Ginsberg in the Galleries

Presented by The Allen Ginsberg Estate and co-presented by Origin Magazine in affiliation with Climate Week NY
Free
6-7 p.m.
Happy Hour in K2 Lounge
7-8 p.m.
Poetry on the 6th floor gallery
The Allen Ginsberg Estate is pleased to join the Rubin Museum of Art and Origin Magazine forGinsberg in the Galleries:Holy Soul Jelly RollAlbum Release. Eighteen years after its release as a box set on Rhino Records,Holy Soul Jelly Roll, the most comprehensive compilation of Ginsberg’s recorded works,is finally getting a digital release in September 2012. Poets and friends of Ginsberg,Alex Dimitrov, Sharon Mesmer, Anne Waldman, Bob Rosenthal, Eliot Katz and Steven Taylor will be reading and performing songs and poems from the collection as well as their own work in celebration of the event. An excerpt from Ginsberg’s Wales Visitation will be read; a work written in response to the growing evidence of what scientists termed “the Greenhouse Effect”.
The latest issue of ORIGIN will be available for purchase in Serai, the museum’s shop.

Order of Poets & Poetry
*poets will be reading their own work as well as the poems listed below
Bob Rosenthal – After Lalon, by Allen Ginsberg
Eliot Katz – Van Gogh’s Ear, by Allen Ginsberg
Sharon Mesmer – Sunflower Sutra, by Allen Ginsberg
Anne Waldman – Wales Visitation, by Allen Ginsberg
Alex Dimitrov – A Supermarket in California, by Allen Ginsberg
Steven Taylor will be singing a selection of songs by William Blake, tuned by Ginsberg, as well as accompanying Anne Waldman on Blake’s Garden of Love.

More Information

Official Website: allenginsberg.org
On Facebook: The Allen Ginsberg Project
Origin Magazine
Climate Week NY

Alex Dimitrov’s first book of poems, Begging for It, will be published by Four Way Books in March 2013. He is the founder of Wilde Boys, a queer poetry salon in New York City. Dimitrov’s poems have been published in The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, Slate, Poetry Daily, Tin House, Boston Review, and the American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize in 2011. He is also the author of American Boys, an e-chapbook published by Floating Wolf Quarterly in 2012. Dimitrov works at the Academy of American Poets, teaches creative writing at Rutgers University, and frequently writes for Poets & Writers.
Sharon Mesmer’s poetry collections are The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose, 2008), Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books, 2008), Half Angel, Half Lunch (Hard Press, 1998) and the chapbooks Vertigo Seeks Affinities (Belladonna Books, 2006) and Crossing Second Avenue (ABJ Books, Tokyo, 1997). A selection of her work will appear in the forthcoming Postmodern American Poetry — A Norton Anthology. She is a 2011 Fulbright Specialist, a 2009 Jerome Foundation mentor, a two-time New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in poetry, and recipient of the 1990 MacArthur Scholarship given through the Brooklyn College MFA poetry program by nomination of Allen Ginsberg. She teaches poetry, fiction and literature at New York University and the New School. Of Half Angel, Half Lunch, Allen Ginsberg wrote: “Her first full collection of poetry is a lively, readable volume, always interesting, beautifully bold and vivaciously modern.”
Anne Waldman is a poet, performer, professor, editor, curator and co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of The Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where she has worked for over three decades. Author of more than 40 publications of poetry, her most recent books include Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets 2009), The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press 2011), Soldatesque/Soldiering (Blaze [Vox] 2012) andthe forthcoming Gossamurmur (Penguin Poets 2013). CRY STALL GAZE, a folded “scroll” collaboration with painter Pat Steir is being produced by the Brodsky Center at Rutgers University in 2013. She has worked extensively with video movie writer and director Ed Bowes, and musician Ambrose Bye, their most recent collaboration being The Milk of Universal Kindness (Fast Speaking Music, 2011). She has written the libretto for the opera Cyborg on the Zattere” with music by composer Steven Taylor, a piece taking on the “knot” of Ezra Pound’s poetry and politics. She is a recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award for Poetry and has been deemed a “counter-cultural giant” by Publisher’s Weekly. Her feminist epic, The Iovis Trilogy, was recently awarded the USA 2012 PEN Literary Award for Poetry. Waldman worked extensively with Allen Ginsberg as colleagues in the Naropa “experiment”, and travelled with him performing her own poetry in France, the UK, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Canada and British Columbia. He referred to her as his “spiritual wife”. Anne is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Eliot Katz is the author of six books of poetry, including Unlocking the Exits, and Love, War, Fire, Wind: Looking Out from North America’s Skull. He is a coeditor, with Allen Ginsberg and Andy Clausen, of Poems for the Nation, a collection of political poems that Ginsberg was compiling in the mid-1990s. Katz’s poems are included in many anthologies, including: Poetry after 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets; Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, 2nd ed.; and Blue Stones and Salt Hay: An Anthology of Contemporary New Jersey Poets.Called “another classic New Jersey bard” by Ginsberg, Katz has worked for many years as a political activist for a wide range of peace and social-justice causes.
Steven Taylor collaborated on poetry and music works with Allen Ginsberg for twenty years, touring internationally and producing numerous recordings. His musical settings of Ginsberg’s texts have been performed with the Mondriaan Quartet, the Pro Arte Quartet, and members of the Juilliard Choral Union. In 1988, he scored incidental music for the Eye and Ear Theater’s revival of Ginsberg’s Obie Award winning play Kaddish. His settings of the poems of Jack Kerouac were performed by the Leeds University Choir in 2007, and his setting of an excerpt from Kerouac’s On the Road was premiered at the Kerouacmanuscript exhibition at Birmingham University in 2008. He has collaborated on numerous performance and theater works with librettist-poets Kenward Elmslie and Anne Waldman. He is a member of the seminal poetry rock group the Fugs. Between 1988 and 1992 he toured and recorded with the hardcore band False Prophets. He holds the PhD in ethnomusicology from Brown University and is the author of False Prophet: Field Notes from the Punk Underground, published by Wesleyan University Press (2003).
Bob Rosenthal, who studied poetry under Paul Carroll, Ted Berrigan, Joel Oppenhiemer, Bernadette Mayer, and Alice Notley, is a poet and a writer who has co-written and produced five plays. His 1970’s Cleaning Up New York was regarded as a cult classic. His latest collection of poetry is Viburnum (White Fields Press, Tennessee). He has taught workshops at The Poetry Project, Snug Harbor, and the Naropa Institute. He worked as Allen Ginsberg’s secretary for 20 years until Allen’s death and currently is a Trustee of the Allen Ginsberg Trust. Bob is on the faculty at Abraham Joshua Heschel High School. He is currently writing his account on the business of Allen Ginsberg Straight Around Allen and has written three other books of poetry, Morning Poems, (Yellow Press, Chicago, 1972), Rude Awakenings, (Yellow Press, Chicago. 1976) and Eleven Psalms (1999). He frequently reads at New York’s Bowery Poetry Club.