Allen Ginsberg (1926 - 1997)

 

Gregory Corso

Oku Onuora & Najavibes / "I A Tell & Reflection in Red"

 Live at Undertown, Meyrin, Geneva, Switzerland (2018)

 

Allen Ginsberg (1926 - 1997)

Allen

Farewell Lawrence RIP

Goodbye to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet, publisher, political activist, godfather of the beat generation and owner of San Francisco's legendary City Lights Bookshop. He was 101.

Ginsberg's The Fall of America tribute

Grateful Dead's Mickey Hart, Yo La Tengo, Angelique Kidjo, Ed Sanders, Sonic Youth's bandmates Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, Bill Frisell and Devendra Banhart are among the musicians that pay tribute to beat poet  Allen Ginsberg on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Ginsberg's The Fall of America: Poems of These States (1965 - 1971)

The album includes musical interpretations of poems from Ginsberg's 1971 book, with some tracks featuring the late poet reciting his lyrics accompanied by the new music.

The collection (in digital, CD or vynil format) can be ordered here

Allen

Allen Ginsberg 

Is Everybody In ?

William S. Burroughs reads  Jim Morrison's poetry "Is Everybody In?" on Doors' tribute album "Stoned Immaculate" (2000). The Doors give the musical  brilliant background....

Allen Ginsberg: "Hum Bomb"

Get Drunk

( Charles Baudelaire, "Paris Spleen", 1869 )

Ira Cohen 1935 - 2011

Ira Cohen was an American poet, publisher, filmaker, photographer and a countercultural icon. In the '60s and '70s he traveled extensively around the world, in particular in India, Nepal and Maroc (he lived in Tangier for 4 years, in the early 1960s.)
In 1981 he returned in New York, but continued to travel, making trips to Ethiopia, Japan and back to India, where he filmed the Kumbha Mela, the greatest spiritual gathering of the world.
Deeply inspired by Hindu and Islamic philosophy and spirituality, Ira was also an expert and a joyous user of hashish in its various forms, in particular the majoon, a powerful Moroccan confection made of cannabis resin, honey, dates, spices and other ingredients. In 1966 he published The Hashish Cookbook.
Get more info about Ira Cohen here

A memorial event for Ira Cohen will be held in New York City on Sunday, Febr. 5th, 2012, 6 pm - 10 pm at the Living Theatre, 21 Clinton Street, NYC
For more details please visit Ira Cohen's website

Peter Orlovsky has left the planet...

Sadly another mourning hits art and counterculture: Peter Orlovsky (b. 1933), longtime partner of Allen Ginsberg and a poet on his own right, died May 30 in Vermont for lung cancer. He met Ginsberg in 1954 in San Francisco, two years before Ginsberg's publication of his best-known poem "Howl". In the late fifties and during the sixties they extensively traveled together. In 1957, they met William Burroughs in Tangers, Moroc; afterwards they lived with him, Gregory Corso and others at the famous "Beat Hotel" in Paris. In 1962-'63 they made their first trip to India (as told in Ginsberg's Indian Journal.) Later they became buddhists and met their life-long spiritual teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche. They helped Trungpa and New York poet Anne Waldman in founding the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.
Peter can be seen in Bob Dylan's movie Renaldo and Clara while meditating in a circle with Allen, Roger McGuinn and others.
Among other poems Orlovsky wrote Dear Allen, Ship will land Jan 23,58 ('71), Clean Asshole Poems and Smiling Vegetable Songs ('78) and Straight Hearths Delight: Love Poems & Selected Letters (with Ginsberg, '80).