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Sam Charters - Jack Kerouac's Jazz - 3 (Monk, Dizzy and Bird)
part 3 - Monk, Dizzy and Bird Sam Charters: I thought I would talk about the three black performers that Jack talks about so specifically – Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie...
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Expansive Poetics - 105 (Kaddish)
Allen's August 13 1981 Naropa class continuesAG: "Kaddish", (which is a long poem, celebrated, and it's supposed to be sort of a kind of terrible masterpiece), is really just writing what I hadn't been...
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Expansive Poetics - 106 (Joy Without Cause)
Student: How can joy be…AG: Without cause?Student: Without cause, yeah?AG: Well, it's a mystery. Joy without cause, meaning.. Joy, the unborn joy, I should say. "Unborn", in the sense that you can't...
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Expansive Poetics - 107 (Philippe Soupault)
[Philippe Soupault (1897-1990)]AG: So you can do it in a short form too. You don't have to write a big long long (poem). So we go back to "the frogs", back to the French, to Benjamin Peret (he's after...
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The Birthday of Antonin Artaud
Today is Antonin Artaud's birthday. We draw your attention to our 2011 Artaud birthday posting - here(See also our postings here and here) [Antonin Artaud - Self-Portrait, December 17, 1946]Here is a...
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Nicanor Parra's 100th Birthday
["Nicanor Parra Anti-Poet, professor of Newtonian physics, University of Santiago Chile, my host a month 1960. We couldn't get a cab downtown from his daughter Catalina on 110 St. N.Y.C. so tookSubway...
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Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 188
[Allen Ginsberg's Rainbow Honor Walk plaque, recently unveiled in the Castro in San Francisco, 2014 - Photograph by Steven Bracco]Two weeks sincethe last "Round-Up" so we'd better get down to it.Last...
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Rarities from the Naropa Archives 1 - (Ashbery & Merwin)
Back in June of last year, we reported on the extraordinary trove of recordings which is the Naropa University Digital Archive.Just this past month Airshow of Boulder completed the monumental task of...
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Rarities From the Naropa Archive 2 - (Ginsberg, Cage & MacLow)
Continuing with yesterday's "treasures" from the Naropa Archives, here's another one, another singularly early one, dating from August 1975 - "Visiting Poetics Academy Convention" (consisting of three...
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Expansive Poetics 108 - Benjamin Péret)
[Benjamin Péret (1899-1959)]Benjamin Peret, next - 1899-1959 - also a member of the original Surrealist group. There was a grand reunion of all the old Surrealists and their friends in Paris in 1960...
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Expansive Poetics - 109 (Beauty, Humor (and no belly-laughter from television)
[A performing chimpanzee, "Zippy", watches tv in 1955]Student: Why do you find beauty in it (Benjamin Peret's poem, "Hymn of The Patriotic Old Soldier") if it's so crude ?[Benjamin Peret]AG: If it's...
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Expansive Poetics - 110 ( The American Inheritance)
[Blaise Cendrars (Frédéric Sauser),(1887-1961)]I want to turn back to 1887 for just one moment to get Blaise Cendrars (because, oddly enough, Cendrars, except for Apollinaire, was the earliest of...
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Allen Ginsberg in Poland
[Allen Ginsberg in Poland, 1986]We've been noticing for some time now an Allen in Poland blog, a rich source of information, the bulk of it (naturally!) in Polish. Andrzej Pietrasz, an independent...
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Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 189
[ Allen Ginsberg - For Martin Mooij - signed and dated hand-written ms., Rotterdam, June 14, 1979]In Rotterdam, the Tower of Babel/rises unbombed to the rainy sky/today - many tongues babbling/their...
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Saturday September 13
We're having a few technical (formatting) difficulties here today at Ginsberg Central, so our planned post (on William Burroughs!) is regrettably not yet up. We're working on it… Stay tuned - and...
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William Burroughs on Jack Kerouac at the 1982 Naropa Conference
["But Jack as I warned you back in 1945, if you keep going back to live with ‘Memére’ you’ll get wound tighter & tighter in her apron strings till an old man you can’t escape…” William S. Burroughs...
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Expansive Poetics - 111 (Marsden Hartley)
AG: Marsden Hartley…it was recommended that I should look at his poetry also, because I was looking for examples of free-form poetry in English, and Marsden Hartley was one of the first, and one of the...
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Expansive Poetics - 112 (Albert Pinkham Ryder)
[Alfred Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917) - The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse) - oil on canvas - 70.5cm x 90cm - (1896-1908) courtesy the Cleveland Museum of Art] AG: There’s one painting in here I’m...
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William Carlos Williams' Birthday
[William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) - Photograph courtesy the Yale Collection of America Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library]September 17 is William Carlos Williamsbirthday. Williams...
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Cross Worlds
"Transcultural Poetics", global action, cross-cultural activity, is something we're very much in support of here. Transcultural Poetics, the new anthology from Coffee House Press, drawing from the...
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