The great thing about appearing to choose something "obvious" is that it reminds you that things that have become iconic are in fact much much more layered and complex than their simulated conversational touchstones would have you believe or recall.
How in tarnation did I get this behind? Oh, with such wistful fondness do I remember a vision of a free spirited, leisurely April, in which this would be my main endeavor, broken only by outings to the park or teaching of a morning! With saudade, then, do I gratefully go about now collating this most loved task with the many many shifts I'm working -- your patience, friends.... <3
Should I do something obvious, then? In figuring how to do four poets-in-one, perhaps let's do a category:
Yes yes, snap bam zoom, here's the Beats.
A great place to start if you're new to this important chapter in 20th Century American Poetry History (or can acknowledge to at least yourself that your first hand reading is spotty at best) is the 1952 New York Times article, This is the Beat Generation, by John Clennon Holmes. Follow link to full text! And here is a link on the etymology of the term.
I'm going to leave the history to you, rather than filling space by reprinting what you can find using the above, and put poets and poems here instead.
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 . . . from HOWL [1955, Full text and audio here]
Kaddish [excerpt]
IV
O mother
what have I left out
O mother
what have I forgotten
O mother
farewell
with a long black shoe
farewell
with old dress and broken stocking
farewell
with six dark hairs on the wen of your breast
farewell
with gold teeth and a long black beard around the vagina
with your sagging belly
with your fear of Hitler
with your mouth of bad short stories
with your fingers of rotten mandolines
with your arms of fat
with your belly of strikes and smokestacks
with your chin of Trotsky and the Spanish War
with your voice singing for the decaying overbroken workers
with your nose of bad lay with your nose of the smell of the pickles of
with your eyes
with your eyes of
with your eyes of no money
with your eyes of false
with your eyes of Aunt Elanor
with your eyes of starving
with your eyes pissing in the park
with your eyes of your failure at the piano
with your eyes of your relatives in
with your eyes of Ma Rainey dying in an ambulance
with your eyes of Czechloslovakia attacked by robots
with your eyes going to painting class at night in the
with your eyes of the killer Grandma you see on the fire escape
with your eyes running naked outof the apartment screaming into the hall
with your eyes being led away by policemen to an ambulance
with your eyes strapped down on the operating table
with your eyes with the pancreas removed
with your eyes of appendix operation
with your eyes of abortion
with your eyes of ovaries removed
with your eyes of shock
with your eyes of lobotomy
with your eyes of divorce
with your eyes of stroke
with your eyes alone
with your eyes
with your eyes
with your Death full of Flowers
[written 1957-1959, more info on Kaddish here]
__
ANNE WALDMAN
Waldman is, in her words, “drawn to the magical efficacies of language as a political act.”
Much to your good fortune and future gratitude, she still reads with some frequency at the Poetry Project, and is ALWAYS present at the New Years
Avail yourself.
The Lie
Art begins with a lie
The separation is you plus me plus what we make
Look into lightbulb, blink, sun’s in your eye
I want a rare sky
vantage point free from misconception
Art begins with a lie
Nothing to lose, spontaneous rise
of reflection, paint the picture
of a lightbulb, or eye the sun
How to fuel the world, then die
Distance yourself from artfulness
How? Art begins with a lie
The audience wants to cry
when the actors are real & passionate
Look into footlight, then feed back to eye
You fluctuate in an artful body
You try to imitate the world’s glory
Art begins with a lie
That’s the story, sharp speck in the eye.
___
Few will know of his devout Catholicism, if mixed unconventionally with Buddhist doctrine, nor of his support of the Vietnam war...? I didn't. A complex character, which is saying not enough at all.
The taste
of rain
-- Why kneel?
of rain
-- Why kneel?
Bowery Blues
The story of man
Makes me sick
Inside, outside,
I don't know why
Something so conditional
And all talk
Should hurt me so.
I am hurt
I am scared
I want to live
I want to die
I don't know
Where to turn
In the Void
And when
To cut
Out
For no Church told me
No Guru holds me
No advice
Just stone
Of New York
And on the cafeteria
We hear
The saxophone
O dead Ruby
Died of Shot
In Thirty Two,
Sounding like old times
And de bombed
Empty decapitated
Murder by the clock.
And I see Shadows
Dancing into Doom
In love, holding
TIght the lovely asses
Of the little girls
In love with sex
Showing themselves
In white undergarments
At elevated windows
Hoping for the Worst.
I can't take it
Anymore
If I can't hold
My little behind
To me in my room
Then it's goodbye
Sangsara
For me
Besides
Girls aren't as good
As they look
And Samadhi
Is better
Than you think
When it starts in
Hitting your head
In with Buzz
Of glittergold
Heaven's Angels
Wailing
Saying
We've been waiting for you
Since Morning, Jack
Why were you so long
Dallying in the sooty room?
This transcendental Brilliance
Is the better part
(of Nothingness
I sing)
Okay.
Quit.
Mad.
Stop.
[my note: do you hear echoes Whitman as much as I do?]
____
The deep love I have for Burroughs's work (and his intense, incredible collaboration with Brion Gysin, whose "Dreammachine" I spoke at length about earlier this year) dare not fit into this already long post.
From the always excellent UBUWEB archive, 50 mp3's of burroughs.
Burroughs relationship with language (which he referred to as both "game" and "virus") defies classification; even while we do not usually categorize him as "poet" he ultimately refuses, as his work, to be categorized.
Not surprisingly, Burroughs often remains in the picture as well as employing the structural games of "cut-up" as part of his practice.
An example, from 1978:
Fear and the Monkey
This text arranged in my New York
Turgid itch and the perfume of death
On a whispering south wind
A smell of abyss and of nothingness
Dark Angel of the wanderers howls through the loft
With sick smelling sleep
Morning dream of a lost monkey
Born and muffled under old whimsies
With rose leaves in closed jars
Fear and the monkey
Sour taste of green fruit in the dawn
The air milky and spiced with the trade winds
White flesh was showing
His jeans were so old
Leg shadows by the sea
Morning light
On the sky light of a little shop
On the odor of cheap wine in the sailors’ quarter
On the fountain sobbing in the police courtyards
On the statue of moldy stone
On the little boy whistling to stray dogs.
Wanderers cling to their fading home
A lost train whistle wan and muffled
In the loft night taste of water
Morning light on milky flesh
Turgid itch ghost hand
Sad as the death of monkeys
Thy father a falling star
Night sky
Dispersal and emptiness.
__
Originally published as William S. Burroughs, “Fear and the Monkey,” Pearl 6 (Odense, Denmark: Fall/Winter 1978). Collected in The Burroughs File, City Lights, 1984. Republished by RealityStudio in August 2010.
