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. [1]
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. [1]
Ron Whitehead has been involved in many aspects of the artistic field; writing poetry, editing literary works, organizing a non-profit organization to support literature worldwide called the Global Literary Renaissance, teaching and lecturing to students, and collaborating with artists and musicians, focusing primarily on the Louisville art scene and Kentucky folk art. Whitehead was also the honorary poetry editor of GonzoToday.com. [2]
Whitehead has authored thirty titles which include: Western Kentucky: Lost & Forgotten, Found & Remembered (with Sarah Elizabeth Burkey), The Third Testament: Three Gospels of Peace (with art by Lawrence Ferlinghetti & David Minton), Beaver Dam Rocking Chair Marathon, The Wanderer, and most recently, The Storm Generation Manifesto & on parting, the wilderness poems. In 2016 Finishing Line press released his work, Kentucky Basketball is Poetry in Motion, a collection of poems about the history and culture of Kentucky basketball. [3] [4] The Ron Whitehead poetry collection is currently managed by the University of Louisville. [5] A special exhibit of works produced by Whitehead, "Poets, Rock Stars, and Holy Men" was featured at the main branch of the Louisville Free Public Library in 2018 and Whitehead was honored at that event for his work in the arts by Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer. [6] [7]
Whitehead has also released forty CDs which include: "Tapping My Own Phone", "Kentucky Roots", "Kentucky: poems, stories, songs", "Kentucky Blues", "I Will Not Bow Down", "Exterminate Noise", "From Iceland to Kentucky & Beyond", "Swan Boats @ Four", "The Shape of Water", "The Viking Hillbilly Apocalypse Revue", "Walking Home", "I Refuse", "Ron Whitehead and Southside's Southside Lounge", "Ron Whitehead and Southside's We Are The Storm", and "The Storm Generation Manifesto & on parting, the wilderness poems". Whitehead's book, titled The Storm Generation Manifesto and on parting, the wilderness poems, was released in July 2010 and includes a CD of his readings as well as his first DVD. [8]
SELECTED PRINT AND AUDIO PUBLICATIONS:
POETRY IN PRINT:
AUDIO RECORDINGS:
Whitehead has been honored for his work as a writer and his involvement in the literary community. Some of his accolades include The All Kentucky Poetry Prize, The Yeats Club of Oxford's Prize for Poetry, a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize twice, and a nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature. [9] Whitehead's work has been featured prominently on the international scene. In 2002 his poem "Never Give Up" was the featured theme for the United Nations affiliated program called "Poetry on the Peaks." This poem has been featured in other venues including National Geographic magazine and a book written by the 14th Dalai Lama. In 2009 Ron was one of the one hundred and thirty featured poets representing fifty countries at the International Poetry Festival, which took place in Granada, Nicaragua. Whitehead's work has been published in other venues as well, including Northwestern's TriQuarterly magazine, England's Beat Scene , and Japan's Blue Beat Jacket. Whitehead's work is also featured in Delinda Buie's archive at the University of Louisville Library. [10]
In 2019, Whitehead was appointed to serve as Kentucky's Beat Poet Laureate for the years 2019-2021 by the National Beat Poetry Foundation. [11] He is the first writer from the United States to be tapped as writer-in-residence for the City of Literature international residency program in Tartu, Estonia. [12] In May 2021, Whitehead was named U.S. National Beat Poet Laureate for 2021-2022 by the National Beat Poetry Foundation. [13]
Whitehead has also been involved in production of musical and poetry events worldwide. Some of these events include days long music and poetry readings called "Insomniac-a-thons", benefit concerts, and International and National Poetry Festivals in locations such as London, New York City, and the Netherlands. Whitehead's most notable production was the Official Hunter S. Thompson Tribute, which featured individuals such as Johnny Depp, David Amram, and Roxanne Pulitzer. [14] and he has participated in a yearly "Gonzofest" in Thompson's hometown of Louisville, Kentucky honoring Thompson. [15]
He has collaborated with many musicians as well, doing readings of his work with other artists. Whitehead has worked with musical artists ranging from Icelandic musicians Sigur Rós and Utangarðsmenn, to Jim James of My Morning Jacket and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth. One of his most recent collaborations was with heavy psychedelic rock group Blaak Heat, on their EP The Storm Generation and following album The Edge of an Era. In March 2019, Glass Eye Ensemble featuring Sheri Streeter mounted a multi-media music, video and art installation using Whitehead's poetry as a springboard for creative collaboration; the world premiere of which was held at the Tim Faulkner Gallery in Louisville, Kentucky. [16]
Whitehead has also continued to be involved in the academic world through working as an editor and a professor. He has edited thousand of works by authors such as Jimmy Carter, Jack Kerouac, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. [17] Whitehead has also taught at various institutions of higher education including the University of Louisville, New York University, Trinity College Dublin, and the University of Iceland.
The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generationers in the 1950s, better known as Beatniks. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.
"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.
Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti was an American poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. An author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, Ferlinghetti was best known for his second collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), which has been translated into nine languages and sold over a million copies. When Ferlinghetti turned 100 in March 2019, the city of San Francisco turned his birthday, March 24, into "Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day".
Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet and a key member of the Beat movement. He was one of the youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers.
City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination in San Francisco, California, that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin. Both the store and the publishers became widely known following the obscenity trial of Ferlinghetti for publishing Allen Ginsberg's influential collection Howl and Other Poems. Nancy Peters started working there in 1971 and retired as executive director in 2007. In 2001, City Lights was made an official historic landmark. City Lights is located at 261 Columbus Avenue. While formally located in Chinatown, it self-identifies as part of immediately adjacent North Beach.
Theodore Joans was an American jazz poet, surrealist, trumpeter, and painter, who from the 1960s spent periods of time travelling in Europe and Africa. His work stands at the intersection of several avant-garde streams and some have seen in it a precursor to the orality of the spoken-word movement. However, he criticized the competitive aspect of "slam" poetry. Joans is known for his motto: "Jazz is my religion, and Surrealism is my point of view". He was the author of more than 30 books of poetry, prose, and collage, among them Black Pow-Wow, Beat Funky Jazz Poems, Afrodisia, Jazz is Our Religion, Double Trouble, WOW and Teducation.
Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth was an American poet, translator, and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement. Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was dubbed the "Father of the Beats" by Time magazine. Largely self-educated, Rexroth learned several languages and translated poems from Chinese, French, Spanish, and Japanese.
Lewis Barrett Welch Jr. was an American poet associated with the Beat generation literary movement.
Anne Waldman is an American poet. Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the Outriders Poetry Project experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist. She has also been connected to the Beat Generation poets.
The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range of poetic activity centered on San Francisco, which brought it to prominence as a hub of the American poetry avant-garde in the 1950s. However, others felt this renaissance was a broader phenomenon and should be seen as also encompassing the visual and performing arts, philosophy, cross-cultural interests, and new social sensibilities.
Jazz poetry has been defined as poetry that "demonstrates jazz-like rhythm or the feel of improvisation" and also as poetry that takes jazz music, musicians, or the jazz milieu as its subject. Some critics consider it a distinct genre though others consider the term to be merely descriptive. Jazz poetry has long been something of an "outsider" art form that exists somewhere outside the mainstream, having been conceived in the 1920s by African Americans, maintained in the 1950s by counterculture poets like those of the Beat generation, and adapted in modern times into hip-hop music and live poetry events known as poetry slams.
Big Sur is a 1962 novel by Jack Kerouac, written in the fall of 1961 over a ten-day period, with Kerouac typewriting onto a teletype roll. It recounts the events surrounding Kerouac's three brief sojourns to a cabin in Bixby Canyon, Big Sur, California, owned by Kerouac's friend and Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti; at the same time dealing with his increased drinking and declining mental health. It is Kerouac’s first novel to be fully written following his success in the late 1950s, and thus departs from his previous fictionalized autobiographical series in that the character Duluoz is shown as a popular, published author; most of Kerouac's previous novels instead portray him as a bohemian traveller.
Barbara Moraff is an American poet of the Beat generation living in Vermont.
Neeli Cherkovski was an American poet and memoirist, who resided from 1975 onwards in San Francisco.
Mexico City Blues is a long poem by Jack Kerouac, composed of 242 "choruses" or stanzas, which was first published in 1959. Written between 1954 and 1957, the poem is the product of Kerouac's spontaneous prose technique, his Buddhist faith, emotional states, and disappointment with his own creativity—including his failure to publish a novel between 1950's The Town and the City and the more widely acclaimed On the Road (1957).
David Meltzer was an American poet and musician of the Beat Generation and San Francisco Renaissance. Lawrence Ferlinghetti described him as "one of the greats of post-World-War-Two San Francisco poets and musicians". Meltzer came to prominence with inclusion of his work in the anthology The New American Poetry 1945–1960.
Richard William McBride was an American beat poet, playwright and novelist. He worked at City Lights Booksellers & Publishers from 1954 to 1969.
At the Center is an album by Meat Beat Manifesto, released in 2005 as part of the "Blue Series" of Thirsty Ear records fusing jazz with electronica.
Bill Morgan is an American writer, editor and painter, best known for his work as an archivist and bibliographer for public figures such as Allen Ginsberg Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Abbie Hoffman, and Timothy Leary.
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.