This is the music film for Bob Dylan's great song, "Subterranean Homesick Blues," from the great Bringing It All Back Home album (the one that has the cover of the young lady in red stretched out on the couch, behind Dylan).
If you watch the video, you probably will mostly focus on Dylan holding the cue cards, but the guy on the left, who can be seen gesturing and talking, and who walks across the scene with his cane at the end, is Allen Ginsberg, the famous poet.
As Eric Wagner has pointed out, today is Ginsberg's centennial, i.e. he was born on June 3, 1926.
In his book Coincidance, Robert Anton Wilson writes about Ginsberg in the piece "The Poet As Defense Early Warning Radar System." RAW refers to Ginsberg as "our major living American poet."
Ginsberg has a long Wikipedia biography. Here is the Allen Ginsberg Trust website. You can also see the calendar of Ginsberg centennial events, one is tonight in New York City, but there's stuff all over the world.
Ginsberg is best known for his poem "Howl," and (in the comments) Van Scott mentioned in yesterday's post reading in April Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems.
UPDATE: Ed Sanders on Howl. Link via Eric Wagner.
5 comments:
Happy birthday!
I gave all my Beat related material to my daughter, about 10 years ago, but I think this year would be a good time to get my hands on some Ginsberg and do some rereading.
As an undergrad I did my senior thesis on the religious aspects of of Ginsberg’s poetry and like Eric I was fortunate enough to meet him at a poetry reading in the early 80’s. I told him about my thesis and he was kind enough to say he’d like to read it.
In early 1985, while going to recording school, I moved into the Sivananda Yoga Center on W24th St. in New York. I'd never heard of Sivananda before prior to taking beginning yoga classes there. A couple of days later I picked up a City Lights edition of Allen Ginsberg's poems. I chose that particular one, "Planet News 1961 - 1967," because it was #23. When I got back to my room at the center I flopped down on my bedding, randomly opened the book and saw this line at the top:
"O I am happy, O Swami Sivananda, a smile." and it blew my mind.
Stanzas Written At Night in Radio City
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