American Poets
The films on Gary Snyder, Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, & William Carlos Williams were made in the mid-90s as part of a series for Channel 4 Television. They were each half an hour long, though the film on Allen Ginsberg, originally called The Windows of the Skull, retitled No More To Say And Nothing To Weep For: An Elegy For Allen Ginsberg, was expanded to an hour for prime time transmission shortly after Allen’s death.
In recent months I have been revisiting two more of these programs, & have been making them into feature-length films. Soon, I hope, to be distributed are I, The Poet Gary Snyder & Sing! Fight! Sing! Fight! From LeRoi to Amiri.
Abstract Alchemist of Flesh, my film on Michael McClure, which won the Grand Festival Prize at the 2013 Berkeley Film & Video Festival, was made independently, as were my still unreleased feature-length films Vot Em I Doink Here?, on Jerome Rothenberg, and Black Mountain Blues, on Robert Creeley, which I hope to see launched in the coming year
The ten poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti were all lined up to celebrate his 102nd birthday, which would have been on 24th March 2021. Sadly, he didn’t quite make it, & died on 22nd February. Here, to celebrate his long & productive life, not least as one of America’s greatest publishers, are those poems, filmed at City Lights Bookstore, in 2002.