This tumblr website is now here only for archive purposes. To see the latest books, events and other news please visit LarryBeckett.com

Where are you spending your Fourth of July? Eight years ago, in 2015, Larry celebrated Independence Day in England — as a featured guest at the acclaimed Ledbury Poetry Festival, where he performed an excerpt from “Paul Bunyan,”. Some might call that irony, others might see the act itself as a piece of poetry.

You can decide for yourself — the performance has been archived at LedburyPoetry. Larry starts at 26:13, but listen from the beginning which starts with George Wallace who has a voice that resonates.

Howl at the Beat Museum. Live performance by Larry Beckett at the museum in San Francisco. Another cassette recording! Available through SoundOhm.

A cassette tape of the 2022 London performance by Larry Beckett & Stuart Anthony now available on the Dutch label Counter Culture Chronicles. Find it through bandcamp or
Soundohm

“To the ancient Greeks, they were hybrid creatures, part bird, part woman, who lured sailors to their death with the spell of their music. In 1967, singer and songwriter Tim Buckley and poet and lyricist Larry Beckett paid tribute to those deathly seducers with ‘Song to the Siren,’ a haunting ode to doomed love whose story is the stuff of pop legend.” David Cheal Financial Times APRIL 22 2016

Full article here: https://tinyurl.com/ycvs324p

Imagine our delight when, on a regular visit to the official Allen Ginsberg website [allenginsberg.org], we read this: <<check out also Stuart Anthony and Larry Beckett’s 2022 version of Mirabeau Bridge (“Le Pont Mirabeau”)>> Thanks, https://www.facebook.com/therealallenginsberg!

Simon Warner shared an email postcard from UK guitarist Stuart Anthony who, in June, was in London for a live gig with Larry and then in Paris to visit the inspiration for the Apollinaire poem that gives the duo’s most recent album release Mirabeau Bridge its Gallic title… To read that postcard, head to https://simonwarner.substack.com/p/correspondence-7-stuart-anthony
*
*
*
#poetry #beatpoetry #guillaumeapollinaire @instapollinaire

“After writing most of the long poems of American Cycle and contemplating writing a beginning and ending, I thought of when I was rolling down the freeway back into Los Angeles after years away, and how those old off-ramp names — Sepulveda, Sunset, Figueroa — had stayed in my memory, like the names of rivers a century before. These highways are our rivers. And then from On the Road I took the image of the American driver and imagined him going north on Highway 1, and then west on Route 66, along the way encountering the next nexus, where history, legend, and song mysteriously cross, and I had US Rivers, to start and finish the epic.”

Mutual admiration society: Larry praised Marc Zegan’s newly published book, Lyon Street, and Marc praised Larry. “Larry Beckett, perhaps best known for his songwriting gifts, is a mythic poet of ground shaking proportion. He reaches deeply into the lives of gods, sirens, epic heroes, and magical figures who open pathways between the material world and more subtle realms. He makes present the mythos and epic literature at the heated core of the western tradition, the bohemian freedom of the 19th and early 20th century, and the near boundless scope of the real and imagined American West.” -Marc Zegans

Lyon Street availabe now.