Iain Sinclair & Dr Camila Oliveira Querino in conversation,. The conversation will be followed by a live performance of the Sunflower poems and of Ginsberg’s epic masterpiece Howl. Performers including Libro Levi Bridgeman, Tim Arnold, Mark Walton and Vanessa Vie.
Doors: 7pm
Tickets: £12 [£10 concessions]
The Ginsberg In London exhibition and events programme is proudly supported by The Wire magazine.
In 1948, alone in his Harlem apartment, Ginsberg experienced a supernatural vision of the London poet and artist William Blake. He looked out his Harlem window at the bright blue sky and realised that 'the sky had been created, that the sky did the creating’ claiming in later years his drug use was often a means to try to recapture that moment,
Blake, widely considered a seminal figure in the history of poetry, has been described as "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced”. His poem Ah! Sun-flower - the poem that featured in that Harlem vision, inspired Ginsberg's own sunflower poem, Sunflower Sutra, composed in Berkeley in 1955, and Blake continued to be a major influence.
Dr Camila Oliveira Querino and Iain Sinclair discuss both poets, the impact of Blake on Ginsberg and the latter’s 1970 interpretations of Songs of Innocence and Experience (an album produced by Miles).
The conversation will be followed by a live performance of the Sunflower poems and of Ginsberg’s epic masterpiece Howl. Performers including Libro Levi Bridgeman and Vanessa Vie.
Iain Sinclair is a critically-acclaimed poet, writer, flaneur, metropolitan prophet, urban shaman and filmmaker. Much of his work is rooted in London, recently within the influences of psychogeography. His early poetry in the 1960s was self-published, and he worked as a teacher and labourer while researching occult aspects of the city's past. He remains connected with the British avant garde poetry scene and has written a multitude of fiction, poems, essays, criticism and digressions including The Kodak Mantra Diaries, a recollection of the film Ah Sunflower! he made about Ginsberg in London in 1967
Dr Camila Oliveira Querino is a Research Fellow at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon, studying and teaching in the area of counterculture and William Blake. She is a trustee of the Blake Society and is currently writing a monograph on Blake and Music, investigating the impact of Blake’s literary work on the music scene from the 60's to the present.