Beat Poetry

1. Beat Poetry SAM HOLZMAN BOBBY DULLY

2. Beat Generation • Underground, anti-conformist movement in New York • Core community of friends (Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, Burroughs) • Beat culture includes rejection of mainstream American values • Drug experimentation • Interest in Eastern spirituality • Sexual exploration • Controversial figures in America because of the subject matter of their works, specifically Ginsberg’s Howl

3. Characteristics of Beat Poetry • Continuous, spontaneous rhythm • “…tried to convey, uncensored, their field of perception at the moment of composition” (Steven Watson) • Forthright expression of emotion • Visceral engagement in gritty experiences • Desire to find truth in everyday existence • Connections to spirituality • Buddhism, Judaism, Catholicism • Boundary-pushing subject matter (drug use, sexuality)

4. Allen Ginsberg • 1926-1997 • One of the leaders of the Beat Generation • Practicing Buddhist • Opposed capitalism and conformity in America • Developed epic, free verse style • Inspired by Walt Whitman • Graphic depiction of sexuality • Psychedelic drugs and marijuana • Famous Works • Howl: most well-known poem of the Beat Generation • A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley • A Supermarket in California

5. Gregory Corso • 1930-2001Youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers • Considered by Ginsberg and Kerouac to be a superior poet • Used surreal juxtaposition • Famous Works • Marriage • Bomb • Last Night I Drove A Car

6. A Supermarket in CaliforniaAllen Ginsberg What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.  In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!  What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?  I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.  I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?  I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.  We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.  Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?  (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)  Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.  Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?  Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank  and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe? 

7. A Strange New Cottage in BerkeleyAllen Ginsberg      All afternoon cutting bramble blackberries off a tottering brownfence     under a low branch with its rotten old apricots miscellaneous underthe leaves,     fixing the drip in the intricate gut machinery of a new toilet;     found a good coffeepot in the vines by the porch, rolled a big tire outof the scarlet bushes, hid my marijuana;     wet the flowers, playing the sunlit water each to each, returning for godly extra drops for the stringbeans and daisies;     three times walked round the grass and sighed absently:     my reward, when the garden fed me its plums from the form of asmall tree in the corner,     an angel thoughtful of my stomach, and my dry and lovelorn tongue.

8. Marriage (stanzas I + II)Gregory Corso When she introduces me to her parents back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie, should I sit knees together on their 3rd degree sofa and not ask Where's the bathroom? How else to feel other than I am, often thinking Flash Gordon soap-- O how terrible it must be for a young man seated before a family and the family thinking We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou! After tea and homemade cookies they ask What do you do for a living? Should I tell them? Would they like me then? Say All right get married, we're losing a daughter but we're gaining a son-- And should I then ask Where's the bathroom? Should I get married? Should I be Good? Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustaus hood? Don't take her to movies but to cemeteries tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries and she going just so far and I understanding why not getting angry saying You must feel! It's beautiful to feel! Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky—

9. Constantly Risking AbsurdityLawrence Ferlinghetti Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of the day
performing entrachats
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be
For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap
And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence

10. Childhood’s RetreatRobert Duncan It’s in the perilous boughs of the tree    out of blue sky  the wind    sings loudest surrounding me .And solitude,   a wild solitude ’s reveald,   fearfully,   high     I’d climb    into the shaking uncertainties, part out of longing,   part     daring my self ,part to see that widening of the world,   part to find my own, my secret hiding sense and place, where from afar    all voices and scenes come back —the barking of a dog,   autumnal burnings, far calls,   close calls—   the boy I was calls out to me here the man where I am   “Look! I’ve been where you most fear to be.”

11. Howl (excerpt)Allen Ginsberg I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night