Allen Ginsberg Live in London is a DVD film of Allen Ginsberg reading his poetry, singing songs and performing a Tibetan meditation live on stage[1] in London on Thursday 19 October 1995, at Megatripolis club-night at Heaven nightclub, London.
Filmed and edited by Steve Teers, of Diva Pictures, the film was recorded as part of an archive record for 'megatripolis', the underground psychedelic club-night which ran at Heaven nightclub from 1993 to 1996. The DVD sees Ginsberg reading a selection of his work from the 1970s White Shroud Poems era to 80's Cosmopolitan Greetings and 90's new and unpublished poems. Ginsberg was on stage for almost an hour, performing under theatrical lighting in front of about 1000 people. Dressed in blue shirt, red braces and slacks, Ginsberg was reading on stage at a single microphone with assistance from poet Tom Pickard for the duration of the performance, also occasionally playing harmonium. He was initially introduced by Lee Harris who had also booked him for the event. Ginsberg performed William Blake[1] accompanying himself on the harmonium as a singalong finale.
This was Ginsberg's last public stage appearance in the United Kingdom.[2]
The film premiered in Covent Garden, London in June 2005, and was later released on DVD, officially released with the permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Ltd.
The film has been shown at numerous arts festivals. It was shown at a 50th anniversary celebration of "Howl", Ginsberg's iconic protest poem on 1 November 2006 in Bloomsbury, London, where live readings from Adrian Mitchell, Michael Horovitz and Aidan Dun also took place along with a screening of Wholly Communion, Peter Whitehead's famous film of the 1965 Royal Albert Hall poet meet.
The DVD film was released initially through major stores and remains available through amazon and its website. It is a fine alternative tribute to Ginsberg's mastery of performance poetry. It is an archive film and thus reflects the sound and picture quality of archive film footage.
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions.
"Howl", also known as "Howl for Carl Solomon", is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1954–1955 and published in his 1956 collection Howl and Other Poems. The poem is dedicated to Carl Solomon.
Performance poetry is a broad term, encompassing a variety of styles and genres. In brief, it is poetry that is specifically composed for or during a performance before an audience. During the 1980s, the term came into popular usage to describe poetry written or composed for performance rather than print distribution, mostly open to improvisation.
Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet and a key member of the Beat movement. He was the youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers.
The Liverpool poets are a number of influential 1960s poets from Liverpool, England, influenced by 1950s Beat poetry. They were involved in the 1960s Liverpool scene that gave rise to The Beatles.
Adrian Henri was a British poet and painter best remembered as the founder of poetry-rock group the Liverpool Scene and as one of three poets in the best-selling anthology The Mersey Sound, along with Brian Patten and Roger McGough. The trio of Liverpool poets came to prominence in that city's Merseybeat zeitgeist of the 1960s and 1970s. He was described by Edward Lucie-Smith in British Poetry since 1945 as the "theoretician" of the three. His characterisation of popular culture in verse helped to widen the audience for poetry among 1960s British youth. He was influenced by the French Symbolist school of poetry and surrealist art.
Hal Willner was an American music producer working in recording, films, television, and live events. He was best known for assembling tribute albums and events featuring a wide variety of artists and musical styles. He died during the COVID-19 pandemic due to complications brought on by the virus.
Bob Holman is an American poet and poetry activist, most closely identified with the oral tradition, the spoken word, and poetry slam. As a promoter of poetry in many media, Holman has spent the last four decades working variously as an author, editor, publisher, performer, emcee of live events, director of theatrical productions, producer of films and television programs, record label executive, university professor, and archivist. He was described by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in The New Yorker as "the postmodern promoter who has done more to bring poetry to cafes and bars than anyone since Ferlinghetti."
Megatripolis was an underground London club night created by Encyclopaedia Psychedelica/Evolution editor and founder of the Zippie movement Fraser Clark, and partner Sionaidh Craigen as well as a great many others. The club combined New Age ideology with Rave culture to create a vibrant, festival-like atmosphere presenting a wide variety of cross-cultural ideas and experiences. Club nights ran regularly on Thursdays from 1993 until 1996, being the focus of much of the Zippie movement. The club and its related activities also helped to popularise ideas such as cyberculture and the Internet between those years.
Performance poetry is poetry that is specifically composed for or during a performance before an audience. During the 1980s, the term came into popular usage to describe poetry written or composed for performance rather than print distribution, mostly open to improvisation. From that time performance poetry in Australia has found new venues, audiences and expressions.
Michael Yechiel Ha-Levi Horovitz was a German-born British poet, editor, visual artist and translator who was a leading part of the Beat Poetry scene in the UK. In 1959, while still a student, he founded the "trail-blazing" literary periodical New Departures, publishing experimental poetry, including the work of William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and many other American and British beat poets. Horovitz read his own work at the 1965 landmark International Poetry Incarnation, at the Royal Albert Hall in London, deemed to have spawned the British underground scene, when an audience of more than 6,000 came to hear readings by the likes of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
The International Poetry Incarnation was an event at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 11 June 1965.
Poetry in Motion is a 1982 Canadian documentary film directed by Ron Mann featuring contemporary North American poetry and music. Featured are some of the Black Mountain poets, Beats, minimalist poets, and avant-garde poets. It was released in theaters, later being distributed on VHS, LaserDisc, and DVD. An extended CD-ROM version was also released.
Ins & Outs Press is a small English-language publisher with international connections based in Amsterdam and registered in the Netherlands as a cultural foundation, or stichting. It was started in 1980 by Eddie Woods, Jane Harvey, and Henk van der Does as a natural extension of Ins & Outs magazine, the first three issues of which were produced by Woods and Harvey in 1978. For two years the Press also operated a bookstore, located on the 'quiet fringe of the red-light district,' until Van der Does left the organization to start his own bookshop and Woods converted the ground floor of the six-story building into a gallery and performance space.
Frank Messina is an American poet, author and performance artist.
Howl is a 2010 American film which explores both the 1955 Six Gallery debut and the 1957 obscenity trial of 20th-century American poet Allen Ginsberg's noted poem "Howl". The film is written and directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman and stars James Franco as Ginsberg.
Ron Whitehead is an American poet, author and activist. Whitehead was born on a farm in Kentucky, but traveled to the University of Louisville and Oxford University to pursue his academic interests.
Neil R. G. Oram is a British musician, poet, artist and playwright, best known as the author of The Warp, a 10-play cycle, directed by Ken Campbell.
Songs of Innocence and Experience is an album by American beat poet and writer Allen Ginsberg, recorded in 1969. For the recording, Ginsberg sang pieces from 18th-century English poet William Blake's illustrated poetry collection of the same name and set them to a folk-based instrumental idiom, featuring simple melodies and accompaniment performed with a host of jazz musicians. Among the album's contributors were trumpeter Don Cherry, arranger/pianist Bob Dorough, multi-instrumentalist Jon Sholle, drummer Elvin Jones, and Peter Orlovsky – Ginsberg's life-partner and fellow poet – who contributed vocals and helped produce the recording with British underground writer Barry Miles.
"September on Jessore Road" is a poem by American poet and activist Allen Ginsberg, inspired by the plight of the East Bengali refugees from the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. Ginsberg wrote it after visiting the refugee camps along the Jessore Road in West Bengal in India. The poem documents the sickness and squalor he witnessed there and attacks the United States government's indifference to the humanitarian crisis. It was first published in The New York Times on November 14, 1971. Further to topical songs by George Harrison and Joan Baez, the poem helped ensure that the Bangladesh crisis became a key issue for the youth protest movement around the world.
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