Allen Ginsberg, Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness, edited by Gordon Ball There are many influences that went into my creating Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine, and Allen Ginsberg was a major one. Here…
George McGovern and William R. Polk, Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now March 2007 Dear Andrew, I have finished McGovern and Polk’s primer on the catastrophe in Iraq and how to get…
Tom Hayden was a major player in the antiwar movement of the 1960s as well as a familiar liberal and progressive activist, commentator, and researcher since. His last book is entitled, Hell No: The Forgotten…
Liz Burkemper shared this with me, and I am happy to share it here. Liz is a sophomore at George Washington University. “The Occupation has created generations of us that have to adore an unknown…
Working on a kind of sequel to Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine, I am imagining a character named Bella Levenshteyn, who in her twenties devotes herself to learning Yiddish, the language of her ancestors. At…
What is genius but the faculty of seizing and turning to account everything that strikes us? … The greatest genius will never be worth much if he pretends to draw exclusively from his own resources…….
What is genius but the faculty of seizing and turning to account everything that strikes us? … The greatest genius will never be worth much if he pretends to draw exclusively from his own resources…….
A while back I reread David Barsamian’s first collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky, entitled Chronicles of Dissent. Actually, I first heard the material starting in the mid-1980s, listening to Barsamian’s cassette tapes of interviews…
I first read Allen Ginsberg’s City Lights paperback Howl and Other Poems late one autumn night 1980 with friends at the White Castle at the corner of Bardstown Road and Eastern Parkway. A few months…
Ten years ago, I read Eliot Weinberger’s anthology, World Beat: International Poetry Now (New Directions, 2006). Looking back, I’m grateful, because that volume (re)introduced me to Israeli Aharon Shabtai, Iraqi Dunya Mikhail, and Chilean Nicanor…