Lesson 8

The Beats Go On

Introduction to five other significant Beat-related writers and their works. The influence of Beats in the Sixties and beyond.

Gregory Corso: Biographical Notes and Works

The man whom William S. Burroughs praised as “a poet” was born March 26, 1930, in Greenwich Village, one of the most artist-centered locales in the nation. He had a genuinely Beat beginning; like Neal Cassady his mother abandoned him early on, and he spent a good many years of his youth in foster homes and one form of jail or another. The muse of poetry — the steamy Romantics — descended on him while he was serving a sentence for robbery, and in 1950, shortly after he finished his three-year term behind bars, he met Allen Ginsberg in a Greenwich Village bar, and he was quickly assimilated into Ginsberg’s circle of aspiring poets. He’s still in that circle spinning poems. Let’s get to some of them.

“I am 25″ is a hilarious declaration of his poetic independence, his exulting of “love” and “madness for Shelley, Chatterton, Rimbaud.” He emphatically announces his contempt for the “OLD POETMEN.” Young poets aren’t bound by the constraints of form, but to their ancient faces he’ll conform, but the minute they trust him, he’s got other plans — to silence them by violence and “steal their poems.” Corso shows the energy with which one generation replaces another. The fervent new generation has to get its poems from somewhere.

“Visions of Rotterdam” is a little off the beaten Corso path, but it’s so beautiful I wanted you to read it. The pictures are so clear; you can almost see the images of the Dutch city — home of the largest port in Europe, which made it particularly strategic during wartime. It was so heavily bombed by the Germans that one of the few standing buildings that dates to the pre-war times is the city building, which was reconstructed from its own rubble. I’ve been told by natives of Rotterdam that some part of the city was burning from bombs for four consecutive years. Hence, Rotterdam is a very modern European city.

“Visions of Rotterdam” is a good prelude to Corso’s famous “Bomb.” If it were all on one page, you could see that it is shaped like a mushroom cloud, and the words suggest the angst of the generation that first faced nuclear annihilation. Read the phrases carefully. Note how fragmented the poem is — how better to depict the world going up in radioactive smoke? How can the poet come to terms with the existence of the bomb? When he says, “O Bomb I love you” does he mean it? What is it like to realize that once the force was unleashed, everyone on the planet would have to consider the fact that the nuclear threat would never go away?

“Marriage” is a humorous consideration of a serious question: “Should I get married? Should I be good?” He plays out the entire marriage process in his mind, imagining himself a husband and father, playing out domestic scenes. What conclusion do you think he comes to? Is he accepting, ambivalent, or resisting in the end? What does the poem tell you about Corso’s concept of romantic relationships? Compare the poem with Snyder’s “Praise for Sick Women.” What attitudes toward women do you see in these poems?

Kenneth Rexroth: Biographical Notes and Works

Kenneth Rexroth was born on December 22, 1905, and he died on June 6, 1982. This solstice child was not one of the Beats. He may have been the Beat poets’ launch pad, however. By the time Allen Ginsberg came to him in San Francisco carrying a letter of introduction from William Carlos Williams, Rexroth was a leader in the West Coast poetry scene. Were it not for the stable and growing foundation of West Coast poets that Rexroth had been so instrumental in fostering in the early Fifties, the Beats might not have made such a huge splash. Rexroth gambled with his own credibility when he decided to feature five unknowns in a reading at the Six Gallery in October 1955.

Rexroth never was a Beat proper, but his influence was tremendous. He may have pointed Snyder at Buddhism and Japanese poetry — certainly Rexroth was one of the first poets to study Japanese philosophy and poetry. He was also steeped in classical literature, mythology, modern poetry, and the Bible; all of those converge in “Thou Shalt Not Kill” (The Portable Beat Reader, 233) to create a powerful look at the myriad ways by which humankind violates that straightforward commandment.

Aspects of his profound poem “Thou Shalt Not Kill” may have inspired Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Let’s examine that assertion a little more closely. The poem’s four parts lament the “socially acceptable” deaths of poets as well as the slaughter of generations through warfare and tyranny. He laments a long list of dead poets and a history of young men slain in battle. What are the opposing forces? Commercialism, greed, and, yes, that old culprit Moloch, who is named at the end of part three. Could Ginsberg have borrowed the devouring Beast of “Howl?”

The poem is obviously more controlled than “Howl,” and it has many many more allusions (which forced the editor to use footnotes); it looks like more traditional verse with short lines and capital letters at the beginning of each line. However, look at the repetitions, the catalogues — how many times does Rexroth begin a series of lines with the same words? What effect is he trying to create? Do you see how Ginsberg used similar repetition in “Howl”?

A final similarity between the poems is the last section, which is about a particular person, the fate of whom has inspired the poem. In Rexroth’s case, the death of Dylan Thomas, the famous Welsh poet who collapsed and died while on a reading tour in the United States. Success killed him, alcohol killed him, the materialistic culture that made him a god and skyrocketed him to fame killed him — devoured him whole, as it has so many other good artists.

The poem is divided into sections, each internally unified; Ginsberg’s poem is much the same. “Thou Shalt Not Kill” is more sweeping than “Howl,” though. Rather than focusing solely on “his generation,” Rexroth laments the destruction of generations all the way back to ancient Greece. As such, the poem is also more universal and “literary” than “Howl” — you have to know quite a lot of history and classic literature to understand all that Rexroth alludes to.

Rexroth’s poem is not so jazz-inspired, and it does not use any “controversial” language, but its scope is larger than that of “Howl” because it is not about madness, but the reality of war, generations of genocide, the cosmic body and soul count.

As you can see from the poem, Rexroth was intensely concerned with literature and politics. Several years older than even Burroughs, Rexroth was almost an adult at the end of World War I, and he sat out World War II in a camp for conscientious objectors. Throughout his life he wore his politics on his sleeve, weaving them in through his many literary works.

Michael McClure: Biographical Notes and Works

In his 67 years, Michael McClure has written poems, plays, and essays. He was born in Kansas in 1932, and he arrived in San Francisco in 1954. Like Rexroth, he was a huge player in the San Francisco art scene. He was also a reader at the Six Gallery on that legendary October night. Like many of his contemporaries, he experimented with psychedelic drugs as a means of freeing the mind from all restrictive structures, and he was a naturalist who explored his kinship with the animals. Many of his poems have traditional structures that verge on resembling short jazz lines, and later in his career he wrote poems that he read to music. McClure is still going strong. In fact, he published two books in 1999.

I asked you to read the two poems that he read at the Six Gallery, “Point Lobos: Animism” and “For the Death of 100 Whales” in The Portable Beat Reader. They reveal McClure’s obsession with animate beings living full-bodied existences, aware that each part of themselves is an animal with a soul. Like Snyder, McClure sees nature as a conduit of revelation, and in exploring nature carefully, meticulously, we might see that the earth and its inhabitants, animal and vegetable, give us our names.

When we know our true link with the natural world and its inhabitants, we realize that the senseless slaughter of any animate being (whale or old growth forest) also slowly kills the butchers. The spirit of the entire world weakens. The sentiments of “For the Death of 100 Whales” affirm these notions, saying that the wanton killing of the whales celebrated in Time magazine was an act of horror, sacrilege, and unholiness. He is not a poet-maker in the sense that he believes he can re-create the lost whales — he marks and mourns the death of a part of himself and the collective.

Have a look at his more recent work on pages 556-58. See how the shape of the poems informs their subject, how his concerns are still the same, but the language is even more precise.

Ken Kesey: Biographical Notes and Works

Born in 1935, Ken Kesey forms a link between the Beats and the acid generation of the Sixties, and he remains a staunch believer in the mind-expanding powers of LSD. In the early Sixties he participated in intensive government studies of LSD and other hallucinogens, and later he went “on the road” in a psychedelic bus (a 1939 International Harvester school bus) with Neal Cassady at the wheel to advocate acid use across the nation. Kesey, Cassady, and their entourage were called the Merry Pranksters, and their outrageous exhibitions in cities across the nation created quite a stir.

Kesey’s two most important works are the novels One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion. The former is a critically lauded social commentary that depicts American culture as a madhouse in which creativity and non-conformity are brutally stifled. Randle Patrick McMurphy is an unforgettable character, and the haunting end of the story is one you won’t soon forget.

The assigned excerpt from “The Day after Superman Died” is a Kerouac-style treatment of Kesey’s response to hearing that Neal Cassady had died in Mexico. Note the allusion to Kerouac — the passage about the Holy Goof. Do you see any similarities between their writing styles? Both are superb at recreating raucous voices and precise physical detail, but Kesey’s writing is more conventional in its structure than Kerouac’s. His punctuation doesn’t direct your reading, and he doesn’t have rapidly changing pacing; the prose is less spontaneous and the narrative more straightforward. Kerouac offered no rendering of the death of “Dean Moriarty,” but it seems fitting that Kesey should make the point that in some way the man counted.

Diana DiPrima: Biographical Notes and Works

Born August 6, 1934, Diana DiPrima is a mother of five and second-generation Italian-American whose poetry and political activism align her with the Beats. She left Swarthmore College in 1953 to pursue writing, and that blended into political activism. Inevitably, in her scene, she was destined to meet Allen Ginsberg. In 1957 she met both him and Kerouac, and she was assimilated into the Beat circle and the arts community in New York. Like many of the others, she was an editor and publisher.

During the Sixties she headed west to San Francisco for a time, then roamed the nation in the obligatory vehicle of the counter-culture, a Volkswagen bus. Like many of the Beats, she immersed herself in studies of Buddhism. In the Seventies she taught at the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, which Ginsberg co-founded.

Her poem “The Practice of Magical Evocation” is a response to the early lines of Snyder’s “Praise for Sick Women,” telling the searing birth-story from the female perspective. Her poem charts the distance between the male and female perspectives; through her words she almost dares him to cross the unimaginable abyss of the torn flesh through which all humans emerge. What do you think about the poems, side by side? How are the genders different? The same?

Lest you decide DiPrima is a man-hater, contrast the poem with her quiet yet epic celebration of her grandfather in “April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa.” The title twists the poem’s meaning somewhat, raising the question of her sincerity, but the memory of her grandfather’s consciousness clearly influenced the directions she has taken in her own life. There is more than blood in the kinship she shares with him in this loving tribute.

The Beats and Their Flower Children Permeate Rock and Roll Culture

The influence of the Beats on the culture of the Sixties should be obvious — especially since so many of the prominent Beats were major figures at the time. It is no exaggeration to say that the flower children of Haight-Ashbury were their children. So many songwriters and bands were inspired by the Beats that they are too many to mention, so we’ll have to settle for a few highlights.

Of course, the Grateful Dead have to be first on the list; they’d been on the scene since they called themselves the Warlocks. When Ken Kesey was throwing huge parties called “Acid Tests” in San Francisco, Jerry Garcia and company were the house band. They grabbed the Beat baton, tie-dyed it, and carried it through several decades.

One of the most influential songwriters of the era, Bob Dylan was an early offshoot of the Beats, bending the concept of the lyric into new shapes and subjects. Obviously they were not his sole influence, but he carried the spirit of the Beats into the world of music with him and transformed the terrain forever.

The many protest songs of the Vietnam War era hearken to the spirit of the Beats. They were banned from radio stations, but live performances helped keep the anti-war movement going.

A number of bands have alluded to the Beats. A short list includes Pink Floyd, Lou Reed, Richard Hell, Rage Against the Machine, They Might Be Giants, King Crimson, Steely Dan, Patti Smith, 10000 Maniacs, Laurie Anderson, Kurt Cobain, Nirvana, Blue Oyster Cult, Tom Waits, Janis Joplin, David Bowie, and Van Morrison. Artists who were babes in arms during the Sixties and Seventies now talk about the Beats in their music.

Conclusion: Keep the Beat Going

As you know, this course has been designed as a mere introduction to the Beats, and even as such, it barely touches on some of the prominent figures and a handful of their works. Much remains to be discovered. Hopefully this course has served as a map that you can use to chart your own course through the realm of the Beats. Where you go from here is up to you — will you read more or write, or both? Ultimately, the Beats are about motion and expanding consciousness. In the spirit of the Beats, I wish you a good journey.