“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 …”
But then I heard them reading their existential stream of consciousness rants, raves, raps and roars linking thoughts and concepts, with little thought to vocal interest, expression and tone. Their voices natural and flat, their sentences long and unpunctuated except by the odd comma or hyphen, and their accents representative of homes from across the Black streets, or downtown synagogues, they spoke out in free or blank verse. They made their own rhythms based on the free jazz music that they listened to in clubs. These …
“… 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, …”
… wrote it down. They were literary lions working in a historic medium but disassembling and re-assembling the language in ways their parents hadn’t thought of. Poets, or comics, they were as brave as the musicians they admired. They were the Miles Davises of rhyme, the Coltranes of quatrains. If James Joyce could write a sentence that went on for pages, if Walt Whitman could make poetry of real life, then the Beats could drag the price of pork chops into the realm of poetry. And, in “A Supermarket in California” Allen Ginsberg did just that. The poem quoted above is Ginsberg’s classic “Howl.” This is arguably the best known of all the Beat poems by the dean of Beat poets. But there were more.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose City Lights bookshop (co-owned with Peter Martin) was the centre of the movement (if it could be said to have a centre), is represented by three poems, and his “Autobiography” is punctuated by live jazz music. This helps in the presentation, but also in the listener’s understanding of the time and place. Is Ferlinghetti really reading Lorna Doone, one cannot help but wonder? There is humour too; he confesses to have heard both the Gettysburg Address and the Ginsberg address.
Kenneth Rexroth’s reading is accompanied by music, or at least announced by a trumpet flourish. Once you hear the music, even though it’s brief, you hear rhythm and melody in the flat readings. The dryness of the voices is a decision made by the poets to make the words more important than a conversational style might. And in some sense it works. I’ve attended readings where the dramatic style of the reader kept my attention, but when it was all over I couldn’t remember any of the poetry. Who could forget Gregory Corso’s “Mexican Impressions”? The Coca Cola stand, the Ford pickup, the sombrero on the young child’s head.
The first disc is dedicated to Lenny Bruce, and is not so much poetry as a creative use of language. Language is what got Bruce in trouble. A judge told him he must not use “that language again” and Bruce riffs on the fact that, since the judge didn’t specify which words, but only “that language” that he would be essentially muzzled, only able to grunt and mumble for fear of using the wrong “language.” This idol of all of today’s standup comics is demonstrated to be both funny in his earlier work doing voices and situations that we can relate to (such as “How to relaxe your colored friends at parties”) and bitter in his later work. He became distracted by his legal problems later in his career as he riffed on his courtroom experiences. Eventually he would just read transcripts of the trials. The material presented here doesn’t go that far, and is still entertaining.
I haven’t looked at these four discs in order, or chronologically, or even thematically. I think the whole concept of beat is to listen and dig what you hear, and respond. That’s what I’ve tried to do here. To give you a sense of the wealth of the material. To give you a sense of the vibe. These four discs present some of the beat movement’s best. Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Rexroth, Corso and Bruce are joined by John Wieners, Philip Lamantia, Lew Welch, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, Peter Orlovsky and David Melzer. It’s cool, man.
These are the people …
“… 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 …”
And they did all that and more, just as Ginsberg wrote in “Howl.”
You’ve seen that little black-and-white book on the shelves in the hipper bookstores, maybe you even bought a copy, but did you ever get any further than that first line or two? On this magnificent collection you can hear Ginsberg read it himself. It’s far out. And it’s a marvelous use of technology to create this treasure trove of a generation’s poets. Imagine if we had the spoken poems of Blake and his circle … that’s how important this box is.
(Fantasy, 2007)
