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Post by suspendedzen on Mar 12, 2008 22:20:48 GMT -5
Here is a thread where we discuss the literary gifts bestowed upon us by the beat generation of writers.
A few of them are even still alive and active. Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Ferlinghetti. I honestly have no idea how Burroughs managed to live so long. Guy remained as eloquent as Adlai Stevenson into the 80s and 90s.
To me, there has been no literary/artisitic revolution more important than that forged by the destroyed minds of that generation's best.
Post by suspendedzen on Mar 13, 2008 12:42:27 GMT -5
The mention of Hunter Thompson is interesting. While he came along about a decade after the "official" Beat window, he certainly fit in with that philosophy. Another great writer who came along later but is best categorized (he also felt this way about himself) as Beat was Richard Brautigan.
I wonder how many millions of people's lives were changed by the writing of Jack Kerouac? As his contemporary poet, Gregory Corso, put it, Kerouac treaded very close to th appelation of "divine".
Post by GratefulHippie on Mar 13, 2008 13:00:54 GMT -5
suspendedzen said:
The mention of Hunter Thompson is interesting. While he came along about a decade after the "official" Beat window, he certainly fit in with that philosophy. Another great writer who came along later but is best categorized (he also felt this way about himself) as Beat was Richard Brautigan.
I wonder how many millions of people's lives were changed by the writing of Jack Kerouac? As his contemporary poet, Gregory Corso, put it, Kerouac treaded very close to th appelation of "divine".
Kerouac will always hold a place in my heart. my best friend did her undergrad thesis on him, and his application of religion/buddhism into his writing. it was a great read once she was done, and she had to read SO many of his books, that it got me into him.
and yes, HST was a few years late on the actual beat generation, but he is most certainly a beat writer, IMO
Post by suspendedzen on Mar 30, 2008 0:19:44 GMT -5
In case anyone might be interested, an essay on Howl.
'Gyzm of Consciousness: The Images and Rhythm of Howl'
Allen Ginsberg's Howl both consumes and breathes out the rhythm and the images of Life. While both a separate terms in the study of literature for appropriate reason, it is quite accurate to also see both working together as though they were a couple of lovers' hands entwined. The magic of Ginsberg is in how he allows the reader to see the rest of those two hands' bodies in all their shared action, be it glorious or not. Such is life. Poetry is the crow's route to the soul, to the human condition, and Ginsberg illuminated that past as grotesquely bright as possible in Howl.
In considering the melding of rhythm and images into this epic glimpse of the human experience, I will focus on the first section of Howl. This, probably the most widely known section of the poem, begins with Allen Ginsberg's iconic eyewitness testimony of "the best minds of [his] generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked." (Ginsberg 1-2) From the beginning, both eyes, the imagination, and unconsciously tapping fingers and feet are kidnapped and dragged into this unrelenting poem. One can see beyond the words and into pictures of "angelheaded hipsters" (5) as they walk, hitchhike, dance, and burn up in the "starry dynamo in the machinery of night." (6) There is sight and there is also feel. I can see the hipster just as clearly as I feel the rhythmic steps of his gait. The spotlight of the city gleam burns constant. I feel the tapping of giant clock hands overhead as they drone forth the mechanized time at all hours.
The setting most often referenced in Howl is the inner-city and all the bitter trappings that accompany it. To those who have seen, felt really, the angry pulse of such conditions, the sights of the homeless and the drug-addicted in "poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high" (7) huddled or scheming or dying "under the El" (10). I think of some of the most wretched people, strung out, that I've ever encountered and can see them as clearly as Ginsberg saw his most desperate junkie friends as he wrote how they
"ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night" (23-24) And lines just like that, beyond the pictures conjured, display the intense rhythm of Howl, the beat, beat, beat, the drumming of the heart. The constant sounds that permeate the scope of the American City and elevate it to a realm above, beneath, and within, all at once, the people that function today out of a not-always-desired need for a tomorrow. Awful and tragic as it may often be, it remains important, to me anyway, to not discard anything in life for no reason but fear or ignorance. Just as Howl accepts, and even glorifies the urchin elements alongside the splendid, I will not avoid the broken glass sidewalks of the cities for I have known the feeling of "when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy." (69-70)
The aspect of Howl that probably impresses me, never fails to drop my bottom jaw in awe with each new experience, is its unceasing tight rhythm. In the parlance of its own time, it was all that jazz; in the slang of the today that it lives still so relevant within, it has the hip-hop flow and punch of Biggie Smalls. At times the words seem to be swinging out as if they were the tape wrapped around a prizefighters fists. There is an "endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on Benzedrine" (35-36) and the sounds of "yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering." (49-50) Perhaps most delightful of the entire piece are the charmingly simplistic rhythm of the same two-syllable word said three times, "boxcars boxcars boxcars," (62) and the humorous back-to-back wordplay of "cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully" (155) With both of those examples the reader/listener is again given a steady barrage of images along with the beat of the unfolding wordplay. This is the absolute grit of the American language barreling out of Ginsberg at locomotive speed. And as we roll along on his torrent of words we can look through the window of a younger soul to see "storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light". (31-32) This is a rhythm of words that drum beneath a larger rhythm, a thumping groove that the collective reader slides into amidst a shared memory of driving through a town, be it small or metropolis, amongst friends, taking part in some sort of communal activity amidst the jarring realities of the constant fluorescent realities.
Ginsberg could not contain his exuberance to live and chronicle Life, be it the sugary or the painful, to New York or Jersey and so he, as Jack Kerouac would do not long after, took to the roads. He shares his reveries of those "who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation, who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision". (175-179) Covering lines 175-179, there is a pair of strophes ruminating on the road and its consequences, the journey and its tolls and rewards. Ginsberg feeds us images of a fiery James Dean death with "hotrod-Golgotha" and a moment of some kind of indigo-light stardom as a jazzman to illustrate the divergent results that can wait at the end of any travel in search of one's vision, the force-to-be-seen that drives us forward.
Ginsberg finished Howl with a few strophes packed with deserving braggadocio. He exposed the brass tack jewels of his ultimate vision for Howl, "to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejecting yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head" (230-234) This, then, is Ginsberg and what he did with this revolutionary poem. Howl. A knife, dipped in immortal ink, was driven into "the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years." (241-242) And, I must ask, will it be to stand up a thousand years hence when Ginsberg's self-prescribed expiration date arrives and, again, return Poetry to those who live and write according to the beating drum of their souls?
