Yesterday, we wrote about the incredible resource that is ubu.com – an internet archive of all things avant-garde. It’s a tremendous place to get lost, but, although it may be the finest, there are other such archival rabbit-holes on the internet (isn’t the entire internet really just one archival rabbit hole anyways?). There’s Monoskop, Memory of…
In February 1961, the Newark-born socialist, anti-Communist poet Louis Ginsberg wrote a fretful letter to his son. The poet Allen Ginsberg, among his many other vagaries, seemed over-optimistic about the Castro regime in Cuba, as his father cautioned: “Visitors tell of being in manipulated throngs chanting pro-Soviet and anti-American slogans in whose frenetic atmosphere it…
Let’s start right from the beginning by getting this out of the way: Allen Ginsberg was no Bob Dylan. But Bob Dylan is no Allen Ginsberg, either. However, the funny thing is that the two of them, each top in his chosen field, seem to have had aspirations to be the other. Dylan’s man crush…
Although the voice is definitely familiar, the genre is definitely not. Could that possibly be the late Allen Ginsberg, talk-singing while accompanied by horn and guitar? In fact, it is. In conjunction with the release of the 3 CD box set “The Last Word On First Blues” released by Omnivore Recordings, the Forward presents the…
When did Allen Ginsberg and Bernie Sanders first meet? What were the circumstances? Even people close to Sanders and Ginsberg do not agree on that history, explored in a recent piece in the Forward. But a photo that surfaced after the story went to press shows the poet, whose outlook reflected socialist ideas and the…
Last June, while digging through 50 boxes of archival material about Bernie Sanders’s four terms as the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, a reporter for the British newspaper the Guardian found a poem by Allen Ginsberg. Written by hand on a 1986 visit to the city, “Burlington Snow” didn’t name Sanders, but he was clearly the…
A lot of people are going to be writing hagiographies of Amiri Baraka, who died on January 9, at the age of 79. A lot of other people are going to be painting him as a hateful, irredeemable anti-Semite. The truth is that Baraka wrote some of the greatest plays and poems of the post-war…
Doris Lessing, who died on November 17 at age 94, won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature for her prolific writings ranging from autobiography to what she called “space fiction.” Sometimes overlooked was the lasting inspiration which Lessing, born Doris May Tayler in 1919 in Persia, drew from Jews and Jewish heritage. In 1925, her…
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