Beats in NYC (1959)
Silent 16mm film of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr and friends in the East Village, summer of 1959…
Allen Ginsberg – “Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.” (TV – 1968)
Allen Ginsberg’s May 7, 1968 appearance on William F. Buckley’s TV show Firing Line. Episode 99: The Avant-Garde…
“Howl” (2010)
A Sept. 16, 2010 Newsweek review by Jennie Yabroff of the 2010 film concerning Ginsberg’s poem “Howl”…
Bohemian Rhapsody
When is a biopic not just a biopic? When, like ‘Howl,’ it’s got poetry in its soul.
The movie opens in black and white with a bespectacled poet adjusting his glasses and preparing to read. In the audience, college kids drink wine from glass jugs and blow cigarette smoke dramatically skyward. The poet begins. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” It’s Allen Ginsberg (James Franco), the poem is “Howl,” and this is the point at which a traditional biopic would flash back to Ginsberg’s childhood, then proceed forward in a dutiful, linear manner, detailing all the events that led the man to create the work. Instead, filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman make the convention-defying, refreshing choice to focus on Ginsberg’s art, not his biography. We get little of his childhood, a smidgen of his personal relationships, and nothing of the 40-odd years he lived after “Howl” made him famous. By devoting their movie to Ginsberg’s poem (and the obscenity trial it engendered), the filmmakers avoid all the pitfalls of so many formulaic biopics and create a response to a work of art that is art itself.
In 1955, a gay, Jewish, self-doubting 29-year-old wrote a raw, ragged, personal ode to bohemia, homosexuality, interracial sex, drugs, and the American landscape, dedicating it to a boy he had met during a stay in a mental institution. As a piece of writing, “Howl” is arrestingly visual, but its de-tractors found the meaning behind the often rude images difficult to parse: according to the prosecutor in the obscenity trial, the poem could have literary value only if the Read the rest of this entry »
Lawrence Ferlinghetti – “Allen Ginsberg Dying” (1997)
Allen Ginsburg is dying It's all in the papers It's on the evening news A great poet is dying But his voice won't die His voice is on the land In Lower Manhattan in his own bed he is dying There is nothing to do about it He is dying the death that everyone dies He is dying the death of a poet He has a telephone in his hand and he calls everyone from his bed in Lower Manhattan
Allen Ginsberg – “Do the Meditation Rock” (TV – 1984)
Allen Ginsberg with Peter Orlovsky (meditating), Arthur Russell (cello) and Steven Taylor (guitar) perform on Nam June Paik’s TV special for PBS’ Good Morning Mr. Orwell from 1984.
Allen Ginsberg – “Feb. 29, 1958”
Last nite I dreamed of T.S. Eliot
welcoming me to the land of dream
Sofas couches fog in England
Tea in his digs Chelsea rainbows
curtains on his windows, fog seeping in
the chimney but a nice warm house
and an incredibly sweet hooknosed
Eliot he loved me, put me up,
gave me a couch to sleep on,
conversed kindly, took me serious
asked my opinion on Mayakovsky
I read him Corso Creeley Kerouac
advised Burroughs Olson Huncke
the bearded lady in the Zoo, the
intelligent puma in Mexico City
6 chorus boys from Zanzibar
who chanted in wornout polygot
Swahili, and the rippling rythyms
of Ma Rainey and Vachel Lindsay.
On the Isle of the Queen
we had a long evening’s conversation
Then he tucked me in my long
red underwear under a silken
blanket by the fire on the sofa
gave me English Hottie
and went off sadly to his bed,
Saying ah Ginsberg I am glad
to have met a fine young man like you.
At last, I woke ashamed of myself.
Is he that good and kind? Am I that great?
What’s my motive dreaming his
manna? What English Department
would that impress? What failure
to be perfect prophet’s made up here?
I dream of my kindness to T.S. Eliot
wanting to be a historical poet
and share in his finance of Imagery-
overambitious dream of eccentric boy.
God forbid my evil dreams come true.
Last nite I dreamed of Allen Ginsberg.
T.S. Eliot would’ve been ashamed of me.
Allen Ginsberg
The Beat Patrol 