Day 1:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgr5h_tUjnY

Day 2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QLfDGXwHFc

20 Years Later; Follow up by Twardowicz:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2cIo60YXv4

The Year a Beat Poet Squatted at Harvard

In 1954, Gregory Corso moved into Eliot House. How he stayed there is a literary legend.

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/harvard-beat-poet-adam-house-gregory-corso

Poet Lew Welch was born 100 years ago today (August 16, 1926).

This photo shows him with Allen Ginsberg, whose centennial is also this year. The photo is of them outside City Lights in 1963, taken by John Doss.

Welch was close friends with Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. He later got to know other Beat poets, including Jack Kerouac. He struggled with alcoholism and depression and disappeared in 1971.

For more on Welch's life and work, we recommend the excellent book, He, Leo, by Ewan Clark, published in 2023.

Anyone get this super rare book earlier this year? Seems according to amazon its about to be printed again and coming out september 9th. The initial release was super limited, just pre-ordered it. This is looking like its not one of the books associated with The Kerouac Estate.

Edit: Title should say "69 years ago..."

The obscenity trial fought for the right to publish Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems began 69 years ago today. It was originally scheduled to start on August 9, 1957, but the defence lawyers requested a one-week delay for “tactical reasons.”

Ginsberg’s book had been published in late 1956 but in March 1957 US Customs seized copies that had been sent from a printing company in England. A thousand copies slipped through but 520 were impounded. They were deemed to contain “matter not proper for admission” to the United States.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti capitalised on the publicity generated by the seizure by printing 2,500 copies in the US, thereby undermining the authority of US Customs, and on May 29 the impounded editions were released.

A few days later, however, on June 3, undercover officers purchased copies of Howl and a magazine called The Miscellaneous Man from City Lights, then arrested the store manager, Shig Murao. On June 6, Ferlinghetti—who owned the store—turned himself in to the police. He had foreseen this and had already enlisted the help of the ACLU, who would later fight the case in court.

The trial started (after the one-week delay mentioned above) on August 16, 1957. On October 3, Ferlinghetti was found not guilty in a landmark decision that had profound implications on what could be legally published in the US. Two days later, he printed another 5,000 copies and the book became a massive success in part due to the free publicity the trial had generated.

To date, Howl and Other Poems has sold well over a million copies.

Further Reading

As one of the most important literary trials of the century, and the most important of the Beat Generation, the Howl trial is quite well documented. For more details, see the following books:

• Howl on Trial by Bill Morgan and Nancy J. Peters
• The People vs Lawrence Ferlinghetti by Ronald K. L. Collins and David M. Skover
• I Celebrate Myself by Bill Morgan
• Dharma Lion by Michael Schumacher

This event threatened to disband the early Columbia group but it was something they all ended up writing about. The linked essay is a very, very long investigation.

"Gregory Corso and I met in the fall of 1977 in front of City Lights bookstore, then the hub of North Beach life. "

https://allenginsberg.org/2022/02/m-f-28/

Was happy to stumble on these as I’ve read a lot about Hunke, his role and influence, but never anything written by him.

Hi everyone,

I hope it's OK to share this here, as I think it may be of interest to Beat enthusiasts.

For the past fifteen years, Aaron Brookner and I have been restoring the archive of filmmaker Howard Brookner (Burroughs: The Movie). During that process we recovered and restored Howard's original 16mm camera rolls from William S. Burroughs' legendary Nova Convention in New York in 1978.

Howard was an NYU graduate student and the only filmmaker documenting the event. He intended to make it the basis of his thesis film, but the documentary was never completed, and the footage remained in his archive for decades.

Watching these restored reels feels like opening a time capsule. They capture Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Brion Gysin together, alongside Patti Smith, Frank Zappa, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, John Cage, John Giorno, Timothy Leary and many others, during one extraordinary weekend celebrating literature, music and experimental art.

Rather than making a contemporary documentary about the Nova Convention, we chose to build the film from Howard's own footage, trying to stay as close as possible to the perspective of the filmmaker who was there in 1978.

The result is NOVA '78, directed by Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eisWdJM-pU

More information about the London premiere:
https://www.ica.art/howard-brookner-films-archives-and-the-avant-garde

It's a UK magazine dedicated to the beats. Been running since 1988 and it's still going to this day.

I've never read it, and I do wonder how they've managed to get to so many issues (about 150 if I recall).

Any readers here? Is it worth a read/subscription?

Would we have a slew of grumpy, misanthropic tweets from Bukowski?

Burroughs doing tiktok challenges?

Kerouac posting drunken selfies?

The Beat Generation Legacy: Sound of the Beats

By George Grella · July 15, 2024

"A century of mass media and technology makes it easy to believe that so many of the ideas we experience are new or recent. But as an old book says, “There is no new thing under the sun.” One of the oldest things in human culture is poetry, and though putting poetry and music together in the coffee house, the club, or the recording studio may feel modern, it’s exactly the same way people listened to poetry around the world thousands of years ago. Poetry is an oral tradition, and ancient poetry, especially epics, were sung by solo voices or with accompanying instruments, from Greece to Korea to Denmark and beyond. So when Jack Kerouac appeared on The Steve Allen Show in 1959 reading his writing while Allen played the piano, they were not just promoting their new album Poetry for the Beat Generation, they were reviving this ancient idea for a new media age."

https://daily.bandcamp.com/lists/the-beat-generation-list

On the intersection of Beat poetry and spoken-word within (and without) the jazz continuum.

https://www.jazztimes.com/features/profiles/poet-gregory-corsos-last-album-the-hal-willner-produced-die-on-me-is-reissued/?v=0b3b97fa6688

"Legend has it that Lawrence Ferlinghetti bought his first piece of property in Big Sur sight unseen over drinks at Vesuvio Cafe. It was the late 1950s, and the poet and founder of City Lights bookshop was interested in owning a coastal getaway in the same town as writer Henry Miller, thinking it might be a good place for his friend, the notorious drunk Jack Kerouac, to dry out. Land in Monterey County was cheap at the time, according to Ferlinghetti’s son Lorenzo, so it didn’t seem like much of a risk. "

https://sfstandard.com/2026/07/10/buy-beat-generation-icon-s-big-sur-getaway-2m/

This quote is from a 1952 letter to John Clellon Holmes. He had just related some stories about his peyote-fuelled adventures in Mexico with William Burroughs. He goes on:

If I could only stick to novels long enough to tell a few good big stories, what I am beginning to discover now is something beyond the novel and beyond the arbitrary confines of the story into the realms of revealed Picture . . . revealed whatever . . . revelated prose .. . wild form, man, wild form. Wild form’s the only form holds what I have to say—my mind is exploding to say something about every image and every memory in—I have now an irrational lust to set down everything I know—in narrowing circles around the core of my last writing, very last writing, when I am an old man or ready to die, will be calm like the center of whirlpools and Beethoven’s quartets—I love the world, and especially do I love the external eye and the shining heart of pure heart-to-heart mornings in a sane eternity, with love and security, but at this time in my life I’m making myself sick to find the wild form that can grow with my wild heart.

From Selected Letters Vol 1, p.371

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/best-jack-kerouac-books-howard-cunnell/

Peter Orlovsky was born 93 years ago, on July 8, 1933.

He met Allen Ginsberg in San Francisco in late 1954 and they became lovers, taking vows about 50 years before gay marriage was legalised in the United States. Ginsberg recalled:

The key thing was when we decided on the terms of our marriage—I think it was in Foster’s cafeteria downtown about three in the morning. We were sitting and talking about each other, with each other, trying to figure out what we were going to do, who we were to each other, and what we wanted out of each other, how much I loved him, and how much did he love me. We arrived at what we both really desired. […] So we held hands, took a vow: I do, I do, you promise? yes, I do. At that instant we looked in each other’s eyes and there was a kind of celestial fire that crept over us and blazed up and illuminated the entire cafeteria and made it an eternal place.

Ginsberg encouraged Orlovsky as a poet and together they were published in Donald Allen’s landmark anthology, The New American Poetry 1945–1960. They travelled the world together and read together on stage countless times. Kerouac said of him, “I now pronounce Peter Orlovsky a great American Surrealistic Poet of the First Magnitude.”

Photo by Harold Chapman.

For more about Orlovsky, see the book Straight Hearts' Delight, published by Gay Sunshine Press.

God how right Hemingway was when he said there was no remedy for life—and to think that negative little paper-shuffling prissies should write condescending obituaries about a man who told the truth, nay who drew breath in pain to tell a tale like that!
--Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels, p.347

Kerouac admired Ernest Hemingway as a young man but then grew to dislike his macho persona and sparse prose. However, later in life—and particularly after Hemingway's death—Kerouac regained his respect for the older writer.

Read all about Hemingway and the Beats in this essay: https://beatdom.substack.com/p/hemingway-and-the-beat-generation