Let’s talk about the Beats. Well I’ve got to talk about them cos I love them, they were part of my youth, they were more than poets, they were lives lived in poetry and their words were more than poems, they were uncontrolled eruptions of words that could end up effluence or exultation.
I’m sorry, I’m stuck on them: I can’t read the last section of On the Road without welling up. I’m a sick man I know, it has the same effect on me as the last page of The House on Pooh Corner. And they both mention Pooh.
Mea Culpa. Ok they were misogynists, junkies, petty criminals and narcissists, what’s more some of them were shite poets - has there ever been a more overrated poet than Gregory Corso? - but they summed up a changing world with freewheeling words and made every person think they could be a lover, a traveller and a poet. They conjured up a never ending landscape of hope - for change, for kicks, for love- at complete and desperate contrast to what we have now which seems - even without the physical constraints caused by this virus- to be a lockdown of the spirit, the death of hope.
They were also poetry revolutionaries. Alan Ginsberg's Poem 'Howl' in its honesty, its proletarian passion, its subject matter, took literary America by storm. Jack Kerouac's free flowing stream of consciousness writing ('Typing, not writing" according to Truman Capote) mimicked the cadences and patterns of jazz, William Burrough's philosophy of cut-up writing threatened to destroy the very structure of literature itself.
Alan Ginsberg Reads Howl Part 1
Jack Kerouac reads October in the Railway Earth
Revolutionary Letters by Diane Di Prima
Diane Di Prima is probably the best known woman writer of the movement. In my video I read a poem by Brenda Frazer, another of the women who found their voices as a result of their experiences of the time. In her case, as a result of the abusive lifestyle she suffered as the partner of Ray Bresner, a Beat poet.
Tomorrow Live! Gordon Mead!
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