The poet Michael McClure, who died on May 4, 2020 in his home in Oakland, California, was one of five readers at the seminal Six Gallery poetry reading in San Francisco in 1955 that kicked off the Beat Generation. I always loved his simple and organic poetic style, at once … Read the rest
Phife Dawg aka Malik Taylor, the raspy half of the seminal hiphop band A Tribe Called Quest, has died at the age of 45. The brilliant, funny, wise, immensely talented and lovable rapper from Queens had suffered from diabetes and other ailments for years. Despite his renown as one … Read the rest
It was very easy for me to meet Herschel Silverman, then a Beat/jazz poet of some renown, around twenty-five years ago when I began frequenting the downtown New York City poetry scene that swirled between St. Marks Church, ABC No Rio and the Nuyorican.
These were the years when Allen … Read the rest
(Literary Kicks is twenty years old today. This fact has left me speechless, so I asked Jamelah Earle to send some retrospective thoughts. — Levi)
When I was 16, I was on my high school forensics team. This was not in any way related to anything you might see on … Read the rest
I saw Ray Manzarek, the keyboardist for the Doors who died today, at a poetry show with Michael McClure at the Bottom Line nightclub in New York City a few years ago. I was awestruck by both legends on that stage: McClure for being a Beat Generation poet and … Read the rest
Droopy eyes under the hat. An old, creepy looking man leaning on the bar, crouching like a frail spider among a few smarmy-dressed women. The 50-ish ladies sneered at me when I wandered in off Bleecker and Houston streets on a Tuesday afternoon, but the spider just squiggled his mouth … Read the rest
(This is chapter 27 of my ongoing memoir of the Internet industry.)
It never occurred to me, during my early years running Literary Kicks, that I could use the site to discuss contemporary literature or current writers. There were no lit bloggers around (yet) to compare notes about new books … Read the rest
(This is chapter 12 of my ongoing memoir of the Internet industry.)
Early in 1996 I got an idea to arrange a reading of web writers. There were more and more literary zines and journals popping up on the web, many of them emerging from within New York City and … Read the rest
(This is chapter seven of my ongoing memoir of the Internet industry.)
The World Wide Web was a social network from its earliest days, but it wasn’t much like the social networks of today. It was a small world, for one thing, and everybody in it had some degree of … Read the rest
