Category: Beats

Meditations

Written in the Margins of Ginsberg’s “Why I Meditate” There are 10,000 reasons to meditate (at least) There are 10,000 beings to save (for starters) There are 10,000 demented states of consciousness to purify (carpe…

L. K.Lapinski

She’s Had a Pretty Good Nocturnal Run At Dunkin’ Donuts She said matter-of-factly “I haven’t had a nightmare In 17 years” She’s 22 Share the Wealth with Laura Katherine Lapinski: The Films of Wes Anderson…

Blasts from the Past

Hold It All It must have been 1983, springtime: I asked former classmate Ray Pruitt what he’d been reading. “Last night, Kierkegaard, Proust, and Phil Berrigan.” Things Have Changed It was back in 1982 We…

The Way It Looked in 1969

Now the age of 101, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has composed poetical works about most U.S. presidents since the administrations of Eisenhower in the 1950s. I recall with appreciation his poem “Tale Tale of the Tall Cowboy”…

Gleanings and Connections

Anne Waldman and Laura Wright, editors,  Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics—An Anthology Dear Layla: “modernist textual montage/collage of a wide-ranging array mixing the personal and the historical” Dear Layla: “Ezra Pound’s Cantos gave me a way…

“It’s the Old Thoreau Tradition”

This morning I was reading a 1972 interview with poet Allen Ginsberg and came across the following exchange… YLP: I was surprised to see the importance young Americans grant now to the Do It Yourself…

“Action Needed, Goethean Action”

Allen Ginsberg, Journals: Mid-Fifties 1954-1958, edited by Gordon Ball During winter and spring of 1996 I went on a binge of poet Allen Ginsberg’s books: poems, letters, photos, journals (I was taking a break from…