A Loving Accounting Of Allen

Ginsberg at Cherry Valley, 1973

Among various roles he has filled in his life, from political consultant, attorney and elected official, to college professor, CPA and all-around troublemaker, Don Wilen will speak this Tuesday at Curley’s about how his recommendation to Allen Ginsberg as a prospective personal financial/business adviser launched a friendship filled with warmth and memorable adventures rivaling the fecundity of Ginsberg’s own farm in Cherry Valley, New York, where Don and his family spent many weekends.

Initially referred to him in 1966 by underground press pioneer Paul Krassner, publisher of The Realist (1958-2001), the Yippie-era satire magazine, Don’s introduction to Ginsberg and his friends in the Beat circle led to meals in seedy restaurants on the lower East side, occasional forays to the Carnegie Deli and second-hand clothing stores (not to mention a few near-arrests). Of all this and other fond recollections, Don’s one regret remains not being able to say goodbye to his friend before he passed in 1997.

Click here for a past entry on Ginsberg, along with clips from 2007’s The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg (available on two DVDs) and Howl, the 2010 experimental film starring James Franco, which combined live-action and animation to relate the genesis of his titular heretical indictment of modern industrial life and the legal fallout that ensued in 1957.

Ginsberg, 1994

More developmental in its cast of the man and the movement, last year’s Kill Your Darlings (Sony Pictures Classics), directed by John Krokidas, features Daniel Radcliffe as a still younger Ginsberg during his years at Columbia in the 1940s, where he first met William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and others who would help form the core of the Beat Generation. Against the backdrop of a murder mystery, Kill dramatizes the revolutionary rationale and social necessity for what Ginsberg and his peers were trying to accomplish: 

Don is active with Sarah Van Arsdale’s Bloom readings program, based in the Washington Heights area, which presents poetry/spoken-word art in the Lounge at Hudson View Gardens, West 183rd Street & Pinehurst Avenue in New York City. Don is also part of the Three Arrows Cooperative Society, an intentional community alternative to urban isolation established by New York socialists in 1936, located in verdant Hudson Valley.

  

Loving You Is Like A Party

Professor Arturo (AKA Arthur Pfister) returns to the Stam-ford area tomorrow night as Barnes & Noble’s Open Mic guest reader. As a poet/fiction writer, spoken work artist, educator, editor and speech-writer, Arturo draws on decades of plying and living the jazz idiom to relate pieces of justice, the heart and life crafted with a magnetic conviction.

Originally from New Orleans, he has collaborated on numerous projects with an amazing array of partners, such as musicians, photographers, dancers, fire-eaters, waiters, cab drivers and other members of the Great Miscellaneous.

His work has been placed in Fahari, American Poetry Review, the Shooting Star Review, EBONY, the Gallery Mirror and numerous other publica-tions. He has also contributed to the anthologies A Broadside Treasury: 1965-1970 (Broadside Press, 1971), edited by Gwendolyn Brooks, Orde Coombs’ We Speak as Liberators (Dodd Mead, 1970) and Lindahl’s,  Owens’ and Harvison’s Swapping Stories: Folktales from Louisiana (University Press of Mississippi, 1997). My Name is New Orleans: 40 Years of Poetry & Other Jazz (Margaret Media, Inc., 2009), his latest volume, is a multimedia project that comes with a CD of six jazz poetry readings from the book.

Here is a sampling of the Professor at his most warm and sensual from "Jazz for My Baby":

You’ve changed, but change makes me wanna hustle for salt peanuts on summer days

For all we know we’ll be together again bumpin’ on sunset at a freedom jazz dance

Loving you is like a party

Mercy, Mercy, Mercy! What a wonderful world!

It’s a love supreme

      a love supreme

      a love supreme…

This live 2012 performance of the entire poem from his new collection reveals the captivating effect of his fluid swaying between recitation and song and back again: 

Below, Arturo is at his galvanizing best in the name of social change at the International Festival of Arts and Ideas at The Maple Leaf in New Orleans in 2006, after having to evacuate the city from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina the year prior:

One of the original Broadside poets of the 1960s, Professor Arturo took part last August in PoemAlley’s “Café Night” program outside the Unitarian Universalist Society in Stam-ford. He currently teaches at Norwalk Community College. Find out more at his blog, professorarturo.blogspot.com.

Hosted by Frank Chambers and PoemAlley's Nick Miele, the Barnes & Noble's Open Mic Poetry program meets the second Monday of each month in the cookbook section on the main floor of the bookstore (located in the Stamford Town Center), beginning at 7:00 p.m.

For more information, contact:

Barnes & Noble

100 Greyrock Place Suite H009

Stamford, CT 06901

203-323-1248

The Artful Souls To Everyone

Presenting an original hodgepodge of creative wistfulness, humor and social inclusivity, this Tuesday’s featured PoemAlley reader, novelist/poet Esther Cohen hails from Manhattan, where she serves as Executive Director of Bread & Roses, the cultural arm of 1199/SEIU, New York’s health care union.

Esther is the author of two novels, No Charge for Looking (Schocken), a 1988 distillation of her obsession with Jews, Arabs and the city of Nazareth “and a naive American woman trying hard to understand what she sees” and Book Doctor (Counterpoint, 2005), a hilarious but tender swirl of romance, creative aspiration-channeled-through revenge, and writer’s block revolving around the conflicted life of Arlette Rosen, the titular manuscript consultant.

Two titles from 2008, God Is a Tree and Other Middle-Aged Prayers (Pleasure Boat Studio) and Don't Mind Me: And Other Jewish Lies (Hyperion), display her humor in non-narrative format, the first, a collection of poetry, the second, “the complex, but all too familiar, language of the Artful Untruth”, illustrated with New Yorker panache by Roz Chast.

Growing out of her work at Bread & Roses, Esther also edited Unseenamerica: Photos and Stories by Workers (Regan Books, 2006), based on a Pure Visionary Award-winning photography program she created wherein thousands holding assorted blue collar jobs were taught how to document in black-and-white images the poignancy and  joys of their lives, as well as--to quote program participant Sam Contreras, a building maintenance worker--the “artful souls to everyone.”

In fact, her simple response to this excerpt from “For Memory” from Adrienne Rich’s A Wild Patience has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978-1981 says everything about Esther’s fervent humanism:

Freedom. It isn’t once, to walk out

under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers

of light, the fields of dark—

freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine

remembering. Putting together, inch by inch

the starry worlds.

           

To which, Esther says, “Ditto!”

Mentioning on her website (http://esthercohen.com/) how Book Doctor “took years to write”, Esther’s dedication to the shaping of self-definition through self-expression (for her, the mystery road of the writing process and who she meets along the way), rather than through practical vocation, alone, finds sympathy in the character of Jack Bellicec, a poet frustrated by the gimmicky expectations of the “Me” Generation, played by Jeff Goldblum in Philip Kaufman’s claustrophobic Invasion of the Body Snatchers (United Artists, 1978):

In inventive opposition to the small-town intimacy of Donald Siegel’s 1956 original film (click here for more about the germinal Jack Finney novel), the setting is now switched to frenetic, jumbled San Francisco, where the price of taking for granted the seemingly autonomic urban conveniences and services provided through the work of semi-ignored cabbies, garbage collectors, telephone linemen and other stewards of the cityscape who seem to have stepped right out of Unseenamerica, is an inhuman automatonicism threatening to engulf all our lives.









You can contact Esther Cohen at bookdoctor@rcn.com.