Neo Beat Writer Alan Kaufman Heads an All-Star Line Up on How Poet Allen Ginsberg Changed American Culture
(PRWEB) July 09, 2013 -- The first time Alan Kaufman met Ginsberg, in the early ‘70s, the younger writer was an undergraduate at Queens College and heard that the poet would be reading at Columbia and rushed over to hear him. Later, Kaufman worked with Ginsberg throughout the ’90s, occasionally traveling with him to conferences abroad. In Kaufman’s memoir, Drunken Angel, he featured Allen Ginsberg as a mentor and friend.
Alan Kaufman will be moderating a couple of panels on Allen Ginsberg and the Beats at the Mechanics' Institute Library in San Francisco on July 12th.
6:30 pm
"The Prophetic Voice: Blake, Whitman and Allen Ginsberg" explores the link between this great Beat poet and his visionary lineage.
7:45 pm
"The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg" celebrates Ginsberg’s journey through the major social, cultural and political revolutions of his day, and how he launched the Beat Generation and inspired the zeitgeist of the ‘60s.
Panelists include Beat era experts and writers such as:
Neeli Cherkovski, Leaning Against Time and Whitman’s Wild Children
Jerry Cimino, Founder/Director of The Beat Museum, San Francisco
Brenda Knight, Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution, and publisher of Viva Editions
Kush Cloud House (Steven Kushner), literary documentarian and creator of The Cloud House archive
Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club and Distilled Spirits: Getting High, Then Sober, with a Famous Writer, A Forgotten Philosopher, and a Hopeless Drunk
Regina Marler, Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America on to Sex
Gerald Nicosia, One and Only: The Untold Story of On the Road and Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac
Steve Silberman, Web archivist for Scrap Leaves by Allen Ginsberg; and editor of Ginsberg’s photo collection Snapshot Poetics
David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love
Alan Kaufman will also be conducting a “Poetry Shabbat” at Temple Sha’ar Zahav on July 13th, and reading from his memoir at Badger Books in San Francisco on July 18th at 5:30pm.
Drunken Angel
By Alan Kaufman
Alan Kaufman has been compared to Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Hubert Selby Jr., and even Ernest Hemingway, another soldier turned writer. Drunken Angel drops like a sledgehammer: an exhilarating account of a life-long battle with alcoholism and a magnificent rise into sobriety that takes us from East Village park benches and reciting Kaddish in Dachau to the pages of The New York Times. Along the way, Kaufman shares revealing portraits of mentors and friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Kathy Acker, Barney Rosset, Anthony Burgess, Elie Wiesel, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Bernard Malamud. Now a leading voice of the children of Holocaust survivors, Kaufman delivers a lacerating, cautionary tale of a life wasted and reclaimed through love and storytelling. Drunken Angel was recently reviewed Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene as "Highly recommended."
Brenda Knight, Cleis Press, INC, http://www.vivaeditions.com, 510-845-8000, [email protected]
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