 76.2cm]

Et aussi  Jack Kerouac - and one to look out for -  An intriguing notice appeared in Macleans (Canada) - The Secret Canadian Life of Jack Kerouac by Richard Stursberg, (regarding Kerouac's recently-published French writings) - see here

The European Beat Studies Network's annual conference starts up again on Monday (this year in Manchester, England - the two central themes this year - music and science). Among the specifically Ginsberg-centric papers - Rona Cran, "Simultaneous Data - Collage in Allen Ginsberg", Peggy Pacini, "Writing and Reading Kaddish - An Exploration of the Soundscape(s) of the Poem", and Franca Bellarsi - "Ginsberg's Poetry through the prism of Buddhist Theories of Mind". Ginsberg biographer Steve Finbow will be chairing these Ginsberg sessions.

For a full list of the schedule - see here

Allen Ginsberg and Indran Amirthanayagam] 

Cafe Dissensus, Issue 26 - "The Beat and the Hungry Generation - when losing becomes hip" - (a special issue on the Beats and the (Indian) Hungryalist movement, edited by Goirick Brahmachari & Anhimanyu Kumar) appeared on-line at the end of last week and there's plenty there worth looking into. Among the specifically Ginsberg-centric pieces: Spring and Oblivion" - ("Indran Amirthanayagam revisits Allen Ginsberg's Howl & Other Poems through his personal memory of the poet (who was close friends with his father), their interactions, the copy of the book gifted to his father by Allen and Ginsberg's readings that Indran attended."),  "Mind Breaths - Learning Buddhism from Allen Ginsberg"  ("Poet and Beat researcher, Marc Olmsted's essay investigates Ginsberg's source and commitment towards Tibetan Buddhism and how he balanced it with his political views/socialism"),  "The Ginsberg-Dylan Express - Tangled Up in Vomit and Blues  ("Brinda Bose looks at two decades of collaborations between Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, through poetry, music and films"),  "Talking  Poetry - Ginsberg and the Hungryalists - Samir Roychoudhury - a retrospective"  ("Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury writes a first-hand account of her visit to the Roychoudhury residence in Kolkata, where she meets and converses with Samir Roychoudhury about Allen Ginsberg and the Hungryalist Movement")  
& Malay Roychoudhury is interviewed about Ginsberg and the Hungryalist Movement in a previously-published interview - here

As with the EBSN conference, tho' we cite the Ginsberg pieces, there's plenty more  - see Pamela Twining's  "The Women of the Beat Generation", for example - or Marc Goldin's "A Sojourn in Tangier"

And, still on Beat scholarship, Josef Rauvolf's recent presentation on Allen in Czechoslovakia (note - the presentation is in Czech) may now be found here 

Hilary Holladay interviews Todd Swindell re Harold Norse  in advance of the upcoming (July 6) Harold Norse Centennial

For more on Harold Norse - see here 

Patti Smith is interviewed for Vice this week - here 

Here's a recently-posted performance of Patti reading "Footnote to Howl" (on June 23, 2000 at the Mural Amphitheatre in Seattle, as part of the Experience Music Project concert series) - "Holy, holy, holy..".

For more renditions of that epic chant of passion - see here 

Allen Ginsberg Montreal, 1969 (Q & A - 13) - (The (Alternative) American Tradition)

                                [William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)]

Q:  (Describe for me some of your  important influences?)  

AG: William Carlos Williams as a poet - partly because of his charm and his human eyes. He had a..he had a kindly sympathy for younger poets and an openness that came from partly from being, like, just a simple, straight, doctor man, and a desire to write a poetry that was completely his own diction, and his own rhythms, and his own speech, rather than a poetry which is a reflection of another culture or an archaic or high-falutin’ sound. So he, like, turned me on to listening to my own talk. And hearing rhythms in that –  So “like, turned me on to listening to my own talk. And hearing rhythms in that" – and then, constructing poems which were projections of the.. or were formations of rhythms of the way we would talk if we were just talkin’. So Williams’ ear, I think, was important. He turned me on to listening to talk

Q: Is Paul McCartney dead?

AG: I don’t know, I didn’t go to his funeral. What is the symbolism of all that? I don’t understand that. 

Q: Neither do I

AG: It sounds to me like some kind of ..really negative gimmick, sort of, like a waste of energy, sort of, except it  - like there are beautiful things that can be examined in the texts of The Beatles and this sounds like a mockery of the examination of texts, you know, the teeny-boppers really should be reading between the lines, but it sounds like some cynical disc jockey has decided to sour everybody on it by, you know, like, creating a flying saucer within the lyrics and then..

Q: It's a nice game though, people are really enjoying it

AG: Okay (next thing) you know, it’s, like “game”

Q:  Looking for clues, man, because clues can be found in everything...

AG: Yeah.

Q: I’d like to know specifically in what way Walt Whitman  influenced  you. I mean, I sense a deep brotherhood in  ”A Supermarket in California”…..

AG: Well, I started reading Whitman heavily after I wrote "Howl", actually, and then I read through all of Whitman and that sort of re-enforced feelings I had. Specifically, well, first of all, the almost Hebraic long line thing, the breath, the breath of someone talking, instead of someone inching  out a poem, like someone actually babbling forth whatever was on the heart. so the line that came from the heart and went out is in Whitman. The second…

Q:  (I was thinking,  Is there a relationship between the long line and the breath (expansion)?

AG: Yeah. There’s I think a relationship, yeah.  Do you know the… Well.. If you hear Vedic chanting, it’s like it's.. or Hebraic chanting, it’s.. it’s a form of yoga, actually  - and brings poetry back to yoga, that long line, (whereas) you take a deep breath to pronounce a long line – but, it’s not just a line, it’s like his actual feelings because Whitman, sexually, was a very interesting, open, polymorphous perverse mammal, who was acknowledging tendernesses in areas that were forbidden at the time and are sill to a great extent [1968] forbidden to men. The basic thing, say, starting off as a homosexual, or someone with homoerotic inclinations, and probably being afraid of them, (I don’t think he made out very much actually. We don’t know - tho' I did meet someone who slept with.. wait wait…the grandson of President Chester A Arthur, Gavin Arthur living in San Francisco, slept with an English cleric named Edward Carpenter, who was the tutor to Queen Victoria’s children, I believe, or tutor to Prince Albert or something like that, who had gone to the United States and visited Whitman and made it with Whitman. So Gavin Arthur then made it with Neal Cassady, the hero of On The Road, so the transmission was complete)..  So..  Beginning with that, let us say that, at the vulgarist level, but Whitman was also acknowledging, or willing to acknowledge, on top of that, was that tenderness between men, open acknowledged frank tenderness between men, was the absolute necessary basis for a democratic society, because unless..   The rule was if the relation between (the) men citizens was “competitive rivalry”, (as it was pronounced to be by Hedley Donovan, the head of Time-Life Inc. – Quote “The American tradition is competition and rivalry”- Unquote) – If that’s so, well then you’ve got the kind of America that you’ve got now. If Whitman’s vision of interpersonal relationships between men comes true, which he says is the actual latent desire among men for a “comradely  tenderness", then a different kind of democracy energes, and a different kind of polis emerges, (a) different kind of man energes, a long-haired tender man, who’s not afraid of his homosexual component, whose not afraid of tenderness (doesn’t have to act it out but he’s not afraid of the blush of affection, doesn’t have to be afraid of his own unconscious), where the American, the Time magazine American of competition and rivalry has constantly to be fighting, fighting his own unconscious. So, finally, the Time magazine American is, finally, you know, (having a predatory relation with his chicks (sic) too - because they’re just more conquests rather than tender persons used..  

["Kausani, India February 1962; with Peter Orlovsky, Gary Snyder & his wife poet Joanne Kyger we made pilgrimage to Buddhist sacred sites, here visiting Lama Anigarika Govinda who lived on nearby ridge. Snyder & Joanne were visiting from Kyoto, Peter & I had come from Tangier". Photograph & caption by Allen Ginsberg © The Estate of Allen Ginsberg]

Q: I also wanted to know how enlightening your trip to India was (when you went with (Gary) Snyder and Joanne Kyger)? 

AG: Well, (it) got me singing, started me singing, (19)61, (19)62. I learned a lot there. I learnt the Hare Krishna mantra there in India, and.. In fact, I started singing the Hare Krishna mantra in (19)63 in Vancouver. I think the first hip kirtan took place in )19)63 as part of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver Poetry Conference. After the first night we all got together (and George Bowering was there) and all began chanting Hare Krishna 

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately fifty-seven-and-a-half minutes in (segment four) to the end of segment four and concluding at approximately one-and-a-quarter minutes in into segment five]

Allen Ginsberg, Montreal 1969 Q & A - 9) ("Holy Ghost on the Nod over the Body of Bliss")

                                                   [Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (Lord Chaitanya) (1486 - 1534)]

AG: Okay, the formulation I finally arrived at was... 

[Allen reads from Planet News] -“Holy Ghost on the Nod over the Body of Bliss" -

"Is this the God of Gods the one I heard about/in memorized language Universities murmur?/Dollar bills can buy it! the great substance/exchanges itself freely through all the world's/ poetry money, past and future currencies/issued and redeemed by the identical bank,/electric monopoly after monopoly owl-eyed/on every one of 90 million dollar bills vibrating/To the pyramid-top in the United States of Heaven - /Aye aye Sir Owl Oh can you see in the dark you/observe Minerva nerveless in Nirvana because/Zeus rides reindeer thru Bethlehem's blue sky..It's Buddha sits in Mary's belly waving Kuan/Yin's white hand at the Yang-tze that Mao sees,/tingue of Kali licking Krishna's soft blue lips..Chango holds Shiva's prick, Ouroboros eats th' cobalt bomb,/Parvati on YOD's perfumed knee cries Aum/ & Santa Barbara rejoices in he alleyways of Brindaban/La Illaha El (lill) Allah Who - Allah Akbar! /Goliath struck down by kidneystone, Golgotha grown old,/All these wonders are crowded in the Mind's Eye/Superman & Batman race forward, Zarathustra on Coyote's ass. Laotzu disappearing at the gate, God mocks God,/Job sits bewildered  that Ramakrishna is Satan/and Bodhidharma forgot to bring Nothing."
(No, Bodhidharma brought the doctrine of the Void across, so "Bodhidharma forgot to bring Nothing")
 - So, in other words, that’s what I would see the whole relation as..  

Ramakrishna was the one who came up with a formula like that when asked, like, "What’s his scene? - He said, “I worship all Gods” – and attempted to practice the different sadhanas – And that obviously is a necessity, you know, at this point in planet history, because you can’t have one planet with about sixty different ethnic groups quarreling over which image of God is the correct one for an entire planet. So you’d obviously have to finally realize that, actually, as Swami Bhaktivedanta says, that Christ is Krishna and Krishna-Christ are identical - which means that the Jews have got to give up their God to get the Big God, and the Christians have got to give up their God to get the Big God, and Krishna-ites have got to give up Krishna in order to get Krishna, and the Mohammadens are going to have to give up Allah in order to get Sophia, to get back to the Abyss of Light, actually.

Q: What about Lord Chaitanya?

AG: Lord Chaitanya?  Well, I guess he’ll have to join the dance! – But I don’t think you can make any exclusive claim to any single name or form, finally. Because, otherwise, you’d have to accept the Christian’s exclusive claim (because they say they have an exclusive claim to an exclusive name and form). I don’t know what Swani Bhaktivedanta would say about that. I think he’d disagree, because he thinks that Krishna is the Supreme Person and includes all other supreme persons. Well, that’s alright. If it includes all other supreme persons, then any supreme person you name, like Christ, you’re naming Krishna, so, there’s no harm done.  Yeah?

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately forty-one minutes in and concluding at approximately forty-four-and-three-quarters minutes in]

Montreal reading continues - (from The Fall of America)

                            

Allen Ginsberg’s October 31 (Halloween) 1969 Montreal reading (begun here)  continues with a reading of his poem "Car Crash!" - [dated 1:30 AM, Jan 1. 1969, subsequently included in The Fall of America - Poems of These States 1965-1971 (1972)] - "I’m starting off a year ago, that is poetry of the last year"– (“Snow blizzard sowing/ice-powder drifts on stone fenced/gardens near grey woods”…”..Rimbaud/age 16 adolescent sneers tight-lipt/ green eyed oval in old time gravure/-1869 his vevet tie askew, hair/mussed & ruffled by the policeman's rape") 

At approximately thirty-one-and-a-half minutes in, Allen continues with "Continuation of A Long Poem on These States" – "Imaginary Universes"  [also later included in The Fall of America] – "It’s part of a long poem, written, like transcriptions of my consciousness during war-time US last year or two, since 1965 to now" -  "Imaginary Universes" -  (“Under order to shoot a spy, I discharged/ my pistol into his mouth./He fell face down from the position life/left his body kneeling blindfold…..""On account of my best friend &/my brother I killed both Gooks."/That was true, yes.") 

Allen comments momentarily on the audio -  "The incense broke an ashtray! - that was what that little clink was all about") - before continuing:

By Air Abany, New York, to Baltimore – which is where Edgar Allan Poe died, so “To Poe”  ["To Poe Over The Planet Albany-Baltimore"]– (“Albany throned in snow Hudson ribboned North ice white flats/New England's blue sky…"…"..Poe/ Died kidnapped by phantoms/conspiring to win elections/in the Deathly Gutter of 19th Century")

followed by
"Falling Asleep in America" -  ("We’re in the Great Place, Fable Place Beulah, Man wedded to Earth, Planet of green Grass.."…"…flickering grass green returns me to/Nashville."

followed by

July 4th 1969 ["Independence Day"] - "(Orange hawk eye stronger than thought, winking above a thousand thin grassblades…"…"Independence Day! the Cow's deep moo's an Aum!" - [and the additional lines (not included in the published version)]
"Cut my backbone, unstring my eyes and fingers/a million insects eat the body,  soul empty as -/grass bends trembling in the breezy warble")

Then,  A continuation of "A Poem on These States", April 1969  - ["Northwest Passage"] – Northwest, going from the Columbia River in the USA Northwest, through the Snake..of the Snake Gorge..where the Snake River meets the Columbia Rivera at a place called Lake Wallula, which is where Lewis and Clark went through to get the Northwest Passage, aided by an Indian lady, Sacagawea - ("Incense over Horse Heaven  Hills/Empty logger trucks speed/Lake Wallula's flatness shimmering.."…"Drive down valley to Main Street/Seattle First National Motor/next to Everybody's Bank.")   

At approximately fifty-one minutes in, Allen declares - "I’ll read one more poem to finish this.. side.. to finish this..hour. I’m reading more or less in a chronological order."

AG  reads "Please Master" (! - tape cuts off last few lines) (Please Master can I touch your cheek?"…."Go moan O please master do fuck me like that…")

[& then chants - (at approximately fifty-six minutes in - more cymbals and ambient sound – Allen accompanying himself on  harmonium] –   "Hare-om-namah-shivaya"
“To Shiva” - (an insight) into divine nature, regarding change, birth, death, the dance of creation, the dance of  destruction (hatred), (jealousy), from tired yogis (and holy men)  who worship by smoking ganja, or cannabis sativa, in India. So, a mantra to the Canadian Commission who will be here next week to investigate the possibility of  legalizing marijuana..    Hare-om-namah-shivaya... 

to be continued

[Audio for the above can be heard here (beginning at approximately twenty-five-and-a-half minutes in (the second segment) and continuing until approximately sixty five minutes in quarter minutes in [i.e. at the end of the second segment of the tape] (and also  one-and-a-half minutes into the third segment] 

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 251

[Allen takes the back-seat - Two photographs - Ryan Weideman (Self-Portrait with Passenger,1990) 

and Brian Graham  (Allen Ginsberg and Brian Graham, Cape Breton, 1992)]

[ - and a third - Steve Silberman, Allen Ginsberg, and Marc Olmsted in San Jose, California, 1986 - Photograph by Marc Geller]

Our good friend Steve Silberman gets to sing Allen's praises once again - "I once told Philip Whalen that my initial experience of working with Allen was disillusioning because he was a crabby, horny, egomaniacal, middle-aged rock star instead of the sweet, broken-hearted nerd in his poems, and Philip replied, "What's so great about illusions anyway?" Ten years later, I became Allen's teaching assistant at Naropa and it was a much better experience, because I was no longer this painfully self-conscious teenager mooning around him. These experiences made me a writer".  Read more on Steve's "Advice to Writers" - here

Crowded By Beauty - Steve' s review of the recent Philip Whalen biography (in The Shambhala Sun) is available on-line here 

(Jonah Raskin reviews the book for the San Francisco Chronicle here, Aram Saroyan for Hypoallergic, here 
 - see also our (July 2015) posting on the book - here)

Allen in India. Did we perhaps miss this one? Abhimanyu Singh's review of  Jeet Thayil's radio documentary. That documentary, incidentally, can still be listened to here. 

And what a delight to hear this - Nanao Sakaki's 1990 reading, recently digitalized and uploaded and made available by the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

(More Nanao on the Ginsberg Project - here and here  (also here, here - and  here)

and this

- Tuli Kupferberg's 1966 "No Deposit No Return" album, now available in its entirety from the ever-redoubtable PennSound 

"I've seen the best minds of my generation laid down in cemeteries.." David Bowie paraphrases Allen Ginsberg in the fade-out of the 1989  Tin Machine song, "Prisoner of Love" (listen closely)

"When I was nine or ten I was given books on Jack Kerouac, (Lawrence) Ferlinghetti, (Allen) Ginsberg, (Gregory) Corso, and all that whole Beat crowd and they sort of became early Bibles to me.."  (David Bowie interviewed, 1973) 

                                                  [David Bowie and William S Burroughs, 1974] 

Countdown to the Feb 2 publication of The UnCollected Ginsberg - Wait Till I'm Dead -
"Rainy night on Union Square, full moon. Want more poems? Wait till I’m dead.—Allen Ginsberg, August 8, 1990, 3:30 A.M." -  Oh yes, we're waiting.