Everything is Known: Ginsberg and Teaching

Everything Is Known: Ginsberg and Teaching
September 15th, 2009 8pm
Parish Hall
St. Mark's Church in the Bowery
131 East 10th Street, New York City
$10. Contribution at the door
to benefit “HOWL ! Emergency Life Project”

Howl Festival ‘09 presents a panel and open discussion on Allen Ginsberg and teaching. The panelists include poets and writers who have worked with Ginsberg, studied with him, and gone on to teach others. The panelists are: Eliot Katz, Andy Clausen, Steven Taylor, Brenda Coultas, Anselm Berrigan, David Carter, and Bob Rosenthal.

Selected bio's as of 8/13/09

Anselm Berrigan, raised and currently living in the east village, is a poet and former artistic director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. His newest book, Free Cell, is coming out from City Lights this September. He is the poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail, and a member of the subpress publishing collective, having earlier this year published The Selected Poems of Steve Carey (edited by Edmund Berrigan) through subpress.

David Carter wrote and directed a film documentary on Meher Baba, the Indian spiritual master, that Peter Townshend produced and scored. A long-time gay activist in Wisconsin, Carter first got to know Allen Ginsberg when he interviewed him for a Madison gay television series, Nothing To Hide. After Carter moved to New York and became a writer, he was hired by Ginsberg to edit his interviews, published as Spontaneous Mind. Carter helped locate audio copies of Ginsberg interviews about Howl for the film about Howl that is currently being made. He is the author of Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, the basis for the forthcoming PBS film, and he is the consultant for that film. He is currently writing a biography of pioneering gay activist Frank Kameny.
www.davidcarterauthor.com

Andy Clausen is the author of many books of poetry including The Iron Curtain of Love, Extreme Unction, Without Doubt, Songs of Bo Baba, 40th Century Man (Selected 1996-1966) and memoir The Latter Days of the Beat Generation. Allen Ginsberg wrote, "...inherited Neal Cassady's American Energy Transmission.. In his intro to Without Doubt, Ginsberg said, "I'd take a chance on a president Clausen." Clausen has read and lived all over the continent and world. He has had 1,473 jobs. He teaches poetry to 5th graders on Long Island though auspices of Teachers and Writers Coll. Has taught at Naropa Institute and lectured at more than a few colleges. He read with Ginsberg approx 30 times. He was born in a Belgian bombshelter.

Brenda Coultas is the author of The Marvelous Bones of Time (2008) and A Handmade Museum (2003) from Coffee House Press, which won the Norma Farber Award from The Poetry Society of America, and a Greenwall Fund publishing grant from the Academy of American Poets. Her writing can be found in many publications including: Conjunctions, Brooklyn Rail, Trickhouse, and the Denver Review. Other books include Early Films (Rodent Press) and A Summer Newsreel (Second Story Press). She received a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) fellow in 2005 and was a LMCC (Lower Manhattan Cultural Council) artist-in-residence in 2009.

Poet and activist Eliot Katz is the author of six books of poetry, including Unlocking the Exits, and the recently released Love, War, Fire, Wind: Looking Out from North America's Skull, a collaboration with the artist, William T. Ayton. He is a coeditor, with Allen Ginsberg and Andy Clausen, of Poems for the Nation (Seven Stories Press), a collection of political poems that Ginsberg was compiling in the mid-1990s. Along with Danny Shot, Katz cofounded Long Shot literary journal in 1982 and guest-edited its final issue, a "Beat Bush issue" released in Spring 2004. His poems are included in many anthologies, including: Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets; Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, 2nd ed.; The World the 60s Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America; Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe; and Blue Stones and Salt Hay: An Anthology of Contemporary New Jersey Poets. His essay, "Radical Eyes," is included in the prose collection, The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later. Called “another classic New Jersey bard” by Ginsberg, Katz worked for many years as a housing advocate for Central New Jersey homeless families. He currently lives in New York City and works with the Center for Constitutional Rights. Some of his writings can be viewed online at http://www.poetspath.com/exhibits/eliotkatz

Bob Rosenthal is a poet and a writer who has co-written and produced five plays. Born in Chicago in 1950 and moved to New York City in 1973. His 1970's how-to book, Cleaning Up New York, has occasionally been regarded as a cult classic. He worked as Allen Ginsberg's secretary for 20 years until Allen’s death and currently is an executor of his estate. He is also a high school English teacher. He is currently finishing Straight Around Allen, his how-to account the business of Allen Ginsberg, and has five books of poetry: Mooring Poems, Lies About the Flesh, Rude Awakenings, Viburnum, and Eleven Psalms. He is married and has two sons.

Steven Taylor collaborated with Allen Ginsberg for twenty years. He is the author of False Prophet: Fieldnotes from the punk underground (Wesleyan UP), and is a member of the Fugs.

Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg’s signal poem "Howl" overcame censorship in 1957 to become one of the most widely read poems of the century. In 1965 Ginsberg was simultaneously crowned Prague May King, then expelled by Czech police and placed on the FBI's Dangerous Security List. He has traveled to and taught in the People's Republic of China, the Soviet Union, Australia, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe, where he received Yugoslavia's Struga Poetry Festival "Golden Wreath" 1986. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University, the first accredited Buddhist College in the West, he was Distinguished Professor at Brooklyn College from 1986 till his death in 1997. He was winner of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award given by the University of Chicago in 1991 and in 1993 received France's "Chevalier de l'Ordre des Artes et des Lettres." He premiered Kronos Quartet’s poetry music performance of "Howl” at Carnegie Hall in 1994.
Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, Newark, NJ & died New York City,
April 5, 1997.

Significant publications & recordings:

Selected Poems 1947-1997, Harper Collins, 2007
Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews 1958-1996 Harper Collins 2001 ed. David Carter
Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995 ed Bill Morgan, HarperCollins, 2000
Howl Annotated, Ed Barry Miles, Harper Perennial, 1995, 2007;
Wichita Vortex Sutra [Artemis Records] 2004
The Ballad of the Skeletons w/Paul McCartney, Philip Glass, Lenny Kaye producer [Mouth Almighty/Mercury] 1996
Howl, U.S.A. Lee Hyla score, Kronos Quartet [Nonesuch] 1996
The Lion for Real [Mouth Almighty] 1997
Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems and Songs 1949-1993 [Rhino] 1994
Hydrogen Jukebox Philip Glass, libretto Allen Ginsberg [Elektra/Nonesuch] 1993
Snapshot Poetics Chronicle Books, 1993
Allen Ginsberg Photographs Twelve Trees Press, 1991


Selected drawing and photo's as of 8/15/09

(Photo credit: David Carter courtesy the artist. Used with permission.
All rights reserved. Copyright David Carter.)
(Photo credit: Anselm Berrigan courtesy the artist. Used with permission.
All rights reserved. Copyright Anselm Berrigan.)
(Photo credit: Andy Clausen by Lou Pollack. Used with permission.
All rights reserved. Copyright Lou Pollack.)
(Drawing credit: Bob Rosenthal by Leah Whiteman. Used with permission.
All rights reserved. Copyright Leah Whiteman.)
(Photo credit: Steven Taylor by John Saarsgard. Used with permission.
All rights reserved. Copyright John Saarsgard.)
(Photo credit: Eliot Katz by Vivian Demuth. Used with permission.
All rights reserved. Copyright Vivian Demuth.)
(Photo credit: Brenda Coultas by Brenda Coultas. Used with permission.
All rights reserved. Copyright Brenda Coultas.)
(Photo credit: Steven Taylor, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky by Saul Shapiro.
Used with permission. All rights reserved. Copyright Saul Shapiro.)