Beat Generation

ROCKPILE‘s new blog is seemingly off the ground now. I helped Michael Rothenberg set it up a couple months ago.

ROCKPILE is a collaboration between David Meltzer — poet, musician, essayist, and more — and Michael Rothenberg of Big Bridge Press. David and Michael will journey through eight cities in the U.S. to perform poetry and prose, composed while on the road, with local musicians and artists in each city. ROCKPILE will serve to educate and preserve as well as to create a history of collaboration. It will help to reinforce the tradition of the troubadour of all generations, central to the cultural upheaval and identity politics that reawakened poets, artists, musicians, and songwriters in the mid-1960s through the 1970s. The project will end with a final multimedia performance in San Francisco. (more…)

Ferlinghetti film gets great reviews.

Over the years, Ferlinghetti has been called everything from a communist to a radical anarchist, but Felver’s film shows he is neither – just a person who cares about human rights.

I recently read this book and think it’s pretty fascinating. Tamalpais is a book written and illustrated by Gary Snyder and Tom Killion. It is full of poetry, Killion’s artwork, and biographical narrations of the two men, who also collaborated on the book The High Sierra of California. Since I will write a full review of the book for the next issue of Jack, I’ll be brief here, but recommend this for your library.