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“... of Commentary, was closely involved from the early Fifties until the early Seventies: Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Hannah Arendt, Lillian Hellman and Norman Mailer. It was in the early years of this same period, the first five years of the Sixties, that what was often called the Family, a closely allied group of mostly New York ...”

“... Faust Foutu, in order to demonstrate the meaning of nakedness, anticipated by a decade or so the Ginsberg party trick that shocked John Lennon and George Harrison at the dawn of Swinging London. When I interviewed one of the Six Gallery poets, Michael McClure, in 2011, he recalled earlier episodes of Dionysian frenzy with Gerd Stern and a thrash of ‘belly ...”

“... is not for him to decide what will happen to him.’ Equally characteristic is his response when Allen Ginsberg began to sing him his musical settings of Blake: ‘Won’t you please stop? Hearing people sing songs they’ve composed embarrasses me terribly. I can’t bear it.’ Spender of course listened to the songs, which were not painful and ...”

“... guru to the hippies. In 1967, during an anti-war march in Washington, he advised Ed Sanders and Allen Ginsberg on their ambitious scheme to exorcise the Pentagon. If they really hoped to levitate the building – and they did – Smith suggested they would need a live cow, painted with magical symbols. It was a long shot; even al-Qaida failed to budge ...”

“... anti-war activities, which were public and meant to bring attention to the cause anyway. As with Allen Ginsberg, the bureau stopped short of interviewing Sontag because they knew that an interview would only result in bad publicity when she inevitably wrote about it. Some of the files were opened as a result of the efforts of the writers themselves or ...”

“... the picture was jumpy at first, was Jack Kerouac. He was sitting up at a white piano, and Steve Allen tinkled away at the keys. Kerouac is very clean, very neat, but he looks nervous. Allen is smug. He’s a polyester-clad uncle sitting at the piano. ‘You nervous?’ says ...”

“... and seascape. In Paterson, Williams included extracts from letters from Edward Dahlberg, Allen Ginsberg, and from a woman called Marcia Nardi, who had turned up in his surgery in Rutherford in the spring of 1942 with a sick son and a sheaf of poems. Williams liked these a great deal, and wrote to say so. He also tried to persuade his ...”

“... home.’ He is Gary Snyder, poet, bioregionalist, teacher. Having bought out his early partners, Allen Ginsberg and Dick Baker, he is the sole proprietor of this estate, a hundred acres of manzanita thickets, with open stretches of ponderosa pine, black oak, cedar, madrone, Douglas fir, bunchgrass – and one of the most seductive houses in ...”

“... half the 35 contributors, few of whom bother to make it clear whether they mean Robert Lowell, or Allen Ginsberg, or the Black Mountain imitators of William Carlos Williams. ‘The Liverpool Poets’ are regarded with a mixture of fear and derision. ‘The ranks of the illiterate raise puerile and rhythmless voices,’ wrote Roy Fuller. ‘Infantile ...”

“... of an isolated system must always increase with time. Whatever we do, entropy goes up (as Allen Ginsberg reputedly said, ‘You can’t break even’). This suggests a compelling hypothesis for the end of the world: the universe will reach maximum entropy and thereafter be a dark place of spent heat where nothing happens. Yet life seems to defy ...”

“... poetry from this preference, placing himself squarely between titillation and the abyss. Like Allen Tate’s narrator in The Fathers, he believes that ‘excessively refined persons have a communion with the abyss,’ and that civilisation is ‘the agreement, slowly arrived at, to let the abyss alone’. Davie arrived at this preference not slowly, it ...”

“... discovered in long forgotten archives, moved sections from one book-in-progress to another. Allen Ginsberg selected the correspondence that became The Yage Letters. Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac put Naked Lunch together from drastic-looking clumps of torn, coffee-stained fragments; the book’s final sequence was ...”

“... Panna Grady, her mother’s best friend and a friend and patron of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Janet was both disarming and bossy about showing her friends her work. When I first read the account of her arriving at boarding school with her mother, I was staying with her in Key West, in a house she had rented from Alison Lurie. When I ...”

“... reading.)The Dorns are among a second tier of correspondents, along with Paul Blackburn, Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac, Louis Zukofsky and Denise Levertov. There are nearly three hundred letters in this selection, the majority of them to men. Apart from Levertov, a regular correspondent, the only women he seems to have written to are his mother, and ...”

“... disavowals (‘My worst mistake was that stupid, suburban prejudice of antisemitism,’ he said to Allen Ginsberg, although it’s a better description of T.S. Eliot’s brand of antisemitism than his own). Kenner was bewitched by the ‘emphatic, aphoristic quality’ of Pound’s speech, which was ‘of a piece with the working of one of the most active ...”