Jack Kerouac by photographer Tom Palumbo, circa 1956.
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
Happy Birthday, Jack.
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;
Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.
Allen Ginsberg read his poem Howl for the first time, at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7, 1955. He was joined that evening by four of his fellow beat compadres: Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen. The event was the brainchild of Wally Hedrick. Hedrick had approached Ginsberg with the idea for a reading at the gallery, but Ginsberg turned him down. He changed his “fucking mind” after completing an early draft of “Howl.”
Kenneth Rexroth introduced the speakers. Neal Cassady and a drunken Jack Kerouac were in the audience along with Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The following day, Ferlinghetti sent a telegraph to Ginsberg offering to publish the poem. It wasn’t long enough for a book so Ferlinghetti requested additional poems.
There were problems right from the start. Many people considered the poem to be obscene. City Lights Publishers published Howl and Other Poems on Nov. 1, 1956, with the British printer Villiers. Customs officials seized 520 copies of the book on March 25, 1957 upon its arrival in the U.S.
“Imagine being arrested for selling poetry!”
—Shigeyoshi (“Shig”) Murao, Manager of City Lights Book Shop
In June 1957 undercover agents arrested the manager of City Lights Book Shop, Shigeyoshi Murao, for selling the book. Those charges were later dropped in court. Ferlinghetti, who was out of town, turned himself in to the San Francisco Police Department’s Juvenile Bureau after an arrest warrant was issued.
People v. Ferlinghetti, went to trial on August 16th in front of Judge Clayton W. Horn. Judge Horn was a Republican who regularly taught Sunday school, but his judicial philosophy lead him to conclude that: “Unless the book is entirely lacking in ‘social importance’ it cannot be held ‘obscene.”‘ Ferlinghetti’s ACLU lawyers called professors, editors, and book reviewers to testify to the poem’s literary merit.
On Oct. 3, 1957, Horn found Ferlinghetti not guilty. “The authors of the First Amendment knew that novel and unconventional ideas might disturb the complacent, but they chose to encourage a freedom which they believed essential if vigorous enlightenment was ever to triumph over slothful ignorance,” Horn wrote in the unpublished opinion.
Howl got the last laugh.
Jack Kerouac’s vision of the Beat Generation was a synthesis of the “beaten down” and the “beatific”. The Beats defied societal norms and rejected the conventions of materialism. Nearly sixty years after Kerouac introduced the phrase along comes a group of writers called the Off-Beat Generation, “a loose association of like-minded writers working across different styles but united by their opposition to a mainstream publishing industry driven by marketing departments.”
Young, untamed, good-looking and as influenced by punk rock as they are by Proust, a new wave of loosely-linked writers dubbed The Off-Beat Generation have been blitzing the net with stories and poems via MySpace and supportive sites such as 3:AM Magazine to organise events and gain publicity.
—Arena Magazine
Let’s meet some of the players…
…and their literary cousins, the Brutalists:
Brutalism is a literary movement affiliated with the Off-Beat Generation that was formed in 2006 by three writers from the north of England (Tony O’Neill, Adelle Stripe and Ben Myers), and “may have been the first literary movement to be launched via MySpace,” where it announced itself with the following manifesto:
Brutalism calls for writing that touches upon levels of raw honesty that is a lacking from most mainstream fiction. We cannot simply sit around waiting to be discovered — we would rather do it ourselves. Total control, total creativity. The Brutalists see ourselves as a band who have put down their instruments and picked up their pens and scalpels instead. “The only maxim we adhere to is an old punk belief, which we have bastardized for our own means: Here’s a laptop. Here’s a spell-check. Now write a book. “Brutalist writing is open to anyone who shares similar ideas about the role of literature.
Much of the writing is raw, edgy, and intense. It is full of the piss and vinegar that fuels the young. It has all of the anger, joy, boredom, and exhilaration of being alive. It’s exciting! It feels as though we just caught the front edge of a new wave of writing and I can’t wait to see where it takes us.
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
Over the past four days, the poetry world has lost three of its leading lights: Leslie Scalapino, Peter Orlovsky, and Andrei Voznesensky.
Leslie Scalapino died on Saturday. She was 65. An experimental writer associated with the West Coast Language poets, Ms. Scalapino was a longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay area where she ran the small press, O Books. She is the author of way (North Point Press, 1988), a long poem which won the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award.
Here is what John Ashbery said of her work:
Leslie Scalapino’s language is often of the disenfranchised kind that rubs elbows with us every day—from graffiti, computer terminals, and cereal boxes. Sometimes this language corresponds with life… Most often it seems to be standing in for life when it has to absent itself for a few minutes, which happens so often.
Her family sums up her life in this obituary.
Peter Orlovsky died on Monday. He was 76. Mr. Orlovsky was probably best known as Allen Ginsberg’s long-time lover and muse. Mr. Orlovsky was credited with sparking Ginsberg’s creative impulse. “Allen needed someone to write to — whenever he wrote poetry, he was sort of writing with someone else’s ear in mind,” said Ginsberg biographer Bill Morgan. “A lot of times, it was Jack Kerouac; and at other times, it was Peter Orlovsky.” They met in 1954, and two years later, Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems ignited the literary landscape.
With Ginsberg’s encouragement, Orlovsky became a poet in his own right. His poems had a playful, conversational style as in “Second Poem,” written in Paris in 1957, when he and Ginsberg were staying with Gregory Corso and William S. Burroughs at the Beat Hotel: “Morning again, nothing has to be done/maybe buy a piano or make fudge.”
Andrei Voznesensky, whom Robert Lowell called, “one of the greatest [living] poets in any language,” died today. He was 77. Mr. Voznesensky came of age in the cultural thaw that followed Stalin’s death. In the 1960s, he attained “rock star” status, as he and fellow “Children of the 60′s” poets, Yevgeny Yevtushenko”, Bella Akhmadulina and Robert Rozhdestvensky filled stadiums for poetry readings.
English critic John Bayley described his feelings after hearing a Voznesensky recitiation of “I Am Goya”:
“Mr. Voznesensky’s recitation of this poem was electrifying, but it may be that the element of performance bulked necessarily larger than the poem’s emotional impact. Russian poetry has always inspired recitation and a rapt response from the reciter’s audience, but Mr. Voznesensky, and his contemporary Yevgeny Yevtushenko, are perhaps the first Russian poets to exploit this in the actual process of composition—to write poems specifically for performing, as pop songs are written for electronic transmission by singers and band”
Here is a brief snippet:
I am Goya
of the bare field, by the enemy’s beak gouged
till the craters of my eyes gape
I am grief
I am the tongue
of war, the embers of cities
on the snows of the year 1941
I am hunger
I am the gullet
of a woman hanged whose body like a bell
tolled over a blank square
I am Goya
All three of these individuals made lasting contributions to the world of poetry. We mourn their loss.
