As poet, I was influenced a lot by William Blake. I’ve known some of Blake’s books, like Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, since I was ten years old, because my father taught him at school. I know a lot of his poems by heart. In… Continue Reading »
DADA Productions had several guidelines: Never do anything twice. Every performer is treated equally (whenever possible, people will read in alphabetical order). In each production, reach out to a different section of the community to try to include unusual faces. Try something technically new with each production (producing for cable tv, live on the radio,… Continue Reading »
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA Federico Garcia Lorca was born on June 5, 1898, in this house in Fuente Vaqueros, a village in the province of Grenada, in an area known as Andalusia, in southeast Spain. At the age of two Lorca was something of a mascot at the local grammar school where this photo was taken…. Continue Reading »
I had written a little poem and in my excitement had immediately made two copies, which I put into the mailboxes of Allen Ginsberg and Ted Berrigan, two of my teachers at Naropa in the spring of 1980. The next day I was over Allen’s house to work on some of his journals. He’d read… Continue Reading »
SURREALISM In December 1919, the poet Tristan Tzara, one of the art terrorists who helped plot the Dadaist’s attack on culture at the Caberet Voltaire, arrived in Paris from Zurich. World War I was over and the pacifist Roumanian writer was free to travel. When he arrived in Paris, he quickly joined a group of… Continue Reading »
In 1988, the painter Chuck Close suffered a stroke, which left him a quadriplegic. His first painting after his injury, returning to his portraits of Alex, was sadder but brighter than he expected. As a student, he’d been interested in the paintings of Willem de Kooning and had painted a number of “Willem de Kooning… Continue Reading »
Review of Screaming with Joy: The Life of Allen Ginsberg Author: Caveney Graham Broadway Books Special Markets Department Random House, Inc. 1540 Broadway New York, NY 10036 216 pages; bibliography, index hardcover 7 1/2 x 8 1/2 Price: unknown ISBN: 0-7679-0278-5 Reportedly, one of Allen’s final instructions to Bob Rosenthal, his literary executor and long-time… Continue Reading »
Review of Reside Author: Patrick Pritchett Dead Metaphor Press PO Box 2076 Boulder, Colorado 80306 40 pages staplebound, paper 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 $5.00 ISBN: 1-880743-14-0 There is nothing really new in the concept of the poem, or the text, as something that only really happens on the page, somehow removed, as Wittgenstein suggested,… Continue Reading »
18 February 2000, 4:30 a.m. Dear Andrew: Thanks for loaning me “The Stranger.” There’s a lot to like about this film, but it’s also not surprising that my film encyclopedias have almost nothing to say about it and only give it 2 1/2 stars (approximately a C+). For someone like me who’s only seen… Continue Reading »
The first surprise was that the audience was mostly shorthaired college kids–short hair not in a skinhead kind of way or in a fashionably unfashionable kind of way, but in a “I’m majoring in business” kind of way–not the longhaired misfits I expected. I didn’t see a single tie-dye all night–but those bizarre light… Continue Reading »