Allen Ginsberg, Part 1 — USA: Poetry, NET Outtakes Series: July 18, 1965

The Poetry Center presents Allen Ginsberg, reading his poetry and talking on contemporary politics and poetics with Neal Cassady and in response to filmmaker/poet Richard O. Moore. Ginsberg reads "Kraj Majales" (King of May) and an anti-war poem written on a protest sign. The footage was filmed July 18, 1965, just prior to the Berkeley Poetry Conference at UC Berkeley, in the basement at City Lights Books in North Beach, San Francisco. Among others in the audience, John Wieners, Robert Creeley, and Bobbie Louise Hawkins appear briefly on camera.

This Allen Ginsberg outtakes program is succeeded by a Part 2, filmed in December 1965 at other San Francisco locations.

The "Second Edition" NET Outtakes Series programs were made in 1978 by The Poetry Center's American Poetry Archives staff. Assembled from unused 16-millimeter black and white film footage shot during production of the original 15-minute USA: Poetry television programs (produced in 1965–66 for National Educational Television by Richard O. Moore of the film unit of KQED-TV, San Francisco), the outtakes footage is arranged here in the original shooting sequence. Note, some silent footage appears among the outtakes. Funding for The Poetry Center's NET Outtakes Series was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Publisher
American Poetry Archives
Location
City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco
Date
1965-07-18
Event Run Time
00:32:05
Contributors
Neal Cassady
Richard O. Moore
Rights

©© American Poetry Archives. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For all other uses please email poetry@sfsu.edu.

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Allen Ginsberg with Neal Cassady (00:31:17)

Allen Ginsberg, after opening by chanting sutras, talks about his recent trip to Czechoslovakia, the Czech political situation, and his selection there by young people as King of May. He reads "Kraj Majales," written on the plane after being ejected from the country for corrupting the youth, and an anti-war poem from a handmade protest sign, made to picket a US visit by Madame Nhu (de facto first lady of South Vietnam). He talks about meeting William Carlos Williams and trying to see Ezra Pound at Saint Elizabeth's Hospital, and about the San Francisco scene. 

Ginsberg is accompanied by Neal Cassady, who tells of his recent arrest at Ken Kesey's; they talk about policing and suppression of intellectuals in the US, political extremists, the American war on the Vietnamese people and those in other small countries, China in tension with the US and the threat of nuclear war, the efficacy of protest, the belligerent war-making obsession of US-American governmance in policy and practice, and Ginsberg's planned cross-country trip by VW microbus to try and ascertain the state of the U.S. in the mid-1960s.

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