Note: Chapter three was previously published in Beatdom. ∘∘∘ Pre-emptive of 1960s counter-culture, in which exploded artistic self-expression and a freer way of relating to community and relationships, Ginsberg’s poetry deals with life at its bleakest and harshest: feelings of vulnerability and inadequacy; the pain of romantic rejection; fear of ageing … [Read more...]
Beat Generation Authors, Poets & Artists
Here you'll find everything relating to the Beat Generation - biographies of the writers, poets, artists, and other players; interviews, book reviews, photo galleries, and more.
Kerouac: The Last Quarter Century by Gerald Nicosia, reviewed by Kevin Riordan
Kerouac: The Last Quarter Century by Gerald Nicosia / Noodlebrain Press/ 2019 “Don’t mention his name, and his name will pass on.” ---Streets of Laredo This is the approach I will use in trying to get my arms around the new work by Gerald Nicosia, a tale of scholarship lost, dealing with the state of Jack Kerouac’s heritage, estate and research in the latter … [Read more...]
On the Dangerous Edge of Things: Weed: Adventures of a Dope Smuggler by Jerry Kamstra, reviewed by Gregory Stephenson
Weed: Adventures of a Dope Smuggler by Jerry Kamstra / Peer Amid Press / 2019 / 978-1-7335481-0-6 / 312 pages This is, to be sure, a tale of adventure – a non-fiction, first-person account of moving a massive amount of marijuana from Mexico into the United States. The suspense and excitement attendant upon that enterprise, the cunning manoeuvres and minute particulars of … [Read more...]
The Beatific Soul: A film featuring Kerouac biographer John J. Dorfner
This short film by Franki Grigoni features John J. Dorfner, author of Kerouac: Visions of Rocky Mount and Kerouac: Visions of Lowell. It includes clips of Jack Kerouac and the road interspersed with John's thoughts about Kerouac, the process of writing the books, his role in Kerouac's induction into the Rocky Mount Hall of Fame, and more. … [Read more...]
Visions, Symbols and Intertextuality: An Overview of William Blake’s Influence on Allen Ginsberg
In a compilation of his personal journals, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice,1 Allen Ginsberg recalled a particular event, which had a strong impact on his career and on his spiritual approach to life. In July 1948, that is to say eight years before the publication of Howl, Allen Ginsberg had a dynamic impression of unification and of human understanding through visions. He … [Read more...]
Before and After Desolation: Two Sojourns by Jack Kerouac at the Hotel Stevens
During the summer of 1956, Jack Kerouac stayed on two occasions at the Hotel Stevens in downtown Seattle. His first stay at the venerable old “skid row” hotel was in the latter part of June of that year, his second stay there some eighty days later in early September. Between these two brief stopovers, pivotal psychological and spiritual events took place in Kerouac’s life, so … [Read more...]
Memory Babes: The Legends of Proust and Kerouac
It was recently announced that Peter Greenaway’s upcoming art installation would be a fully functioning racetrack with real cars inspired by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The iconic British artist and filmmaker is known for avant-garde works that revisit classical art by resituating it in a contemporary setting. Greenaway’s art is one informed by the excellent skill and craft, … [Read more...]
Love and the Titanic: Notes on Last Words: The Final Journals of William Burroughs
On July 30, 1997, William Burroughs wrote: Reading Titanic by Charles Pellegrino. Page 18. What is an experience if it is not shared? Did it even happen? What he wrote later that day is more well-known, his last written words, which seem at a glance so out of character for a writer whose work can often seem inhuman: Love? What is It? Most natural painkiller what … [Read more...]
An excerpt from World Citizen: Allen Ginsberg as Traveller by David S. Wills
The following passage is an excerpt from World Citizen: Allen Ginsberg as Traveller. The events below took place in 1947, during Ginsberg’s first trip to a foreign country. Leaving America In late July, Allen asked Neal to accompany him to Texas. He’d planned this much earlier, even asking Huncke to build them a bed in anticipation of the wild sex Allen hoped would take … [Read more...]
Allen Ginsberg’s Iron Curtain Journals, reviewed by Marc Olmsted
Iron Curtain Journals (January-May 1965) by Allen Ginsberg, edited by Michael Schumacher / University of Minnesota Press / Iron Curtain Journals covers a particularly interesting slice of time in Allen Ginsberg's writing, Jan.-May 1965, anticipated by 1961's "Prose Contribution to the Cuban Revolution," and bracketing the creation of the major poems "Kral Majales" and … [Read more...]
Why Kerouac?
People say I’m obsessed with Jack Kerouac. They point to my blog, to my checked flannel shirts, to my over 140 Kerouac or Kerouac-related books (that I read, not that I wrote), to the one book I have written (about guess who?), to the friendships I’ve developed because of Kerouac, to my constant bringing up connections to Kerouac in daily conversation, and so on. I’m not sure … [Read more...]
The Ghost Sonata
Gregory Corso loved Patti Smith. Patti Smith loved Jim Carroll. Jim Carroll loved Ted Berrigan. Ted Berrigan loved Mark and Mark loved me. Once after Gregory was gone maybe two years, I’m not good with numbers, I ran into Patti at the O.T.B. on King St. It was a delicious day in June, the type day you’d wait a whole year for. Clear sunshine, no humidity, the air clean and cool … [Read more...]
Poetic Licence: The Crime and Hard Time of Gregory Corso, or A Portrait of the Poet as a Young Felon
“When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes I all alone beweep my outcast state. And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries. And look upon myself and curse my fate …” --- William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29 “If you believe you’re a poet, then you’re saved.” --- Gregory Corso A plot to take over the city of New York, a cunning robbery with … [Read more...]
Beat: The Latter Days of the Beat Generation, A First-Hand Account by Andy Clausen
Beat -- The Latter Days of the Beat Generation, A First-Hand Account by Andy Clausen / Autonomedia / 17.95 Here's what I wrote about Andy Clausen when asked to write a blurb for his book of poetry Home of the Brave: ANDY CLAUSEN is an American lug of poetry, unsung worker, overlooked genius, hilarious true original voice toiling in relative obscurity to the shame of those … [Read more...]
The Buddhist Beat Poetics of Diane di Prima and Lenore Kandel by Max Orsini, reviewed by Marc Olmsted
The Buddhist Beat Poetics of Diane di Prima and Lenore Kandel by Max Orsini / Beatdom Books / 224 pages / July 2018 / 978-0993409950 Within the all-pervasive expanse of the sky of great emptiness, without center or circumference, The shadowless sun of luminosity naturally arises, without emanating or dissolving, Thus the dense darkness of innate and conceptual ignorance … [Read more...]
Bob Kaufman’s Lonely Vigil – Michael Amundsen
Bob Kaufman the man is hard to pin down. His life is wrapped in mystery, legends, and hagiography. It was in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood where both the legend and the man began to take form. He arrived in the late 1950s when he was 33, having already made contact with notable Beat figures in New York and sailed around the world on merchant ships. Arriving at … [Read more...]
Being Michael Brownstein – Thomas Locicero
Being Michael Brownstein We exit the underground at Penn Station, determined to walk, if only to breathe out the stench of urine from our Long Island lungs. She suggests we stop at Gotham Book Mart. I spend two hundred dollars on books and then realize I have no way to transport them. She guards them while I hunt for a backpack. I return to give words a piggyback … [Read more...]
Translating the Counterculture: The Reception of the Beats in Turkey by Erik Mortenson, reviewed by Marc Olmsted
TRANSLATING THE COUNTERCULTURE The Reception of the Beats in Turkey by Erik Mortenson / Southern Illinois University Press / 978-0809336548 / 2018 The premise is a fascinating one. Erik Mortenson actually was IN Turkey during its attempted coup in 2016 and had to leave with his family. He taught at the Koç University in Istanbul, so this is no thesis conducted from afar. … [Read more...]
Now What’s Wrong? Reflections on Allen Ginsberg’s Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986-1992
After the accomplishments of late nineteenth and early twentieth century experimentalists Whitman, Dickinson, Rimbaud, and the Modernist poets Apollinaire, Cendrars, Mayakovsky, Stevens, Williams, H.D., Lorca, Vallejo and Neruda---every poet runs the risk of being trite in subject matter or derivative or retrograde as a stylist, or drastically both. Taste is a loaded factor, … [Read more...]
Celebrating ruth weiss on her 90th birthday
ruth was born in Berlin on June 24th, 1928 -- and what a life she’s had so far! Actually, it could have been very short-lived if she and her parents had not managed to escape from Nazi-Germany via Austria and the Netherlands and barely made it to the USA in 1939. Moving from one place to the other became more or less a pattern of her life with stations in Vienna, Chicago, … [Read more...]
Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg: A Story of Influences
The well-known link between Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman comes from both Ginsberg's readers and Ginsberg himself. One of the first explicit mentions of Walt Whitman in Ginsberg's published poetry is to be found in a 1954 poem entitled “Siesta in Xbalba And Return to the States”1: […] – Returning armed with New Testament critic of horse and mule tanned and … [Read more...]
a toast to ti-jean in a liverpool gloom saloon
12 March 2018 It is said that a woman haunts, she sees everything. An observer, a writer, a siren of dreams. In my heart and mind, I am always searching for slivers of paradise while being silently pulled towards some sort of freedom I can’t quite describe, but desire all the time. Again and again I find myself in Liverpool, where everything is nothing and exactly as it … [Read more...]
Jack Kerouac: Avatar of American Buddhism
"I have nothing to offer but my own confusion." -- JK It is intriguing that secular, educated Americans often have difficulty with the rituals and story of Christianity, seeing it as irrational, but eagerly read their horoscope or find new age morality or belief systems relevant to their lives. As traditional organized religion has lessened in influence, spiritual needs and … [Read more...]
The Guardian and the Familiar: William S. Burroughs and Cats
“O fiery river “Spread over this American land. “Drown out the falsity, the smug contempt “For what does not pay … “What would you pay Christ to die again?” -- Kenneth Patchen, from “O Fiery River” William Burroughs has to look after his cats. “I simply could not stand to see my little cats hungry.” But there’s more to this than simple natural compassion. He sees … [Read more...]
I, Too, at the Beginning by Ted Joans
I, Too, at the Beginning I am the early Black Beat I read with some of the Best Beat minds When the Apple was Beat Generating I lived in Greenwich Village I was there Where I read poems and painted poetry Whilst worthy constituents Dwelled elsewhere It was me/myself/and I Who created the original "BIRD LIVES" I wailed & wailed In coffee shops wayback … [Read more...]
And When I Die, I Won’t Stay Dead: a review of the Bob Kaufman documentary
THE POET KNOWS HE MUST WRITE THE TRUTH, EVEN IF HE IS KILLED FOR IT, FOR THE SPHINX CANNOT BE DENIED -- Bob Kaufman, "THE POET" The life and times of Bob Kaufman, the influential and defiant Beat poet, are chronicled in Billy Woodberry's spellbinding documentary, And When I Die, I Won't Stay Dead. And while Kaufman may have died over thirty years ago, his beatific … [Read more...]
Here to Learn: Remembering Paul Bowles by Mark Terrill
In the spring of 1982 I was working as a deck machinist on a cable-laying ship based out of Norfolk, Virginia. In a copy of the Village Voice that I’d picked up while on shore leave, I saw an advertisement for a writing workshop with Paul Bowles in Tangier, Morocco, scheduled for that summer. I immediately sent away for an application form, and when it arrived, I carefully … [Read more...]
Neeli Cherkovski’s Elegy For My Beat Generation, reviewed by Yannis Livadas
Elegy For My Beat Generation by Neeli Cherkovski / Lithic Press / 978-0-9975017-9-7 The Beat Generation as a literary phenomenon was over, or more correctly, was completed, with the last works of Jack Kerouac. Its poetical and prose heritage, although it concerns, at most, works of only five or six people, is particularly important. The first echo of this generation, or … [Read more...]
Passing Through: Allen Ginsberg & Peter Orlovsky in Copenhagen, January 1983
As part of their reading tour through a dozen European countries, poets Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, and their musical accompanist Steven Taylor, arrive by train in Copenhagen in the chill dark of an afternoon in early January of 1983. Birgit and I welcome them with red tulips and after shaking hands help them to carry their baggage from the platform upstairs and through … [Read more...]
The Intersection of Buddhism and the Beat Generation
The 1950s in America was not a period known for its religious diversity. The spiritual consumerism that we know today had yet to be established and the post-War era was defined by adherence to familial and traditional values, including a religious conformity of traditional Catholic-Protestant beliefs (Ellwood 172). The Beat writers were among the minority of spiritual seekers … [Read more...]
Junk Nightmares
William Burroughs was troubled in his childhood by a “fear of nightmares.” The dreams themselves weren’t always so bad. Like when he seemed to wake to find little men playing in a block house he’d made – uncanny yes, but it filled him with wonder rather than fear. It wasn’t what he saw so much as what he didn’t see. “I was afraid to be alone, and afraid of the dark, and afraid … [Read more...]
Visions of Cody, a book of martyrdom
"Time is the purest and cheapest form of doom." -- Jack Kerouac Apropos Kerouac, I think that there is nothing more important, more significant today, than reading his books and evaluate them without associating them with the “beat phenomenon." Kerouac is an author too diverse and expansive, by far the best and the most influential of his generation, to merely continue to … [Read more...]
Book Review — First Thought: Conversations with Allen Ginsberg
First Thought: Conversations with Allen Ginsberg edited by Michael Schumacher / University of Minnesota Press / March 17, 2017 / 978-0816699179 Michael Schumacher is one of the major scholars of Allen Ginsberg, and has thus far written the best biography of him, Dharma Lion. First Thought, Michael Schumacher's collection of Allen Ginsberg interviews, is an excellent … [Read more...]
Out to Lunch with William Burroughs: Who Owns the Dropper Owns the Fix
It was summer 1991, I think, when sharing a joint on a brick fire escape after a night of acid-tapped cartoon lunacy, my friend Steve exhaled smoke into the Manchester morning and casually asked if I’d heard of a writer called William Burroughs. I hadn’t, but that moment has stayed with me as the dawn of what was to become a deep and unremitting love for the man J.G. Ballard … [Read more...]
Jack Kerouac’s Creative Birth
Excerpted from manuscript titled I Live In Two Worlds: The Literary Cosmos of Jack Kerouac to be published by Rowman & Littlefield in late 2017 We first read a hand-written time-wheel created by Kerouac documenting the spiritual/psychological growth of a character named Peter Martin. The pie-graph starts from 1937 circumnavigating through 1945. In it, Kerouac … [Read more...]
Prelude to Big Sur: Kerouac in Spring & Summer 1960
It is sunny, no humidity in the late spring of 1960. A brisk breeze blows in Northport, Long Island where Jack Kerouac has made his home with his mother for two years now. He sits in his yard reading his copy of Suranguma Sutra: What suffers rebirth is not the individual, but the pain of individuality… He is sober, for now, having taken upon himself a concerted effort … [Read more...]
This is IT: Van Gogh and Kerouac
"Dat is Het." In Vincent van Gogh’s Dutch tongue, he extolled this triumphant realization, “Dat is Het!” It lay the foundation for a rich flood of work. He was twenty-four years old. The years leading to this triumph had not been kind. Stymied by bouts of depression and considered a family outcast, Van Gogh sought divine meaning from a cruelly dealt hand, merging the … [Read more...]
Beatnik / Kerouac and Rock ‘n Roll: Two essays by Juan Arabia
Beatnik The origin of "beat" is as a word of oral usage, closer to experience; in its meaning of "beat down" it suggests the being as defeated or battered down. It points toward a certain continuation--open to the world--of the body that breaks with unveiling death. Kerouac includes it into the discourse of “the other,” that is, us, in the middle of a conversation. In … [Read more...]
The sardonic pilgrimage of Jack Kerouac
The works of Jack Kerouac constitute a rich branch of the American literary tradition, which -- through the craftiness of such important writers, like Kerouac himself -- managed to escape the swamp of intellectual, expressional, pompousness. Ergo, the books of Jack Kerouac do not compose a shadowy and somehow pointless incident, merely supporting the matured American … [Read more...]
A Few Far-Flung Fragments of Forgotten Kerouaciana
There are still a few odd jottings and stray scribbles from the pen of Jack Kerouac – elusive bits and bobs published during the author’s lifetime – that remain unrecorded in bibliographies and/or uncollected in compilations of his writings. Admittedly, these fugitive fragments of Kerouac’s writing are not necessarily all lost literary gems, but I would argue that they merit … [Read more...]
