Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 228

From the interesting collection - Literary Ephemera - 14 Postcards From Popular Authors:

 - "Dear Ed (White) - Sorry we keep missing each other, love to Justin. I have been occupied learning music, recording new original songs, collecting all my old recent poetry, returning from traveling. I just haven't had time to stop & renew nostalgia everywhere - fancied - see you one xmas or another soon I hope - Saw a little magazine with one of your letters of Jack [Kerouac]. I visited his mother and widow in St Petersburg this year, [1970] finally, & sang them Blake's Lamb & ended whatever paranoia was between us - (mostly Jack's Ghosts) - Love Allen"

      
Here's a pretty rare Ginsberg piece (the cover image is by Alan Aldridge) - "Ginsberg's famous reading in the basement of Better Books [London], recorded on a Ferrograph by Ian Sommerville. Limited edition of 99 copies (100 stated) - "The reading originated after Ed Sanders provided Ginsberg with Miles's name as manager of Better Books, a connection he followed up on his arrival from 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 Albert Hall reading. Jeff Nuttall later described it as "the first healing wind on a very parched collective mind" 

"Many of the poems Allen Ginsberg read at Better Books were introduced by him with comments on their nature. He introduced the reading bt saying, "What I will be reading from 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 that is not published and I do not know whether to publish because I do not know whether or not they are concerned. Also some poems written in the last five years and some months in Czechoslovakia and Poland". The first four poems on side (one) are described, "Most of these I'll be reading are writings from journals so are therefore not poems, they are writings, with the faults of writings rather than the perfection of poetry - Track (five) Vulture Peak is in India near where Buddha pronounced the Diamond Sutra and the Flower Sermon. Track (six) Perama is a small village outside of Piraeus near Athens, with a great many jukeboxes and Greek boys dancing to the jukeboxes, mostly Bazuki music which is the contemporary music of Greece. Track (seven) - There's a big beat group in Prague called The Olympic(s)… in Czechoslovakia, like in London, there are young beautiful blond kids, with long, long hair down to their shoulders and gangs of screaming twelve-year-old teenagers who 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." The tracks on Side (two) had no introductions except the Mantra which opened the second half of the reading. This Allen called, "...an example of Tibetan concrete poetry""  

From The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, the last (remarkable) concluding letter
to Bill Clinton, April 1, 1997:

"Dear President Clinton,  
Enclosed some recent political poems.
I have untreatable liver cancer and have 2-3 months to live.
 If you have some sort of award or medal for service in art or poetry, please send one along unless it's politically inadvisable or inexpedient. I don't want to bait the right wing for you. Maybe (Newt) Gingrich might or might not mind. But don't take chances please, you've enough on hand. 
Best wishes and good luck to you and Ms Hilary and daughter (name)
Home office: # lunchtime noon and 6-7pm supper
Allen Ginsberg"  

This, in French translation (as it recently appeared in the French press)        


Here's a selection of Ginsberg poems in Spanish translation

The archivists at the Harvard library continue their interesting discoveries - see here



Another film recommendation (we noted the Izzy Young documentary last week) - Karen Kramer's still-in-production Renegade Dreamers

                                                          [Izzy Young and Karen Kramer]

"Throughout the world, people have been influenced by Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, and other renegade spirits from the Beat and folk music scene of Greenwich Village. Yet few audiences to day are aware of how a new generation of young poets, folksingers and renegades are making their voices heard in much the same  way as these early legends"

City Lights at 60 - 60 Years of City Lights. Listen, if you haven't already, to this KQED podcast

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 227

[Pat Sebold with Linda Forgosh, executive director of the Jewish Historical Society of New Jersey] 

Family heirlooms -  Pat Sebold, Allen's first cousin (Allen's father, Louis, was the brother of her mother, Clara), earlier this month, donated "a voluminous collection of Ginsberg memorabilia to the Jewish Historical Society of New Jersey - "The trove", The New Jersey Jewish News reports, "includes signed copies of hardbound and paperback versions of her cousin's poetry, as well as personal letters, postcards, family photographs, and yellowed newspaper-clippings..."
From one of the postcards (Allen, writing from Amsterdam): "Cheese, canals, windows, bridges, dog shit, Indonesian restaurants, red light district, youth clubs with rock n roll and earth dope, friendliness on street and in newspaper stories, tiny cars on tiny alleys, salty soup, good clean toilets, pancake desserts, tramcars, bricks, love, I think of you fondly, Allen G."  
"Whenever we had a Jewish holiday he would come", Sebold recalls, "The whole family would get together and the discussion was always about politics. Although I'm the only one who ever ran for office [she is a veteran local politician, an Essex County Freeholder], they were all very much involved in politics."
"My uncle, Leo Litzky and Allen got into a vicious fight about (Fidel) Castro. Allen's attitude was that (Fulgencio) Batista, the right-wing dictator Castro's forces overthrew, was horrible, and Castro was going to be better for Cuba... I  can still remember - my cousin Larry and I were kids and we sat on the steps listening to the argument." 
"Everyone in the family knew that Allen was gay, but they didn't care"
"Allen was very comfortable with the Jewish side of him. He was a very spiritual guy and he never rejected Judaism."
Sebold recalls Allen and his father reading their poems together "at the JCC in West Orange and the library in Paterson" - "They used to fight over poetry. With my Uncle Lou, everything rhymed. Everything had an order. But Allen was freewheeling. Lou would say, "You're wrong", Allen would say,"You're wrong". But there was a lot of love between them. absolutely. His father and the rest of the family were very proud of him." 

                                                                [Pat Sebold and Allen Ginsberg]

Thurston Moore (on Colorado Public Radio): "I'm interested in looking at (Allen) Ginsberg as a writer who had a passion for activism and going up against oppression in societies, constantly going around the world, to India, Europe and South America, and learning about those cultures and wanting to see where the love is and where the oppression is and exposing it. It was not until I got into studying his life and work in my late forties and fifties that I realized how significant he is not only to American culture but global culture. He single-handed funded a lot of the counterculture through his success…He was everywhere. If there was a movement going on in the counterculture he wanted to be there. He wanted to be where the action was. I don't blame him, it's better than sitting at home and watching TV."

                                                                              [Thurston Moore]

and his recollection - "My favorite is when he would come up at the CBGB's stage in the 1970's. He would go up there with his harmonium and Peter Orlovsky with his banjo, and they would do Tibetan mantra or hillbilly songs to an audience wanting to see The Dead Boys or something. It was completely unapologetic. This was their neighborhood, they were there first!  I remember being a nineteen-year-old sitting in the audience at CBGB's thinking: "The nerve of this guy! He just comes in and does this in a punk rock club!."  He  thought punk was amazing. He wrote a poem about it called "Punk Rock Your My Big Crybaby"

Debi Rotmil - another Ginsberg sighting - "I once saw Allen Ginsberg leaning on a wall in front of Lincoln Center watching legendary xylophonist Lionel Hampton's apartment go up in flames…" - (Read more about that here)

Snap your fingers. The Beat Shindig of last month was, by all accounts, a great success. Here's North Beach photographer Dennis Hearne's snaps from the occasion. More photographs here and here    

                                [ruth weiss and Gerd Stern at The Beat Museum, June 2015 - Photograph by Levi Asher]

Izzy Young Talking Folklore Center seems a movie worth catching.  Here's Izzy reading Allen's "Father Death Blues" in Stockholm back in 2010 ("Allen was very conscious'). 

Here's a trailer for the movie:

[Steven Taylor and Allen Ginsberg from "Izzy Young Talking Folklore Center]