On Diane di Prima (Again)
for Lindsey Trout Danielle Mackey Katie Madges Katie Consamus Magan Wiles New Yorkers all As some of you know, I have recently taken to the writing of Diane di Prima. You know this because…
Category: Beats
The Typewriter Is Holy
Later this summer at Cafe Ventana, I’ll be facilitating a reading group of the new book, The Essential Ginsberg. I was just rereading Bill Morgan’s history, The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat…
halfway around the world the bombs are falling
On the dedication page of her 2007 updated collection of Revolutionary Letters, Diane di Prima states: The REVOLUTIONARY LETTERS are dedicated to Bob Dylan; and to my grandfather, Domenico Mallozzi, friend of the great anarchist…
Anne Waldman on Allen Ginsberg’s Howl
It was a cri de coeur, an alarm, a vision. Its structure matched its energy, which seemed the voices of many, not one. It was a rhizomic collage, just like life, a pastiche of the…
The Essential Allen Ginsberg: Cafe Ventana Reading Group
“It occurs to me that I am America” –Allen Ginsberg, America Beat poet, antiwar activist, gay liberationist, free speech devotee, “First Thought, Best Thought” advocate, and cheerful Buddhist, Allen Ginsberg has been a major influence on U.S. counterculture…
All Power To the Imagination
Have you ever tried to email chicken soup?Diane di Prima The Poetry Deal—It’s only 109 pages. But Diane di Prima—poet, printer, feminist, Buddhist, anarchist, pacifist, cultural revolutionary— packs a lot of life into those pages….
He Would Have Never Gotten Tenure
The thing is to get under the students’ skin and arouse enough enthusiasm that they get under their own skin. This means allowing yourself to be yourself in class. My own best teachers were WC…
Note to a Friend on the Back of Allen Ginsberg’s Poem, Death and Fame
This poem is pure Allen, Lovable and vain Allen to the end You gotta love him– Evidently, lots of men did Rereading this poem Lights my fire “He taught me how to meditate, now I’m…
Radical Presence
The following passages are from an interview with U.S. poet Anne Waldman, co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics… Poetry needs the breath. It needs the voice. It needs the body. It needs…
DIY
You have to write your own history, nobody’s going to do it for you. Allen Ginsberg