Filmed and edited by Alex Abelson, Poetry Project Videographer. Featuring Chuck Lief, Marc Ribot, Bill Morgan, Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton, Jon Sholle, Steven Taylor, Miriam Sanders & Ed Sanders, Bev Isis, Simon Pettet, Janine Pommy-Vega, Bob Rosenthal, Philip Glass, Rosebud Pettet, Gordon Ball, Andy Clausen, Anselm Berrigan, Hal Willner, Alison Winfield, Patti Smith, Anne Waldman with Ambrose Bye, Ann Charters & Herschel Silverman. Peter Orlovsky Memorial Reading

Angelheaded Hipsters

24 January – 20 March
Angelhead Hipsters

They have become known as The Beat Generation; for Allen Ginsberg they were “just a bunch of friends looking to get published”. As writers, they were their own selfchroniclers, but Ginsberg was also their photographer. In these images selected from photographic agency Corbis, you can trace the early years of Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs as they moved towards the centre of the American literary consciousness. Later photographs feature Ginsberg’s New York peers and a small selection of works by other photographers charts the influence of the Beats.

In association with Corbis, the National Theatre’s Photographic Images Partner

Photo: Allen Ginsberg/CORBIS

Exhibition opening times:

Open Monday – Saturday from 10am – 11pm and Sunday 12pm – 5.30pm (when there is a performance in the building)

See http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/63150/exhibitions/angelheaded-hipsters.html

Peter Hale sent me this link

Sometime during the late fall or winter of 1860-61, Walt Whitman began an imaginary conversation with Abraham Lincoln that would continue for decades to come, inspiring several of the most famous poems in American literature. The poet began his dialogue with the president-elect “as in a dream.” Most of the notebook pages reproduced here have never before been published. see http://documents.nytimes.com/walt-whitman-and-abraham-lincoln

“And still,” Randy wrote me, tonight, about this performance, “it’s all not yet true. It’ll take a thousand years.” High Def Feb 2010. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS2belEBXyM

The archives of the proto-Pop artist Larry Rivers, who died in 2002, will arrive at New York University in a few weeks, filled with correspondence and other documents that depict his relationships with artists like Willem de Kooning and Andy Warhol and writers like Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery.

But one part of the archive, which was purchased from the Larry Rivers Foundation for an undisclosed price, includes films and videos of his two adolescent daughters, naked or topless, being interviewed by their father about their developing breasts.

One daughter, who said she was pressured to participate, beginning when she was 11, is demanding that the material be removed from the archive and returned to her and her sister.

See http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/arts/design/08rivers.html?_r=1&emc=eta1 for details.

I’m pleased to announce the inclusion of a one question interview with Iranian-American poet Ali Zarrin.

The interview has been added to the 2010 edition of Napalm Health Spa. See I’m pleased to announce the addition to Napalm Health Spa 2010 of an interview with Iranian-American poet Ali Zarrin. See https://www.poetspath.com/napalm/nhs10/index.html.

Ali’s story is as much a lesson on Persian poetry as it is an amazing tale of how he came to be friends with Allen Ginsberg and have work published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

The digital social network revolution was supposed to be an era where everyone is humilated together.

So, it came as quite a surprise to me that I was approached by a poet whose poems were in early issues of Napalm Health Spa. The poet needed distance from the poems in order to get a job.

In the era of book printing, any request to change a text was impossible post-publication. The digital page changed that.

I don’t know how this is managed by other online publications, but the requests came to me regarding poems in issues over a decade in the archives.

I needed to let anyone interested know that this change was made under threat of legal action by the poet.

I can appreciate the need for expediency by this person. Surely, it’s a tough job market out there.

Are online publishers obligated to comply with such requests? It seems as though any poet could request that revisions be made to work in any issue at any time. What does that make of the historical record?

I work with authors to make all kinds of changes around the time a new issue comes out, but once something is archived, isn’t it somewhat still “done” like a book-object and subject to being as it is?

I think this was a very unique situation, but it has raised interesting questions that I don’t have the answers to.

This spring the Museum of American Poetics published the 21st issue of Napalm Health Spa. The issue is dedicated to the memory of Peter Orlovsky. As with recent issues of NHS, editor Jim Cohn finds himself selecting Postbeat poetry content from video as well as traditional print formats. The new issue of NHS can be found here. The magazine has a new look this year in an effort to get our readers to the poems faster. We hope you like it. Let us know.

Napalm Health Spa: Report 2010, cover art.

Latest info about this soon to be released film on the life of