ESSENTIAL LISTENING Gary Snyder's Earliest Recorded Poems Reed Magazine / November 2008 "Snyder scholars and buffs alike should take note: this recording is a major find, recovering not only the earliest audio of the poet reading his work, but the earliest work-in-progress version of Snyder's long poem Myths & Texts in any format. The tape also contains six core poems from Riprap in completely finished form, four poems that would go into The Back Country, and eight from Left Out in the Rain. Finally, there are Snyder's introductory remarks and asides to the poems..." (continue)   WHEN THE BEATS CAME BACK Earliest Recording of Ginsberg's "Howl" Reed Magazine / February 2008 "When Snyder and Ginsberg arrived in Portland for their reading at Anna Mann Cottage on February 13, they'd been on the road for three weeks-riding squeezed into the cabs of gyppo rigs or rattling along in the back beds of pickups, or hiking for miles on foot with no rides at all against the vast landscape of the misty Cascades, like tiny figures in a Chinese scroll. If Allen had wanted to "learn hitchhiking" from Snyder, he'd gotten that in spades..." (continue)   WHY PHILIP LAMANTIA DIDN'T READ HIS OWN POEMS AT THE SIX GALLERY Philip Lamantia interviewed by John Suiter Beat Studies Association listserve / July 2005 "But Philip, you still haven't told me-why didn't you read your own poems that night?" I said. Lamantia lit another cigarette. "Okay, okayyyy, I'm trying to tell you, man! But first, you have to understand a little bit about Jaime d'Angulo, you see..." And off he'd go. (continue)   BIG BRIDGE INTERVIEW John Suiter interviewed by Michael Rothenberg Big Bridge Volume 8 / January 2003 "So there it was: a continuous narrative line, from 1952 to 1956. Three writers, good buddies, all three into Buddhism, five mountaintops in the same forest, which became the focal point of a major environmental battle...it wasn't too long before the title Poets on the Peaks came to me, and I saw the possibility of a book. Then, late in 1997 I met Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen..." (continue)   ROLLING TOWARDS THE MOON Jack Kerouac's Last Great Adventure Sierra Magazine / March 1998 "A book from an unlikely source gave an incalculable boost to the staid conservation movement of the 1950s. Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, a celebration of backcountry, Buddhism, and the San Francisco poetry renaissance, was published in 1958. The book's main character, Japhy Ryder, was a prototypical green culture hero, whose guiding influences were John Muir, John Burroughs, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Russian anarchist and naturalist Peter Kropotkin..." (continue)