Arousing Enthusiasm: Allen the Talker
for Laura Lapinski, who makes me laugh while lunching at Medina Grill, walking around the CWE, and hanging out in Left Bank Books There’s 15 to 20 Allen Ginsberg poems I’ve loved, and shared with…
Category: Beats
Saturday Share the Wealth with Our Diane di Prima Class: Making the World Bearable
What I saw then was this fairly obvious faculty of art: that it goes on, it lasts a bit longer that our frail human lives—it offers comfort. The vision is more enduring than our persons—it…
“Nobody’s Going To Do It for You”
Anne Waldman and Laura Wright, editors, Beats at Naropa: An Anthology Coffee House Press, 2009 I read Beats at Naropa exactly nine years ago, 2009. In my notes on the dialogues, essays, and interviews are…
Making the World Bearable: A Reading/Writing Class on Diane di Prima—Fall 2018
Feeling a need to be inspired in these dismal times? Been burnt out with academic writing that doesn’t originate in your soul? Seeking a community of comrades to inspire, console, and rouse you? Wanting to…
Aha!
This morning, while writing a letter to one of my favorite poets (who lives in Brooklyn), it dawned on me that I want my next writing/reading class to be on the work and life of…
Exemplar of Epistolary Ecstasy
Bill Morgan, ed., The Letters of Allen Ginsberg “Recommending Hare Krishna to one and all” 375 It might have taken me 12 hours to read this book line by line, but it’s more important to…
Not So Random Entries, Commonplace Moleskine/4
99. There is a notion of “passing it on,” that simple. One to one. Elder to younger perhaps. That “poetry is news,” that the inspiration for any work you do and the work you do…
Not a River-Like Novel; But a Novel Like Poetry, or Rather, a Narrative Poem, an Epos in Mosaic, a Kind of Arabesque Preoccupation
Over the weekend Lindsey asked me some questions about my writing process (such as, How long did it take you to write Book of Mev? Did you always know what the structure would be? How did…
A Sangha with Tu Fu, Milarepa, Lady Murasaki, Li Ching-chao, Basho, and Jack Kerouac
Anne Waldman and Andrew Schelling, editors, Disembodied Poetics: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School Rereading this collection after many years, I’m struck by the following perspectives from various writers I noted then and that still…
Occasional Moments of Peace, Gratitude, and Delight
I first learned of Gary Snyder through Kerouac’s novel, The Dharma Bums, where he was fictionalized as “Japhy Ryder,” who, according to Alvah Goldbook [aka Allen Ginsberg], was “a great new hero of American…