#allen ginsberg poetry awards

[rustbeltjessie]

[Santa Muerte, I ask you to remember]

Santa Muerte, I ask you to remember the wreckage of the streets. How did I escape it? How did I escape being swept from the gutters, one more marigold, one more skull crushed to confetti, one more guttering candle amongst the rest? All we had was those four rooms, up a flight

of stairs I stumbled on. Too steep, and so often too high to climb. These rooms, when I write myself back to them, refract the light. The way the blue, green, brown glass of emptied bottles of gin, whiskey, wine caught—then shattered—the late afternoon sun in that apartment, every apartment. The way

a crystal hung from a chandelier would, in a once-grand hotel turned flophouse. Dust-coated rainbows breaking across the flaking paint. The light of these remembered rooms, though, is more like the reverse—a chandelier in what was once a flophouse, now remade into a grand hotel. Nostalgia is gentrification.

I inhabit these memories and change them, the same way we changed the landscape of the neighborhoods we lived in. Without meaning to. Just by being there. Now I remember those rooms, those streets, and the people who inhabited them as exquisite, dazzling. Harder to recall the dirt, the lack

of money, the mattress on the floor stained purple with wine and vomit, the candles guttering ’til dawn, ’til wax covered the floor boards. Those rooms were squalid, and I wrecked myself in the pursuit of beauty. Before that, I lived in a different house, wretched in its own way. Crowded as it was with cats and stray

kids, sad queers and young junkies with their black-hole stares. I slept on a mattress there, alone in the hot, stuffy back room; I’d wake early and stare out into the small concrete yard, the black walnut tree dropping green fruit, staining everything brown. The pigeons with their oil-slick heads and beady black eyes; the shimmering

iridescence of the flies, those seraphs of death. When my partner in crime woke, we’d walk to the bodega for 32 oz. cups of cola, which we’d then dump half of. The rest, refilled with cheap Canadian whisky, so caustic and rotgut it stripped the wax coating from the paper. The stove in that house had a gas leak.

Even through the miasma of wax and syrupy whisky I could smell it; the sharp, eggy rot, but no one else seemed to notice, or they were too high, too low to care. It was the next place which was haunted. No gas leak there—our gas shut off a few months after we’d moved in and I too broke

and careless to get it turned back on—but those four rooms were crowded with the dead, restlessly clattering through the kitchen, perching on the edges of our mattress-beds, whispering their forlorn secrets. In those rooms, it was always the Day of the Dead. In spring, when the callery pear bloomed, their scent of tainted semen heavy on the air. In summer,

when the black walnuts cracked open on the streets, leaking, brown and green, their boozy-bitter juglone. And yes, in autumn, when the cold and haunted rooms smelled of dust, votive-wax, and the clingy, vegetal scent of just-carved pumpkins—and when all the neighborhood bakeries were making pan de muerto, the air above the autumn streets was heavy

with sugar, yeast, and orange zest. We were haunted, not only by the restless dead. Haunted by poverty, addiction, our own recklessness. The twisted shapes our longing for beauty hammered us into. We’re all doomed. My partner, my crime, scrawled that on a piece of paper which she hung, facing street-ward, in her bedroom window. And the landlord, who said she agreed,

kept trying to evict us. And the men who sang drunkenly below our window scrawled graffiti on the bricks above the alley. Gringos out. I did not blame them. I was an interloper, my ghost-white self settling there after running from—what was I running from?—the other streets, other rooms which had already finished with me. I was trespassing. Still, I learned to pray in their languages. Lit

novena candles, asked for benedictions from Santa María, Madre de Dios, and you, Gloria sea la Santa Muerte, la bendita muerte. My altar laden with ofrendas—cempazúchitl, cakes and sweetbreads, coffee and whiskey, the favorite food and drinks of our restless dead. We drank. A shot left on the altar, for the ghosts, a shot for us. Another. Offerings for them, for us

because we were dead now, or so the suburban boys said. We drank, whiskey in our coffee, beer from the bodega, spiced rum or gin the northwoods boys brought us as offerings. We drank because we woke twisted, shaking, still running from nine-day benders, we drank. To beauty, to death. How did I escape? Santa Muerte, I left those streets, those rooms, half a life ago. Tonight

they return, slow then sudden; sneak up like the creeper weed the ambulance driver gave us, nothing and nothing then I’m too high to move. I watch them flicker and refract, these shades of the past, these scenes altered by the trespass of memory. The altar of memory. And then the ghosts arrive. They fall

like the robes of a skeletal saint, like confetti from a Day of the Dead parade float; float like squid, like semen, like flower petals. Black walnut, callery pear; they smell of spice, tobacco, a gas leak, the early dark. They descend as flies, pigeons; come on as scrawls of graffiti, as thunder snow, the blued flash of light, the roar, then white. White. They fall and fall and cover it all, the squalid rooms, the wreckage of the streets, my whole wasted life, until everything

is just layers and layers of ghosts.

—Jessie Lynn McMains, from Paterson Literary Review #52 (2024)

[100gayicons]

GAY ICONS: ROD MCKUEN

When I first began this tumblr, I wanted to profile gay (LGBT) people who have had an influence on gay rights or impacted our culture. Often a person’s sexual identify is obscured by time and we’re left with a straight backstory. If possible I want to shed light on their gay past.

One of the people I’ve had on my to-do list since the beginning is poet and singer-songwriter Rod McKuen. He was one of the best-selling poets in the United States during the late 1960s and sold over 100 million recordings worldwide. Today he is largely forgotten.

McKuen described a difficult childhood, abused by his stepfather. In his teens he ran away from home, drifting from job to job, eventually arriving in San Francisco. There he read his poetry in clubs that also featured Beat poets Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. By the late 1950s he was performing at the famed “Purple Onion”. Decca Records signed McKuen after he began incorporated his original songs into his act.

During 1967’s Summer of Love, McKuen gained a large youth following after he published his books of poetry. He won a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Recording in 1968. The next year his song "Jean", written for “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” was nominated for an Academy Award. In all McKuen work was translated into 11 languages and sold over 60 million copies worldwide.

But McKuen was not universal loved.

Newsweek dubbed him "The King of Kitsch”

Mademoiselle magazine called him a "Marshmallow Poet."

Literary critic Nora Ephron wrote, "For the most part, McKuen's poems are superficial and platitudinous and frequently silly."

McKuen never identified as gay, straight, or bisexual, but once said:

"I can't imagine choosing one sex over the other, that's just too limiting. I can't even honestly say I have a preference."

In 1977 he actively campaigned against Anita Bryant’s anti-gay campaign - even writing a song called "Don't Drink the Orange Juice", (referring Bryant as commercial spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Commission). And he later gave benefit performances supporting LGBT rights organizations and to fund AIDS research.

Perhaps his gayest act was the release of his 1977 album “Slide... Easy In” that had a photo of a man's arm gripping a handful of Crisco – (then used by as sexual lubricant, in particular for fisting).

The difficulty in researching Rod McKuen is that despite of his fame (or because of it) he regularly embellished (lied about?) his past.

McKuen claimed to have a son who was raised in France by the boy’s mother. But his own biographer Barry Alfonso said:

“There is no information that confirms that Rod McKuen ever had children.”

(This reminds me of actor Raymond Burr who also claimed to have a son without any evidence).

Another example, while defending his writing to a Chicago Tribune reporter (1975), he said:

“… if I wasn’t a damn good poet, why would I be in the Oxford Book of Verse?”

That claim was researched and there was NO Oxford Book of Verse (nor an Oxford books of English Verse or American Verse).

Regarding Edward Habib, his “partner” of 50+ years, the two lived together and McKuen referred to him as a brother. In response to a gay fan letter, McKuen implied he and Habib were biological brothers, and suggested to have had sex together “… wouldn’t that be incest?”

McKuen died of respiratory arrest in Beverly Hills, on January 29, 2015. Edward Habib died in May 12, 2018.

Raymond Burr’s profile:

[studyspiration-coffee]

what to do when everything’s a mess

Wash your hair. Don’t worry about all those articles online about the best haircare products of 2019 and whatnot, get in, wash it like you usually do, get out. Leave it to air dry, it’s less work for you.

Brush your teeth. Even if you brushed them this morning and are probably going to brush it tonight, do it anyway. Especially if it’s exam time, all that tea or coffee you’re most likely downing (props to you if you only study with water) probably makes them feel kind of gross.

I know most of these lists tell you to run a bath, but let’s face it, for those of you who even have a bath in the first place, the thought of filling that tub and sitting there in complete silence for a couple hours seems like a trek. And ironically exhausting. So instead, just brush your hair, take a nap (set a nice soothing alarm) and once you’ve gotten out of bed, wash your face or at least splash cold water on your face.

CLEAN clean clean clean CLEAN. Easier said than done, but at least start by clearing one messy component of your area; it could be your floor, your desk or your bed. You don’t need to clean and re-organise your entire room marie condo-style for you to actually have a reason to take the time to clean in the first place. A little goes a long way, and you don’t ALWAYS need to do the hard yards ya know.

I would say read a book, but sometimes your brain is melting or buzzing so it can’t really focus on anything lengthy. So instead, find someone reciting a poem online, and just listen to it. I recommend Jeremy Irons and his voicing of tons of T.S Eliot poetry, or Allen Ginsberg reciting his own poetry (Howl is a classic).

If you’re one of those people who drowns their sorrows by listening to music, don’t listen to music!! Don’t reinforce your pain!! So to that I say, listen to a podcast. If the classic podcast genre of true crime is a little too stressful and you’ve already cried twice today, listen to interviews with actors, screenwriters and directors. It can be really refreshing to listen to people you already enjoy the content of talk about their work. I recommend Awards Chatter and Happy Sad Confused.

Stop staring at screens! Just physically sit outside for a bit, you don’t need to go for a jog or do a general workout, just…sit. People-watch, try and memorise the exact scene in front of you, from the mis-en-scene to all the colours and sounds and the way the sunlight feels on your eyelashes. Write it down if you want to, you could even denote a single notebook to your little outdoor descriptions. Or just write on a napkin. To each their own.

Have you eaten today? And I mean something hearty, something that isn’t primarily made out of air and salt. Something that falls under the umbrella of snack does not count; meal is more like it. If not, eat. Preparing food might feel exhausting, but so’s going a relatively long amount of time without something nutritionally substantial.

If you’re feeling emotionally heavily, get out a notebook or even just a scrap of paper, a pen and cry until your eyes are as blurry as can be. With tears down your cheeks, scribble out how you’re feeling. Don’t bother with how neat or messy it is, whether the sentences even stay on the lines, it’s not about being aesthetic. In fact, it’s about being as messy as possible. Let all of it out, and let is act as a physical manifestation of what’s going on in your head. Don’t fight it or deny it, relieve yourself by both constructing and understanding yourself. 

[citylightsbooks]

A Women’s History of City Lights: Interview with Nancy J. Peters

We'll be celebrating Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s 102nd birthday on March 24, and what better way to remember his legacy AND to mark Women’s History Month, than to honor Nancy J. Peters, Lawrence’s business partner, friend, and longtime comrade at City Lights Books. While Ferlinghetti certainly deserves all of the accolades he’s received, the fact of the matter is there would literally be no City Lights without Nancy Peters. Beyond shepherding City Lights through various fiscal crises and providing the steady anchor that allowed Ferlinghetti to travel the world as a poet and activist, Nancy's vision as an editor and acumen as a publisher were a vital key to the success and longevity of City Lights Publishers.

 ***

City Lights: How did you come to know what City Lights was? How did you meet Lawrence Ferlinghetti?

Nancy Peters: In Greece in the early 1960s, I became friends with Nanos Valaoritis and Marie Wilson who were at the center of an international bohemian/surrealist community. They had a large home which was always full of traveling writers and artists whom they made welcome. The Beat writers were among their guests, and City Lights was frequently talked about as a place everyone would meet up someday. I met Philip Lamantia there and in 1965 he introduced me to Lawrence in Paris at one of Jean-Jacque Lebel’s anarcho-surrealist festivals of free expression.  Before a riotous crowd Lawrence gave a show-stopping rendition of his “Lord’s Prayer.” I was impressed by his powerful stage presence. Later that year, when Philip and I were living in Andalusia, Lawrence wrote Philip, asking for a selection of poems for a Pocket Poets Series volume. We corresponded some while we were putting the book together, but I didn’t see him again until 1971 when I moved to San Francisco.

I’d been working as an executive-trainee librarian at the Library of Congress in the fall of 1968. In April, Martin Luther King was assassinated and the impassioned protests that ensued left Washington neighborhoods in ruins. There was shockingly little assistance to residents from the government and my part of the city was under military surveillance, helicopters hovering over my apartment through the night. A Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam took place in Washington the following year. Over 750,000 people peacefully demonstrated. In a small way, I was involved in the planning and, during the protests, my apartment was crammed with fellow activists.

The Library of Congress was an amazing, fascinating place with compatible co-workers from all over the world—thousands of book people all in one place. However, the mission of the Library is to serve Congress, and the institution was a huge conservative bureaucracy serving a conservative and ineffective Congress as I saw it. I believed that if I stayed there I would have little contact with actual books or opportunities for civic activism.

So I moved to San Francisco, where Philip was living and urging me to come, and spent an enormous amount of time at City Lights while I was job hunting. It seemed like paradise, such a stimulating atmosphere where people could sit down to read, share ideas, and have conversations about books, politics, art. One day in early 1971 when I was walking down the street in North Beach, Lawrence hailed me and asked if I would like to help him with a bibliography of Allen Ginsberg’s writings.  After just a brief meeting at the publishing office, Lawrence went to Europe and his editorial assistant Jan Herman suddenly decided to move to Germany. Jan showed me how all the editorial work was done in the office, told me Lawrence “wouldn’t mind,” and so I found myself beginning an exciting new career in publishing.

 What was your experience taking over as executive director and co-owner in 1984?

The store back then employed seven people: six men at the bookstore and one (me) at the publishing branch. So “executive director” is far too grand a title. City Lights was a small, failing organization by 1982. The store was not founded to make profits for the owners and it never did make a profit. Breaking even was the goal. But every year the losses mounted and there came a time when there were very few books left on the shelves. No one had seen a customer venture downstairs to the lower part of the store for many months.  

At the time, Lawrence was immensely popular and in great demand as a performer and a speaker, so he was traveling much of the time, visiting foreign colleagues, living abroad, finding new writers to translate. At this low point in the store’s history Lawrence told me in a frustrated moment that if I’d like to own City Lights, he would give it to me outright if I would run the business, freeing him to do all the other things he wanted to do. I declined, but told him I would be honored to be his partner. Theft was seriously addressed, and a protracted payment plan was agreed to by Book People, the East Bay employee-owned distributors who extended us credit for a generous period. Savvy booksellers Richard Berman and Paul Yamazaki headed the re-stocking plan. The three of us would go every week to Book People and Lou Swift Distributors to collect enough books to sell the following week. As time went on, everybody at the store consulted book catalogs and took on the responsibility for buying subject sections. I envisioned a participatory structure. If not a co-op, I wanted a bookstore where all the staff had responsibilities and power.

Why the decision not to have multiple bookstore locations around SF?

At one time we seriously considered additional locations. We explored sites in San Francisco’s Mission district and visited city officials in San Jose to talk about a second store there. But our resources were limited, and we were concerned about the time and money that would be required to create a sister store that would embody the same spirit and ethic as the original. During my time as director, the evolving challenges from chain stores and especially Amazon made beginning a new store a very risky enterprise. In retrospect, so many independents were closing that we decided to invest in our present, iconic location. In retrospect I think it was a good decision after watching attempts by other stores fail to duplicate their success elsewhere.

How has North Beach changed, how has it stayed the same? With the exodus of Big Tech and falling rents, how do you think that will affect North Beach and San Francisco in general in the future? Will there be “a rebirth of wonder”?

North Beach when I came to SF was a small bohemian village, where neighbors shared meals on their flat rooftops watching the sun set over the Bay. My rent was $125 a month, cheap even then. City Lights and the Discovery Bookstore (used books) next door to Vesuvio were key places to spend an evening. Two large Italian grocers delivered (no charge) bags of groceries up four flights of stairs to my apartment. The neighborhood was full of inexpensive Basque, Italian, and Chinese restaurants, and many cafes, many of which seemed unchanged since the 19th century. Change happens, and City Lights is well prepared for the future. It’s never easy to predict how things will develop, but the feeling of a lovely Mediterranean town persists, with the wooden buildings painted pastel colors, and the shimmering sea light on misty days. I feel certain that the light of City Lights will prevail for a long time to come.

 Do you feel that your gender had any impact on your experience during your 23 years as director? Do you have any comments about women in bookselling or publishing in general?

Gender always has an impact. The Beat movement was certainly male focused. Even though the undaunted Diane di Prima was recognized, she was never enthusiastically supported by the inner nucleus of Beat poets. It was a long time before the Beat women came into their own. From the start, Lawrence, who insisted he wasn’t a Beat, had eclectic tastes and was open to women’s poetry. He admired Marianne Moore and Edna St. Vincent Millay as much as he did T.S. Eliot, Jacques Prévert, and Allen Ginsberg. In the Pocket Poets Series, he’d published di Prima and, very early in the series, both Marie Ponsot and Denise Levertov.

Women’s rights and opportunities are always vulnerable and cyclic. The Women’s Movement of the 1970s was very powerful and widespread, its impact on women’s lives enormous. At City Lights we hired more women; we published more women. There have always been outstanding women in publishing and bookselling, and during that time increasingly more women writers were published, reviewed, and were given accolades and awards. Women opened general bookstores and women’s bookstores, founded feminist and lesbian presses. It was a thrilling development, to see so many marginalized writers, and not just women, finding established publishers or creating their own presses. Together they created a larger, much more diverse national literature.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with many talented women at the bookstore. And in the publishing branch: Stella Levy, Kim McCloud, and Patricia Fujii. Gail Chiarello collected and edited our bestselling Bukowski stories. Annie Janowitz proposed the timely Unamerican Activities, and Amy Scholder brought us classics by Karen Finley, Rebecca Brown, and others. I’m happy to say that Amy Scholder is again working with City Lights as an editor.

When did you meet the now current publisher and executive director Elaine Katzenberger? What was her position at the bookstore? When did you know that she was the right person to take over as director?

Ah, Elaine, the woman who can do everything! Elaine began at the bookstore sales counter, then reorganized files and the store accounts, and very soon excelled as a book buyer. She had a great feeling for good writing, so I asked her to become an editor and she immediately began adding excellent books to City Lights’ list. She’s smart, witty, multitalented, and politically astute. We are very lucky to have her at the helm.

What is your understanding or vision of what of City Lights is and what it could be? How has Lawrence’s passing impacted this?

Lawrence’s democratic inclusiveness made him the best-selling poet in the U.S. His moral principles, his courage and resilience are a model to be emulated. He conceived City Lights as an educational institution that would open minds to explore and relate to the world through books. “One guy told me he’d got the equivalent of a Ph. D just sitting in the basement reading all our great books,” he often reminded us.

His “literary gathering place” was to be a fulcrum of San Francisco cultural experience, where our bookselling and publishing could amplify the voices of diverse experiences, connect with other creative communities, and serve as a center of dissent and, at the same time, a force for creating a better society.

Lawrence’s vision will continue to be our guiding light. An optimistic realist, he believed that City Lights would long endure as the co-creation of all the dedicated people who work here and make it what it is.

[mybeingthere]

Robert Mapplethorpe’s first communition, 1951. 

From Patti Smith's book "Just Kids". Below is the review. 

Patti Smith's exquisite prose is generously illustrated in this full-color edition of her classic coming-of-age memoir, Just Kids. New York locations vividly come to life where, as young artists, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe met and fell in love- a first apartment in Brooklyn, Times Square with John and Yoko's iconic billboard, Max's Kansas City, or the gritty fire escape of the Hotel Chelsea. The extraordinary people who passed through their lives are also pictured- Sam Shepard, Harry Smith, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg. Along with never-before-published photographs, drawings, and ephemera, this edition captures a moment in New York when everything was possible. And when two kids seized their destinies as artists and soul mates in this inspired story of love and friendship.

Patti Smith is a writer, performer and visual artist. She gained recognition in the 1970s for her revolutionary merging of poetry and rock. She has released twelve albums, including Horses, which has been hailed as one of the top one hundred albums of all time by Rolling Stone. Smith had her first exhibit of drawings at the Gotham Book Mart in 1973 and has been represented by the Robert Miller Gallery since 1978. Her books include Just Kids, winner of the National Book Award in 2010, Witt, Babel, Woolgathering, The Coral Sea, and Auguries of Innocence. In 2005, the French Ministry of Culture awarded Smith the prestigious title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, the highest honour given to an artist by the French Republic. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. Smith married Fred Sonic Smith in Detroit in 1980. They had a son, Jackson, and a daughter, Jesse. Smith resides in New York City."

  https://abicus.com.au/pro.../justkidsillustratedbypattismith

[magnetictapedatastorage]

Fran Castan of Greenport is no stranger to writing about grief.

Her first book of poems, “The Widow’s Quilt” (1996), partially honors her first husband, Sam Castan — a Southeast Asia correspondent for Look magazine who was killed while on assignment during the Vietnam War. Now, she has been awarded the U.K. Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine for her poem “Voice Mail,” about losing one of her closest friends to cancer.

(the rest of the article under the cut)

“She was a remarkable person. She was a composer, a poet of note, a sculptor, a painter, a novelist, screenwriter — she did all these things. And they didn’t just stay in a room … they were really out there,” Ms. Castan said of her friend, Siv Cedering of Sagaponack.

Ms. Cedering immigrated to the west coast of the U.S. from Sweden as a teenager. “Allen Ginsberg even found her and thought she was amazing back then,” Ms. Castan said. “She never got the full recognition that her work deserved.”

Ms. Castan visited Ms. Cedering several times a week during the last year of her life to help put her last book together. “Then I’d go home, and I would be so sad, or admiring, or whatever I was feeling, you know, that I needed to do my work,” she said. Thus, “Voice Mail” was created.

The poem is written as two sections, “near sonnets” — a bit more formal than Ms. Castan’s usual style. The first, a voicemail from her friend’s perspective, gently breaks the news that the cancer has returned. But “have fun,” her friend says. “Look for the orioles. / I hear them everywhere.”

That’s one change Ms. Castan, who lives at Peconic Landing, where she teaches a poetry appreciation class, has made since she first wrote the poem 14 years ago. Ms. Cedering originally told her to listen for frogs. “And I have versions with that, but I prefer the birds,” she said.

The second section informs the writer, Ms. Castan, that “The previous message / Is about to expire. … press nine to save.”

“If only I could press / A button to save you,” she wrote. “But all I can save is your voice.”

Ms. Castan doesn’t publish enough — she has written enough poetry for at least five collections, yet she’s published only two books — so as one does, she made a deal with herself to send out more poetry in the new year. When she came across the Hippocrates prize, she thought of “Voicemail.”

She had entered another, more humorous poem about shingles in the Hippocrates competition two years ago, and that earned a commendation. She’s won several other accolades as well, including recognition as Long Island Poet of the Year in 2013. Her first-place prize this year, however, was a surprise.

“It’s a COVID year and the poem isn’t about COVID, so I never thought it would win,” she said.

Ms. Castan didn’t start earning a paycheck for her writing until after her first husband died in 1966. At the time, she was living in Hong Kong with her 1-year-old baby , and she thought, “Well, I’d better get a magazine job.”

She ended up in the typing pool at The New Yorker, where she “learned a great deal.” She was eventually promoted to an editorial assistant for the magazine’s poetry editor in the late 1960s. Her first article was published in 1970. She loved her work, but she wasn’t yet writing poetry herself.

That came to her later in life. Although Ms. Castan always loved the genre, she didn’t often see herself reflected in the work she was reading.

“When I was loving poetry, it was mostly dead white men that I read — not so much women,” she said.

She started writing her own poetry in 1978, 12 years after her first husband’s death. “At which point, I thought … I have to learn about this,” she said.

She earned an M.A. in creative writing from New York University in 1987, to top off a B.A. in English from Brooklyn College in 1959 and an M.A. in languages, literature and communication from Columbia University in 1980.

Since then, in addition to “The Widow’s Quilt,” she has also published a volume of poems called “Venice: City that paints itself” (2010), illustrated with art by her second husband, the late Lewis Zacks. Her poems have also appeared in several anthologies and magazines.

[clarasimone]

The Black Sun: marking 75 years since the first atomic bomb (BBC recording with Iain Glen)

Released On: 09 Aug 2020 - Available for 28 days

This edition of Words and Music marks 75 years since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 6th and 9th August 1945, and explores the fallout from that world-defining moment in poetry, prose and music. Readers Iain Glen and Kae Alexander (who was born in Kobe in Japan) read work by Japanese writers, including Hiroshima survivors Nakamura On and Sadako Kurihara; and poetry by Allen Ginsberg, John Donne, Ukrainian poet and Chernobyl survivor Liubov Sirota and the British writer Susan Wicks. The programme includes excerpts from journalist John Hersey’s Hiroshima, first broadcast on The Third Programme in 1948, an unflinching account of some of the survivors Hersey met. There’s also an excerpt from John Osbourne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger, capturing the cynicism and sense of dread that reverberated across the world in the years after the atomic bombings. Musically, Japan is evoked by shakuhachi player Toshimitsu Ishikawa and koto player Kimio Eto. There’s also music by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Electronic pioneer Isao Tomita. You’ll also hear part of Krzysztof Penderecki’s harrowing piece Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, and music from Hildur Gudnadottir’s award-winning score for the television series Chenobyl – plus songs by country duo The Louvin Brothers, pop band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Kate Bush, dealing with the fear and ferment of the nuclear age.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THIS AMAZING CREATION:  https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000llhd

Pics above edited by @itszulasworld​

[ginzyblog]

Fall of America Journals are finally out.  This is the third in a trilogy of  Ginsberg’s Journals edited by Michael Schumacher

An autobiographical journey through America in the turbulent 1960s—the essential backstory to Ginsberg’s National Book Award–winning volume of poetry Allen Ginsberg's The Fall of America Journals, 1965-1971, glistens brightly with openhearted compassion, keen-eyed observation, Bodhisattva mindfulness, political daring, and angelic vision. Expertly edited by Michael Schumacher, every page sparkles with fierce poetic intimacy. The Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, LGBTQ equality, and counterculture insurgency are all nobly documented by Ginsberg. A blowtorch book of Beat/New Left literature for the ages. Highly recommended! — Douglas Brinkley, editor of Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954 Published in 1972, The Fall of America was Allen Ginsberg’s magnum opus, a poetic account of his experiences in a nation in turmoil. The Fall of America Journals, 1965–1971 contains some of Ginsberg’s finest spontaneous writing, accomplished as he pondered the best and worst his country had to offer. Transcribed, edited, and annotated by Michael Schumacher, a writer closely associated with Ginsberg’s life and work, these journals are nothing less than a first draft of the poet’s journey to the heart of twentieth-century America.

[importantwomensbirthdays]

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni was born in 1956 in Kolkata, India. Divakaruni is known for writings that explore the immigrant experience. She has written fifteen books, and her writing has been published in more than fifty magazines, included in more than fifty anthologies, and translated into thirteen languages. Her poetry collection Leaving Yuba City won the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize, and her short story collection Arranged Marriage won the American Book Award. Divakaruni’s novel The Mistress of Spices was a bestseller and has been adapted to film. 

[litzing]

WRITEBLR INTRO!

Greetings and salutations! I’m Litzi (personal blog @stabsinthe) and I really like to write! I thought it might be fun to make a writeblr and delve into a community I’m interested in.

ABOUT

What’s up I’m Litzi, I’m 26, and I never fucking learned how to write! I use she/her pronouns only. I’ve been writing consistently for 16 years and think of myself as a competent writer. Making original characters is my favorite pastime, and I mainly write character-driven fiction. I’m also interested in poetry and won a few awards for it. I’m greatly inspired by Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and its influence shows in most of my pieces. My favorite word is fuck.

POSTS ABOUT

I’ll be using this page for my short stories and poetry, but I’ll also reblog pieces from other writers (like you, perhaps?), silly writing memes, relatable writing posts, and writing resources. I’ll be implementing a tag system to keep my projects organized, so you’ll always be able to find what you’re looking for!

WRITING STUFF

My top genres are realism, magical realism, and sci-fi. My projects often revolve around LGBT+ characters and relationships, as well as mental illness (bipolar disorder). I love to write slice-of-life stories in fantastical settings, à la mundane daily life on a space station. My writing style is very concise and easy to read, so when I go to edit everything, it’s over with as soon as possible. All of my stories are interconnected (same characters in different settings, stories take place in the same world, shit like that), so I guess you’ll just have to read them all for the full Litzi experience. ;)

You might hear me talk about my big bad WIP, Crazy Kid. That’s my novel! The first draft is done and I’m waiting on editing now. Crazy Kid is about a depressed, bipolar millennial with an affinity for psychedelic drugs. The story revolves around his self-destructive habits and gradual recovery. I won’t be posting this here, but I might share quotes or passages that I like, or complain about editing.

My other WIP is an untitled novella (thus far) about lesbians and skateboarding and maybe witches, I haven’t decided yet. Like Crazy Kid, I won’t post this here, but I’ll talk about it a lot.

LOOKING TO FOLLOW

These are a few of my favorite things:

Magical Realism slice-of-life shit (My brand!)

Realism

Sci-fi

Horror, but not excessive gore

Character-driven fiction

Non-human species

Pretentious poetry

I’m also interested in writing resources, writing memes, character design, ask memes, etc. I’m not into fanfiction or fan characters.

Thanks for giving this whole thing a read! I’m eager to jump into the community and make lots of new pals. I’ll only be following writeblrs from this blog, so if your blog isn’t explicitly about writing, I may not follow back. Feel free to shoot me an ask or a message if you want to chat, or ask for my Discord if you’re 18+!

[rustbeltjessie]

February 13: I couldn't make it to the awards ceremony, but they sent me a certificate in the mail. I will definitely be framing it.

[blackkudos]

Bob Kaufman

Robert Garnell Kaufman (April 18, 1925 – January 12, 1986) was an American Beat poet and surrealist as well as a jazz performance artist and satirist. In France, where his poetry had a large following, he was known as the "black American Rimbaud."

Early life and education

Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, Kaufman was the 10th of 13 children. He claimed to be the son of a German-Jewish father and a Roman Catholic Black mother from Martinique, and that his grandmother practiced voodoo. At the age of 13, Kaufman joined the United States Merchant Marine, which he left in the early 1940s to briefly study literature at New York's The New School for Social Research. There, he met William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.

Career

During Kaufman's time at The New School and in New York, he found inspiration in the writings of Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Federico Garcia Lorca, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Nicolás Guillén. He also identified with the works of jazz musicians and improvisational artists such as Charlie Parker, whom he named his son after.

Kaufman moved to San Francisco's North Beach in 1958 and remained there for most of the rest of his life.

Kaufman frequently expressed his desire to be forgotten as both a writer and a person. Kaufman, a poet in the oral tradition, usually didn't write down his poems, and much of his published work survives by way of his wife Eileen, who wrote his poems down as he conceived them. Like many beat writers, Kaufman became a Buddhist. In 1959, along with poets Allen Ginsberg, John Kelly, A. D. Winans, and William Margolis, he was one of the founders of Beatitude magazine, where he also worked as an editor.

According to the writer Raymond Foye, Kaufman is the person who coined the term "beatnik", and his life was filled with a great deal of suffering. In San Francisco, he was the target of beatings and harassment by the city police, and his years living in New York were filled with poverty, addiction, and imprisonment. Kaufman often incurred the wrath of the local police simply for reciting his poetry aloud in public, and it is said that in 1959 alone, at the height of the "beatnik" fad, he was arrested by the San Francisco police on disorderly charges 39 times.

In 1959, Kaufman had a small role in a movie called The Flower Thief, which was shot in North Beach by Ron Rice. In 1961, Kaufman was nominated for England's Guinness Poetry Award, but lost to T. S. Eliot.

In 1963 that he was to depart New York with his wife and infant son, he was summarily arrested for walking on the grass of Washington Square Park and incarcerated on Rikers Island, then sent as a "behavioral problem" to Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital where he underwent electro-shock treatments, which greatly affected his already bleak outlook on society. He took a vow of silence after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which lasted 10 years. He was believed to return to this silence in the early 1980s.

In an interview, Ken Kesey describes seeing Bob Kaufman on the streets of San Francisco's North Beach during a visit to that city with his family in the 1950s:

I can remember driving down to North Beach with my folks and seeing Bob Kaufman out there on the street. I didn’t know he was Bob Kaufman at the time. He had little pieces of Band-Aid tape all over his face, about two inches wide, and little smaller ones like two inches long -- and all of them made into crosses. He came up to the cars, and he was babbling poetry into these cars. He came up to the car I was riding in, and my folks, and started jabbering this stuff into the car. I knew that this was exceptional use of the human voice and the human mind.

Poetry

His poetry made use of jazz syncopation and meter. The critic Raymond Foye wrote about him, "Adapting the harmonic complexities and spontaneous invention of bebop to poetic euphony and meter, he became the quintessential jazz poet."

Poet Jack Micheline said about Kaufman, "I found his work to be essentially improvisational, and was at its best when accompanied by a jazz musician. His technique resembled that of the surreal school of poets, ranging from a powerful, visionary lyricism of satirical, near dadaistic leanings, to the more prophetic tone that can be found in his political poems."

Kaufman said of his own work, "My head is a bony guitar, strung with tongues, plucked by fingers & nails."

After learning of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Kaufman took a Buddhist vow of silence that lasted until the end of the Vietnam War in 1973. He broke his silence by reciting his poem "All Those Ships that Never Sailed," the first lines of which are:

All those ships that never sailed

The ones with their seacocks open

That were scuttled in their stalls...

Today I bring them back

Huge and intransitory

And let them sail

Forever

Personal life

In 1944, Kaufman married Ida Berrocal. They had one daughter, Antoinette Victoria Marie (Nagle), born in New York City in 1945 (died 2008).

He married Eileen Singe (1922–2015) in 1958; they had one child, Parker, named for Charlie Parker.

He died aged 60 in 1986 from emphysema and cirrhosis in San Francisco.

[scarlettsabetlondongirl]

“Poet and performer Scarlett Sabet has a unique ability to convey the purest of human emotions through her beautiful prose.

In her fourth book of collected poetry Camille, Sabet explores the intricate theme of love.

Released on Valentine’s Day 2019, Camille offers a nuanced interpretation of love and all it encompasses. Featuring a selection of traditional 'love' poems that show the soaring joy of intimacy, passion and sensuality, and others that delve into destruction, obsession and infatuation; Camille is a tender and earnest meditation on true love.

Including poems such as ‘Possession,’ ‘Lilith in the Midheaven’ and ‘Scorpio,’ the poems featured in this collection will resonate with many.

Award-winning poet Matthew Yeager has described Sabet’s work as “darkly sonorous vowel music...full of wildness”. 

Returning to Shakespeare and Company for her forthcoming book launch and reading, Sabet joins the ranks of Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald who were all frequent visitors and performers at the legendary Parisian bookshop, regarded as a literary institution.

Since its opening in 1951, Shakespeare and Company remains the epicentre of counterculture and still welcomes young and emerging writers as well today’s leading authors.

Hailed as one of the brightest new stars on the international poetry scene, Scarlett Sabet has become renowned for her emotive poetry readings and has performed at some of the world’s most treasured book shops synonymous with poetry and the Beat Generation including City Lights, San Francisco and The Troubadour, London, where she is poet-in-residence”-Scarlett Sabet 

Photo: Scarlet Page Instagram

[ledenews]

OCPL to Celebrate Harshman 10th Anniversary as W.Va. Poet Laureate

You are cordially invited! Nov. 22, 2022 at Noon, OCPL, Wheeling: Help Us Celebrate Marc Harshman's 10th Anniversary as Poet Laureate of West Virginia! Students Welcome. Marc will read from his new book, Dark Hills of Home  Join us at Lunch With Books at the Ohio County Public Library as we celebrate the 10th anniversary of our friend Marc Harshman's appointment as Poet Laureate of West Virginia with a reading from his new book, “Dark Hills of Home.” He will in the course of the program read a sampling of poems from throughout his career, as well as from the new volume.  He also intends to offer reflections upon what it has meant to be the poet laureate during this time.  And there’s a rumor afloat that there will be cake, as well!!   Every poem in the “Dark Hills of Home” had its birth among the foothills and hollows of the western Alleghenies, between the Ohio and Monongahela rivers in the heart of Appalachia--- where the sun rises late and sets early, and the night is never entirely absent. Marc Harshman's “Woman in Red Anorak” won the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize and was published in 2018 by Lynx House Press. His fourteenth children’s book, “Fallingwater: The Building of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Masterpiece,” co-authored with Anna Smucker, was published by Roaring Brook/Macmillan in 2017. He is also co-winner of the 2019 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. Poems have been anthologized by Kent State University, the University of Iowa, SPM Publications , University of Georgia, and the University of Arizona. He has been Poet Laureate of West Virginia since 2012. If you're unable to join us in person: WATCH THE PROGRAM LIVE! Livestream links to follow for our Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/lunchwithbooks & our YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4denVjKqDujpuz_zeTxTpw/featured ***If you'd like to send Marc a message or question for the program, please email it to lunchwithbooks@yahoo.com *** Read the full article

[cambridgewritersworkshop]

The Cambridge Writers’ Workshop is delighted to have our writing faculty from our 2018 Summer in Paris Writing Retreat featured at SpokenWord Paris and Paris Lit Up this summer!

SpokenWord Paris featuring Kathleen Spivack Adrian Leeds’ Après-Midi (Café de la Mairie) * 3-5 pm corner of rue des Archives & rue de Bretagne Paris, France 75003

Kathleen Spivack will read from her latest novel Unspeakable Things, which deals with refugees from Eastern Europe coming over to New York during World War II. The main characters are members of a string quartet smuggled out of Europe and deals with their displacement and eventual redemption.

Begun in France while the Maurice Papon Trials were going on, in Unspeakable ThingsKathleen weaves her own family’s experience as immigrant refugees with her encounters with individuals she met when she lived and taught in the French university system off and on for almost 30 years. France has been a home and a temporary way stop for people escaping oppression, and this is why Kathleen is so very happy to be able to share this novel with you.

Kathleen Spivack is the author of ten books, prose and poetry (Knopf, Doubleday, Graywolf, etc).  Her most recent novel Unspeakable Things (Knopf) centers on European refugees in New York City, struggling to survive during the last years of the Second World War. Kathleen’s previous book was With Robert Lowell and His Circle: Plath, Sexton, Bishop, Rich, Kunitz and others (University Press of New England). Kathleen arrived in Boston in 1959 on a scholarship to study with Robert Lowell. Lowell introduced her to the poets of that time, who took her under their wing. This memoir centers on how these poets approached their work.

Other books include: A History of Yearning, Winner of the Sows Ear International Poetry Prize 2010, the London Book Festival Poetry Prize, and others; Moments of Past Happiness (Earthwinds/Grolier Editions); The Beds We Lie In (Scarecrow), nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; The Honeymoon (Graywolf); Swimmer in the Spreading Dawn (Applewood); The Jane Poems (Doubleday); and Flying Inland(Doubleday). She has also published in magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The Chicago Review, Poetry, Massachusetts Review, Solas Awards, and many others. Her work has also been translated into French.  Her work has been featured at festivals in France and in the United States. She performs in theatres, often with music. Kathleen is a recipient of the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award and a Discovery Winner among many others. She has also received grants from the Fulbright Commission, National Endowment for the Arts and various organizations. Her residencies include Yaddo, MacDowell, the American Academy in Rome, Ragdale, Karolyi Foundation, etc.

Since 1990, Kathleen has been a visiting professor of American Literature/Creative Writing (one semester annually) throughout the French University System. In the U.S. she directs an advanced writing program and has been named by the National Writers’ Union as “best writing coach”. Her students have published widely and won major prizes. You will too! For more information on Kathleen Spivack, please visit her website at  www.kathleenspivack.org. You can also follow her on Facebook.

Paris Lit Up featuring Rita Banerjee Culture Rapide * July 26, 2018 * 8:45 – 11:00 pm 103 rue Julien Lacroix, 75020 Paris, France

Paris Lit Up will host Rita Banerjee as their featured writer on July 16, 2018 from 8:45 – 11:00 pm!  Banerjee will read from her new poetry collection Echo in Four Beats (FLP, march 2018), which was selected by Finishing Line Press as their 2018 nominee for the National Book Award in Poetry, and her edited volume CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, May 2018).  Banerjee will also read from her new collection of essays on race, sex, politics, and everything cool, and her novel-in-progress about a Tamil-Jewish family in crisis during a post-authoritarian regime. 

Paris Lit Up  is a non-profit community organization that aims to intensify collaborative artistic practices through community events, performance and publication.  With emphasis on transnational writers, artists and musicians, Paris Lit Up promotes the importance of artistic synergy through transparent, democratic, consensus-based decision making.

Rita Banerjee is the Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop and editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, May 2018).  She is the author of the poetry collection Echo in Four Beats (Finishing Line Press, March 2018),which was named one of Book Riot’s “Must-Read Poetic Voices of Split This Rock 2018”, was nominated for the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and was selected by Finishing Line Press as their 2018 nominee for the National Book Award in Poetry.  Banerjee is also the author of the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps (Spider Road Press, 2016), and the poetry chapbook Cracklers at Night (Finishing Line Press, 2010). She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and she is a recipient of a Vermont Studio Center Artist’s Grant, the Tom and Laurel Nebel Fellowship, and South Asia Initiative and Tata Grants. Her writing appears in the Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, Nat. Brut., The Scofield, The Rumpus, Painted Bride Quarterly, Mass Poetry, Hyphen Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, AWP WC&C Quarterly, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Riot Grrrl Magazine, The Fiction Project, Objet d’Art, KBOO Radio’s APA Compass, and elsewhere. She is the Director of the MFA in Writing & Publishing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, an Associate Scholar at Harvard, and the judge for the 2017 Minerva Rising “Dare to Speak” Poetry Chapbook Contest. She is currently working on a novel, a documentary film about race and intimacy, a book on South Asian literary modernisms, and a collection of lyric essays on race, sex, politics, and everything cool.

More information about Rita Banerjee’s Echo in Four Beats and CREDO Book Tours available here!

Paris Lit Up featuring Kristina Marie Darling Culture Rapide * August 9, 2018 * 8:45 – 11:00 pm 103 rue Julien Lacroix, 75020 Paris, France

Cancel any August vacation right now. Why? Because we are incredibly luckily to be hosting the writer extraordinaire Kristina Marie Darling on August 9 at the PLU open mic! Sign up from 8pm, wiggle your bums down around 8.45pm. Here’s her delicious bio… seriously, read it.

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of thirty books, including Look to Your Left: The Poetics of Spectacle (University of Akron Press, 2020); Je Suis L’Autre: Essays & Interrogations (C&R Press, 2017), which was named one of the “Best Books of 2017” by The Brooklyn Rail; and DARK HORSE: Poems (C&R Press, 2018). Her work has been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held both the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry; a Fundación Valparaíso fellowship; a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, funded by the Heinz Foundation; an artist-in-residence position at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris; three residencies at the American Academy in Rome; two grants from the Whiting Foundation; a Morris Fellowship in the Arts; and the Dan Liberthson Prize from the Academy of American Poets, among many other awards and honors. Her poems appear in The Harvard Review, Poetry International, New American Writing, Nimrod, Passages North, The Mid-American Review, and on the Academy of American Poets’ website, Poets.org. She has published essays in The Kenyon Review, Agni, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, and numerous other magazines. Kristina currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press and Tupelo Quarterly, an opinion columnist at The Los Angeles Review of Books, and a contributing writer at Publishers Weekly.

July 10, 26, & August 9, 2018: SpokenWord Paris feat. Kathleen Spivack & Paris Lit Up feat. Rita Banerjee & Kristina Marie Darling The Cambridge Writers' Workshop is delighted to have our writing faculty from our 2018 Summer in Paris Writing Retreat featured at SpokenWord Paris and Paris Lit Up this summer!

[ucsdspecialcollections]

Happy National Poetry Month! Congratulations to all the poets, writers, artists, and scholars who have been awarded Guggenheim Fellowships. Pictured above is the letter notifying Paul Blackburn of his award  in 1967 which enabled him to travel to Europe to work on his translations and poems. Also pictured is a letter from the Guggenheim Foundation to Donald Allen requesting his thoughts on Allen Ginsberg as a poet.