Jazz and Poetry

 

Poetry and jazz at the 2019 Italian Fusion Festival in Dublin

 

 

 

     This survey is idiosyncratic and far from exhaustive.  Far from attempting a definitive scholarly study, this essay is an impressionistic sketch of collaboration between the two arts by a critic who is as well a practitioner.

 

 

     Music and poetry have always been closely allied arts.  Lyric poetry was once regularly performed with music as its name indicates.  The Greek muse Euterpe, originally associated specifically with music, came to govern lyric poetry as well [1].  Some troubadour cansos bear as title the name of the tune to which they were meant to be sung.  In fact, until the Renaissance virtually all short poems were performed to music.  In the past half millennium the silent reading of poetry on a page has become the norm, but it remains the fact that most people continue to consume the two arts at once in the form of pop music. 

     From the early years of jazz some intellectuals were fascinated by its rhythms, while others were inspired only with disdain.  Gilbert Seldes in The Seven Lively Arts (1924) reflects this ambivalent reception when he says jazz is the “characteristic American expression,” and then adds that this fact is recognized “with a shudder by the English and with real joy by the French.”  In the United States a few poets were particularly intrigued by African-American culture, and some decided that their work would be appropriately complemented by jazz accompaniment.  Vachel Lindsay’s flamboyant performances led many to find his style jazz-like (though the poet himself felt distaste for jazz).  His “The Daniel Jazz” represented the improvisatory cadences of a Pentecostal preacher (compete with call and response instructions) [2].  Perhaps the most succinct view of the white Bohemia’s attitude toward Black America opens Mina Loy’s "The Widow's Jazz": “The white flesh quakes to the negro soul.”  Nor did all Black intellectuals appreciate jazz.  In the era of the Harlem Renaissance, writers like Du Bois and Alain Locke favored music like that of R. Nathaniel Dett who was capable of clothing Black material in concert hall European Romanticism over what they viewed as the music of brothels and bars.

     Among the writers of the twenties Langston Hughes stands out for his unapologetic partisanship for blues and jazz and his use of syncopated rhythms in his poetry.  He also pioneered spoken word performances with jazz, reading before the Playwriter's Circle in 1926 with musical backing  and shortly thereafter as part of the Lincoln University’s Glee Club concert.  During the 1950s Lawrence Lipton privately recorded Hughes doing poetry with a changing group of musicians [3]. In 1958 The Weary Blues was released by MGM on which Hughes reads with two ensembles, one led by Leonard Feather and the other by Charles Mingus [4].  The same year he performed with the Doug Parker Band on the Canadian television program The 7 O’clock Show.

     Many white writers as well combined words and jazz during the 1950s.   Kenneth Patchen had, during the ‘forties, read his work on the radio while playing jazz records in the background, obliging him to adjust to the musicians’ pace, the opposite of the ordinary relationship.  In the ‘50s he appeared  in venues like San Francisco's Blackhawk Club and The Cellar, and eventually Oakland's Civic Auditorium, and the Los Angeles Concert Hall, accompanied by Allyn Ferguson and the Chamber Jazz Sextet with whom he recorded Kenneth Patchen with the Chamber Jazz Sextet (1957).  In 1959 he recorded Kenneth Patchen Reads with Jazz in Canada with the Alan Neil Quartet.

     Beat writers recorded several historic albums of jazz and poetry during the ‘fifties.  Rod McKuen read poetry in San Francisco area clubs in the late ‘fifties and released an album of poetry and jazz titled Beatsville in 1959. Ken Nordine meanwhile issued his first album of Word Jazz (1957) with the Fred Katz group including Chico Hamilton under an alias [5].  David Amram collaborated with Jack Kerouac and in 1957, he, along with Jack Kerouac and poets Howard Hart and Philip Lamantia performed at the Brata Art Gallery on East 10th Street, in New York.  Kerouac enjoyed  sufficient celebrity that he even appeared on the Steve Allen Plymouth show in 1959 backed by Allen on the piano.  Later that year Allen and Kerouac released Poetry for the Beat Generation.  Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti read with the Cellar Jazz Quartet on Poetry Readings in the Cellar (1957) followed the next year by Ferlinghetti’s Tentative Description of a Dinner to Promote the Impeachment of President Eisenhower and other Poems and then in 1960 by Rexroth’s Poetry and Jazz at the Blackhawk.  Allen Ginsberg’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1969) featured trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Elvin Jones and Ted Joans Jazzpoems (1979) with musicians such as Andreas Leep (bass), Dietrich Rauschtenberger (drums), Ralf Falk (guitar), and Uli Espenlaub (keyboards) [6].  In 1957 jazz poet Jack Micheline was given the Revolt in Literature award by a panel that included Charles Mingus with whom he sometimes performed. 

     Mingus was in fact notable among prominent musicians receptive to using words other than song lyrics in their performances.   While poets were interested in exploring the possibilities of reading with a jazz accompaniment, with the musicians often following the poet’s lead, jazz had from the start balanced words and music in songs, sometimes beautiful and sometimes mediocre as well as accommodating shouts (“Yeah!’ “Play it!”) and scat-singing.  During the ‘fifties a few musicians began to add elements of spoken word with Mingus leading the movement.  In the late ‘fifties he released a series of recordings with poets.  In 1957 the title track of his album Clown featured the writer for radio Jean Shepherd whom he admired.  Shepherd’s work had affinities to jazz improvisation since he typically told his stories without a written text.  The following year Mingus collaborated with Langston Hughes to produce one side of the Weary Blues album and in 1959 tracks he had done with Hughes and Lonnie Elder two years earlier were released as A Modern Jazz Symposium of Music and Poetry.  Mingus Ah Um (1959) included the “Fables of Faubus” which skewered the racist governor with devastating ridicule, shouted rather than sung by the musicians.  Other artists experimented as well, notably Ornette Coleman, who collaborated with Frank O’Hara and Leroi Jones (later Amiri Baraka).  During this golden era for jazz and poetry, many others, including Archie Shepp and Sun Ra also included spoken word in  their performances.  Jayne Cortez married the free jazz exponent Ornette Coleman released Celebrations & Solitudes: The Poetry of Jayne Cortez (1974) with Richard Davis on bass and Unsubmissive Blues (1979) with the Firespitters.

     While these recordings arose in the jazz and beat poetry milieux, the following decade brought the arrival of Black Power and the allied Black Arts Movement.  Writers like Sonia Sanchez and Haki Madhubuti explored the intersection of politics with jazz and poetry [7] and the Last Poets collective with their recordings The Last Poets (1970), followed by  This Is Madness (1971) and Chastisement (1972) [8].  Meanwhile Gil Scott-Heron’s first album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (1970) had an unlikely popular hit with “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised."      

     More recently, the rise of hip hop culture, including manipulated DJing in the early seventies by figures like Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa and poetry with music (though sampling is scarcely jazz) such as the Sugar Hill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight (1979) and Grandmaster Flash’s album The Message (1982). 

     A good many jazz and poetry collaborations have appeared since the turn of the present century, including work by Steve Dalachinsky, Barry Wallenstein, Yusef Komunyakaa, Golda Solomon, and Allan Harris, among many others.  The hip hop tradition continues with artists like Kendrick Lamar.  The Jerry Jazz Musician website offers a great deal of information on many performers.  Many musicians and poets around the world have contributed as well, including numerous performances, many recorded, by British poets such as Michael Horovitz and Christopher Logue.  Among Eastern European practitioners have been Czech trumpeter Štepánka Balcarová and Polish vocalist Malgorzata Hutek’s who accompanied Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav’s sonnets and improvisations by Russian artists Vladimir Tarasov and Alexey Kruglov.  Perhaps the outstanding achievement in the genre is Speak-Spake-Spoke with Kirpal Gordon reading from his book Eros in Sanskrit with the great Claire Daly Band.  In this ensemble the music and words are elegantly balanced with the voice acting as another instrument, taking solos on occasion, but allowing the musicians free rein. 

     Music and poetry have been allied from archaic times, and poetry with jazz has already a hundred year history.  Jazz is hip for a number of reasons.  The association of jazz with African-Americans lends the combination an edgy radical avant-garde aspect, emphasized by its enthusiastic adoption by bohemians and socially conscious rappers.  Though few poets improvise (though free-stylers do exist) and, in fact, many other musical genres are improvised (notably Indian classical music both Hindustani and Carnatic), the improvisatory element in jazz is attractive to the Romantic view of art, emphasizing freedom and individual genius.  The rise of spoken word shows has to some extent pushed back against the post-Renaissance relegation of poetry to the silently read printed page, to a degree restoring poetry to its historic place as an entertainment, similar to a play or a concert.  If jazz is one of America’s greatest cultural contributions, the combination of jazz with poetry is its offspring, arising first in the United States, in minority racial and social milieux, yet blossoming into art meaningful and beautiful to all.

 

 

 

 

1.  Words and music were likewise joined for Melpomene, Thalia, Terpsichore, and Polyhymnia who represented tragedy, comedy, choral and sacred song respectively.  Calliope was the muse of epic which, while not sung, was chanted to the accompaniment of the phorminx.

2.  In spite of his hostility to jazz and his old-fashioned racial stereotyping, Lindsay was also influential In encouraging the young Hughes.

3.  This historic material has to my knowledge only been aired, for instance on a 1959 KNX radio program titled “The Beatniks” and as part of 1963 Conference at UCLA. 

4.  Hughes also appeared with Mingus’s group at the Five Spot and the Village Vanguard.

5.  This was followed by Love Words and Son of Word Jazz (1958) and a long series of further albums, popular among friends of cannabis.  Nordine later recorded with The Grateful Dead and released his final album at the age of eighty-seven. 

6.  Joans’ recording of “Jazz Must be a Woman” can be heard on I Giganti Del Jazz Vol. 96.

7.  Their recorded performances are much later, for instance, Haki Madhubuti with Nicole Mitchell on Liberation Narratives (2014) and Sonia Sanchez with bassist Christian McBride in The Movement Revisited (2020).

8.  Other recordings by members of the group include The Original Last Poets - Right On Original Soundtrack (1971), Black Spirits - Festival Of New Black Poets In America (1972), Hustlers Convention (1973), At Last (1973), Jazzoetry (1976), Delights of the Garden (1977) Oh My People (1984), Freedom Express (1988), Retro Fit (1992), Holy Terror (1993), Scatterap/Home (1994), Time Has Come (1997), The Prime Time Rhyme of The Last Poets - Best Of Vol. 1 (1999), The Prime Time Rhyme of The Last Poets - Best Of Vol. 2 (1999), Understand What Black Is (2018), and Transcending Toxic Times (2019). 

9.  Komunyakaa also collaborated with Sascha Feinstein on several anthologies of jazz-influenced poetry titled The Jazz Poetry Anthology (vols. 1 and 2). 

An Undercurrent of Pacifism in the Song of Roland

 

     During the Vietnam War, while I was yet an undergraduate, protected for the time by a student deferment, I recall speaking with a visiting lecturer, a British professor who specialized in Celtic and Old Norse literature.  Current events had brought him to a new view of the subject matter to which he had devoted his career.  “I realize now,” he said with soft regret, “virtually everything I have been studying glorifies war.”  He might have made his objection much broader: since the development of writing, martial valor has indeed been the touchstone for male excellence, as beauty has been for female. 

     Possible responses to this scholar’s anxiety might include the reminder that artistic representation of an action by no means entails endorsing what the fictional characters do.  Even if the persona explicitly expresses values other than the reader’s, this hardly justifies rejecting the text.  One need not accept Platonic Forms to profit from reading Plato, nor must one be a Roman Catholic to value Dante.  Finally, of course, people who have never participated in war are nonetheless certain to have had challenging experiences of other sorts for which military ventures make a fitting analogue or figure of speech.

     In an  interview conducted at about the same time as my conversation with the medievalist , with perhaps similar concerns in mind, Kenneth Rexroth maintained that every heroic poem contains, along with praise for the courageous warrior, “a profound condemnation of war” [1] as well.  In general, literature itself blossoms when employed to articulate ambiguities and ambivalences, and evidence is not lacking for Rexroth’s sweeping claim.  When Andromache pleads with Hector to avoid the hazards of fighting, he responds that his reputation demands that he put himself at risk.  Though he envisions her being forced into slavery, as indeed happened following the fall of Troy, her husband cannot turn from his duty.  This, of course, is a woman’s objection, but when Odysseus summons Achilles’ shade from the Underworld in the Odyssey and praises him for his distinguished career, noting that even in death he rules [2], the principal hero of the Trojan War tells his former comrade-in-arms he would rather be a poor but living man than lord over all the dead.  Here is a sharp critique of the pursuit of fame through combat.  Similarly, amid the heroics of Prince Hal and Harry Hotspur, Falstaff punctures the illusion of the glory of combat with a perspective closer to that of Mauldin’s hard-pressed Willie and Joe.

 

There’s honor for you. Here’s no vanity. I am as hot as molten lead, and as heavy too. God keep lead out of me; I need no more weight than mine own bowels. I have led my ragamuffins where they are peppered. There’s not three of my hundred and fifty left alive, and they are for the town’s end, to beg during life.  [3]

                                      

      A similar moment occurs in the Song of Roland, in the very conclusion where it might best influence the listener or reader’s impression of the whole.  Summoned to yet another combat, Charlemagne reacts with weary resignation.

 

Li empereur n’y volsît aller mie:

“Dieu,” dit le Roi, si peineuse est ma vie

Pleure des yeux, sa barbe blanche tire.” (ll. 4261-4263)

 

[“The emperor did not want to go.  “Oh, god,” the king said, “how painful is my life,” as with weeping eyes, he tugs on his white beard.”]

 

     While the placement of this image at the poem’s end increases its weight of significance, it is hardly the first anti-heroic passage.  Throughout the poem Charlemagne has been regularly depicted in such thoughtful moods.  Indeed, the beard-stroking is a leitmotif, the visible signification of his pensive attitudes, associated in general with his authority and wisdom, but numerous time the gesture accompanies distressed reflections of the suffering of war [4]. 

     What should the reader make of Roland the hero, given that Charlemagne, the most sagacious figure in the story, feels such ambivalence?  Roland’s judgement is far from unerring; his decisions are sometimes clouded by vainglory and impulsiveness (resembling in this the most courageous of fighters both on and off the printed page).  His nomination of his treacherous stepfather, who is also Charlemagne’s brother-in-law, for the mission to Marsile, which Ganelon takes as an attempt to do him in, is the origin of the story’s crisis, so Roland might be seen as inviting his fate.  Even in strictly military terms, Roland’s gallantry verges on hubris when he long refuses to blow the trumpet out of concern for appearing cowardly. 

      In the genre of chansons de geste Roland embodies a rashness in the face of death the very seriousness of which validates the hero’s indifference to consequences while Charlemagne represents the more mature judgement that peace, while less glorious, makes more sense.  I am reminded of Shel Silverstein’s 1973 country music song “The Winner” (performed by Bobby Bare) in which Tiger Man McCool resists a needless fistfight, recounting how his body has been battered by a lifetime of brawls and readily conceding “Well okay I quit I lose you're the winner.”  This leads his challenger, to whom he says, “you remind me a lot of my younger days,” to the realization that since “my eyes still see and my nose still works and my teeth're still in my mouth,” “I guess that makes me the winner.”  Machismo and sensible self-preservation are directly opposed, but only the elder’s cooler head can ignore the impulse to fight.    The tension between aggression and survival instinct is perennial and will continue to be enacted on the world stage as well as in song as long as rash youths like Roland pursue fame through violence.

  

 

1.  See Rexroth, Kenneth, "On Peace" (1966). Special Collections: Oregon Public Speakers. 34.  Rexroth is not alone in this claim.  See, for instance, Caroline Alexander’s introduction to her translation of the Iliad, the first by a woman.

2.  XI, 485.

3.  (Henry IV, part 1, Act V, scene iii, ll. 35 ff.)

4.  See for examples, lines 215, 2930, 2943, 2982, and 3712.

Hip Aesthetics

 

     During the twentieth century, several forms of ironic reception of art gained widespread popularity.  Though far from novel, they benefited from the erosion of generally accepted standards of beauty and the exile of many artworks to subcultures or elite audiences.  “Kitsch”  and “camp” have been widely studied [1], while another approach, of arguably equal importance – the hip – has been neglected.  Each involved adopting, temporarily at least, often as much for the fun of it as to reveal unsuspected value, a taste either not one’s own or, at any rate, comically exaggerated.  For kitsch is fundamentally the appreciation of the extremely vulgar products of mass culture, while for camp it is a caricature of a flamboyant gay style.  The hip celebrates a spirited counter-cultural reaction, often the contrary of social norms. 

     The category is used both for artworks and for lived experience bordering on art.  For instance Blake was hip to find Satan the hero of Paradise Lost as was Abbie Hoffman in honoring George Metesky, the “mad bomber.”  Each reaction is an ironic reversal of what might be expected.  People ordinarily seek fame; it was hip of Ted Joans to avoid it.  People seek affluence; to live self-sufficiently was a hip choice by Scott Nearing.  Critics think highly of literary craftsmanship, so Kerouac liked to give the impression that he wrote with a wholly “spontaneous bop prosody.”   

     The spirit of hip is counter-cultural, but the adversarial aspect of the concept is relatively recent.  The  deepest roots are in the notion that poets bring news from a divine realm, either the gods or an extraordinary imagination.  This concept is ancient [2], but in earlier eras the artist had been largely normative rather than challenging social norms.  With the Romantic movement of the end of the eighteenth century, however, and the celebration of the individual genius some in the arts assumed a more contrary posture.  The old patrons – the nobility and the church – lost importance, displaced by middle class consumers as the economic base of much aesthetic production.  With these changes came the avant-garde and contempt for the philistine: “il faut épater le bourgeois” [3].  Some artists since have particularly aimed at provocation, particularly in movements like Dada, Surrealism, and Situationism. 

     The etymology of the term hip is a vexed question.  Over fifty years ago David Dalby suggested that it was derived from the Wolof hipi (or xipi) meaning “with open eyes” [4].  Numerous other alternatives have been suggested including earlier slang derived from hypochondriac, people with the surname Hepp, the wearing of hipboots, associations with hip-flask or with the posture of opium smoking, but a definitive answer remains elusive.  Dalby’s idea has at least the virtue of reinforcing the primary semantic import of the term.

     Whatever the ultimate origin of the word, the current usage has always suggested superior knowledge.  That is the meaning in the word’s first written appearance as slang, a definition in the “Modern Slang Glossary” published in the Cincinnati Enquirer [5] in which “hept” is defined as “to get wise or next.”  The following year Tad Dorgan used the word for several names in a cartoon and it appeared as well in George V. Hobart’s 1904 novel Jim Hickey: A Story of One-Night Stands in which an African American character says, “Say Danny, at this rate it’ll take about 629 shows to get us to Jersey City, are you hip?”  By the ‘thirties, the term was widely used among Blacks, particularly among musicians, and appeared in Cab Calloway’s Hepster’s Dictionary with the definition “a guy who knows all the answers, understands jive.”  The expression was adopted as well as among white people who valued Black culture.  In his Autobiography Malcolm X describes the importance of jive talk in establishing hip credentials in Harlem as well as the appearance of whites who affected it in seeking to be more “Negro than the Negroes” [6]

     Among these white hipsters were musicians and drug-takers, some of whom, like Mezz Mezzrow, had lifelong contact with African-American culture.  Others were further toward the fringes, fans of jazz or marijuana, including artists and intellectuals, some of whom, like Kenneth Rexroth and Norman Mailer, contributed to a theory of hipness during the ‘fifties.

     Kenneth Rexroth, the poet, critic, and translator whose character is described in Dharma Bums as the “father of the Frisco poetry scene,” the organizer the historic Six Gallery reading, cites Lipton and emphasizes even in the title of his essay “Disengagement: the Art of the Beat Generation” [7] the “disaffiliation, alienation, and rejection of the young.”  The movement is thus for him less a protest than a simple opting out.  While condemning “the utter nihilism of the emptied-out hipster,” he asserts that “It is impossible for an artist to remain true to himself as a man, let alone an artist, and work within the context of this society.”  Neither Howl nor On the Road had yet been published; Rexroth’s examples of hip artists are Charlie Parker and Dylan Thomas. 

     Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro” [8] proved even more influential.  He, too, stresses the hip person’s disaffection: “one is a rebel or one conforms,” “one is Hip or one is Square,” but he is more willing than the scholarly Rexroth to admit the petty criminal or addict under the title of “the American existentialist, the hipster,” a spiritual adventurer who explores “uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.”  Though the more edgy, even sinister, aspects of hip culture faded, late 1950s pop culture figures like Del Close’s Geets Romo (on How to Speak Hip) and Jules Feiffer’s Huey, foil for the nebbishy Bernard in The Explainers (1960), remind us to what an extent the inarticulate, perhaps dangerous, youth played in the hip identity during the 1950s.  The same decade that saw the popularization of the Beats was fascinated as well by juvenile delinquency. 

     Some critics in the literary world offered as skewed a view as comedy albums and comic strips.  Norman Podhoretz wrote one of the fiercest denunciations of the Beat writers [9], associating them with youth crime (“young savages in leather jackets”).  Their work “can easily spill over into brutality” since for them ”kicking someone in the teeth or sticking a knife between his ribs are deeds to be admired.”  For him they are “hostile to civilization” and indeed “against intelligence itself.”  Suffering from “a pathetic poverty of feeling” the hip writers are “the spiritually underprivileged and the crippled of soul – young men who can’t think straight and thus hate everyone who can.”  Though Podhoretz’ is one of the most extreme attacks, it is typical of the reception of the Beats among a good many critics and doubtless characterizes their image in the public as a whole.  

     Familiarity with hip artists became all but unavoidable for as the principal American periodicals Time and Life featured that curiosity, the beatnik (a derisive term first seen in print in Herb Caen’s newspaper column [10]).  In September of 1959 Life magazine printed a photo essay comparing the lifestyle of West Coast artists with that of small-town Kansas residents, giving every American a glimpse of an alternative.  Yet, apart from the misrepresentations of popular culture [11] the question of hip identity, was far from settled among the artists, most of whom were not critics, let alone theoreticians.

     The idea of disaffection, of “dropping out,” is widely shared, but the disaffection of the hip is neither random nor utterly nihilistic.  The positive values of the hip aesthetic are nearly all descended from those of the Romantics.  The most convenient demonstration of this lineage is perhaps Norman Mailer’s list of things which are hip and contrasting things which are square which he calls “a primitive foray into the more formal aspects of Hip” before noting “to my knowledge, no one yet has attempted this terrain.” [12].  In the simplest terms he labels spontaneous as hip, while orderly is square; wild is hip and practical square; instinct is hip and logic square; midnight hip, noon square (des Esseintes would have agreed).  In a social context Negro is hip, white is square; crooks are hip, while cops, naturally, are square.  Catholic is hip, presumably because of the ritual and magic, while Protestantism  is square (though perhaps Mailer would have made an exception for Black Pentecostals).  All this would have made a good deal of sense to Lord Byron.

     Some of Mailer’s opposed pairs are more imaginative, and take the reader a moment to understand.  Schrödinger’s model of the atom is hip, and Bohr’s is square, because the former takes quantum uncertainty into account.  Perverse is hip, pious square.  Some might remain somewhat obscure: physiology is hip and anatomy square (because it does not analyze process?)  the T-formation is hip, the single wing square.  He finds Nixon hip compared to John Foster Dulles, presumably because Nixon was such a fabulating hustler.  Apart from  Mailer’s turns of wit, the general pattern is clear.  Mailer privileges the intuitive, the physical, the irrational.

     Several significant elements of the hip semantic field must be added.  Among the probably erroneous etymologies for hip is one that offers an explanation for the word in the posture of users in  opium dens, reclining on one hip, while a competing explanation would have it suggest the hip flask in which one might carry liquor.  While neither seems likely as a source for the word, both assume an association between hip and mind-altering substances.  The connection, not necessarily essential, arises from three circumstances: the advocacy of pleasure-seeking implied by hip values, the ostracism from  the broader society and inclusion in a subculture that accompanies the use of illegal drugs, and the potential some such substances hold for mystical insight.  Thus Howl speaks of “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,” Kerouac begins a letter ““Dig this, PEOTL EATERS OF THE HIP GENERATION,” [13] and Tower of Power’s 1973 song “What is hip?” answers “smokin’ only the best weed.”  The historical partiality of white Bohemians as well as African-Americans in  general and musicians in  particular to the use of illegal drugs strengthens the association.

     Advocates of psychedelics will prefer to call such substances entheogenic (meaning “becoming god-filled”) and point to the world-wide use of psychoactive drugs in spiritual practice from the ancient Hindu soma to the contemporary vogue for ayahuasca [14].  This element in  the meaning of hip returns to the first: to be in the know, in this case enlightened.  This grand ambition is evident in Kerouac’s description of On the Road as “an imaginative survey of a new American generation known as the ‘Hip’ (The Knowing) . . .  This new generation has a conviction that it alone has known everything or been ‘hip’ in the history of the world” [15].  Mailer had sought his “ancient heavenly connection” in existentialism, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder, and Whalen in Buddhism, Richard Alpert and the Beatles in varieties of Hinduism, William Everson and Dorothy Day in a radical Christianity, but all pursued paths to spiritual liberation.

     Ironically the idea of hip may diverge from kitsch and camp in that, for all its associations with being au courant with the latest trends, hip is in substantial ways profoundly traditional.  For the sake of divertissement both kitsch and camp defend the ugly and the overdone; whereas hip aims directly at the truth, psychological, social, and cosmic, just as art has always done.  At the same time, hip values the experiential: pleasure and the aesthetic, the irrational and the mysterious, the ambivalent and the self-contradictory, and in all these ways it is deeply human.  For the hip art is play as is all experience, though the drama takes place amid “the iron gates of life.”  For the hip there is always a certain élan, a delight in the game, a winking confidence in the face of mortality, a sense that we may still laugh even if the joke is on us.

 

 

1.  Most celebrated (and influential) is Susan Sontag’s essay “Notes on Camp,” which itself cited Isherwood’s explanation in The World in the Evening in which his character Charles defines the term: “You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it, you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. Baroque art is basically camp about religion. The ballet is camp about love …”  For him Dostoyevsky, Mozart, and El Greco were camp, while Beethoven and Rembrandt were not.  Clement Greenberg in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and Thomas Kulka in Kitsch and Art provide more hostile views.  For a variety of critics, see the essays in Redefining Kitsch and Camp in Literature and Culture, edited by Justyna Stępień.

2.  See, for instance, my examination of Boccaccio’s views posted this month as “Boccaccio on Poetry.”

3.  Often attributed to Baudelaire though I have not located the line in his oeuvres.  The first use is also  attributed to Privat d'Anglemont (1820–59) in the form “Je les ai épatés, les bourgeois.”   Flaubert used “terrifie les bourgeois” in a letter and by 1879 the Goncourts use “épater le bourgeois.”

4.  The term hepicat is also Wolof, meaning “one with open eyes.”  Dalby’s idea seems to have first been published in, of all things, the London Times of July 19, 1969.  It was accepted by many subsequent writers, including J . L. Dillard’s Black English (1972), Clarence Major in his Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang, (1994), Joseph Holloway and Winifred Vass in The African Heritage of American English (1997).  The derivation is prominently featured in John Leland’s Hip: the History (2001).  Dissenters include Jesse Sheidlower in Slate (December 8, 2004) who used the term “crying Wolof” to indicate false African origins for Black American usage.

5.  May 9, 1903.  The puzzling “next” is perhaps a way of saying “to what will happen next.”  Dorgan had referred to “Joe Hip” and “Old Man Hip.”  Hep is usually considered to have preceded hip.  In 1947 Harry the Hipster recorded “It Ain’t Hep,” declaring that hep had become passé, superseded by hip. 

6.  The Autobiography of Malcom X, 105.  I recall a similarly disparaging usage among my hip friends in  college who called slightly younger aspirants to the scene “hippie,” equivalent to teenybopper,  well before the term came into popular usage.  This use is verified by the glossary of the 1959 comedy album How to Speak Hip, according to which a hipster is defined as "a fully paid-up member of Hip society", whereas a hippy is "a junior member of Hip society, who may know the words, but hasn't fully assimilated the proper attitude."

7.  First published in New World Writing 11 (1957), reprinted in Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg’s The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men (1958).  Rexroth reinforces the characterization of the hip as “disaffiliated” by Lawrence Lipton, doyen of the Venice Beach counter-culture.

8.  First published in Dissent (1957) and later reprinted as a pamphlet by City Lights and included in The Beat Generation  and the Angry Young Men.

9.  Norman Podhoretz, “The Know-nothing Bohemians,” Partisan Review XXV (1958).  Podhoretz was at least consistent in his reactionary activism.  In 1963 he published in Commentary "My Negro Problem—And Ours" in which he complained about his own feeling oppressed by African-Americans during his childhood, saying that Blacks "were doing the only persecuting I knew about - and doing it, moreover, to me," resulting in "the hatred I still feel for Negroes."  He later worked for the USIA, the Hudson Institute, and Rudy Giuliani. 

10.  See his column for April 2, 1958 in the San Francisco Chronicle.  Caen is also responsible for the equally annoying term hippie.  The September 21, 1959 issue of Life included a contrast of the lifestyles of West Coast hip artists with the people of small-town Hutchinson, Kansas.

11.  Maynard Krebs on the Dobie Gillis Show is one of the best-known, but even his image was subject to further devolution in the cartoon character of Shaggy Rogers on Scooby-Doo.

12. Mailer, Advertisements for Myself, p. 423.  The list, Mailer says, was originally notes for his “The White Negro” and the essay and list, he says, are “the intellectual core” of a proposed book.

13.  Letter to John Clellon Holmes, June 5, 1952 from Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters 1940-1956, edited by Ann Charters, p 368.

14.  See my essay “Drugs and Religion” on this site at https://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2016/06/drugs-and-religion.html.

15.  Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters 1940-1956, edited by Ann Charters, p. n224.

Wang Wei

 

     I write here as a reader of English translations of Tang poetry.  I have always felt altogether at home among these poems so distant in time and language.  To reflect the experience of those like myself who have not mastered the Chinese, I quote from a number of the translators I have read over the years.  Each, of course, offers a unique Wang Wei.  See on this same site “Yet Two More Versions of Wang Wei” for multiple takes on the same quatrain, including a couple of my own.

     The poems translated by Wu Fu-ning is from Robert Payne’s The White Pony, those by Burton Watson from in Chinese Lyricism: Shih Poetry from the Second tom the Twelfth Century, Pauline Yu’s from Pauline Yu in The Poetry of Wang Wei

 

    Among the classic poets of the Tang Dynasty Wang Wei exemplifies the gentleman-poet of his day, somewhat as Sir Philip Sidney did for his.  Successful in his examinations, Wang served as a government official as well as writing poetry, but then, in later life, withdrew to a contemplative retirement (not to a hermitage but to his country estate).  In visual art he is regarded as a founder of the Southern School, called literati painting, known for free calligraphic strokes.  [1]  

     He excelled in the paired couplets of five or seven syllable lines called jueju [2], a highly demanding form requiring a set syllabic count for each line, rhymed abcb. [3]  Apart from these demands, the jueju must also conform to certain  prescribed tonal patterns (thus its name “regulated verse”) [4].   A caesura is expected and tonal as well as semantic parallelism is admired, particularly in the middle lines of a quatrain.  Furthermore, this poetry of scholars was replete with allusions and subtler associations reminding readers of earlier verses.  Imagery likewise observed a set of conventions, with Images were often meant to suggest conventional meanings (such as the plaintain for physical frailty and the moon in the water for unreality).  [5]

     In this form the genteel might display wit, imagination, and ingenuity and gain recognition among those of their own class, as their work could only be appreciated only by those sharing a similar education.  These highly sophisticated poetic texts, in an ironic reversal, appeared to many Western readers unfamiliar with the Chinese originals to be direct impressionistic sketches of a natural scene.  The immense influence of Ezra Pound and his edited version of Ernest Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character As A Medium For Poetry [6] encouraged the view that Chinese poetry mirrors ordinary consciousness by emphasizing visual perception.  Thus Fenollosa maintained that Chinese poetry embodies a “simple poetic outlook on life” by presenting the reader with “vivid shorthand pictures of actions and processes in nature.”  In sum he claimed that “Chinese poetry gets back near to the processes of nature by means of its vivid figure.”   “The Chinese written language has not only absorbed the poetic substance of nature and built with it a second world of metaphor, but has, through its very pictorial visibility, been able to retain its original creative poetry with far more vigor and vividness than any phonetic tongue.”

    Though Fenollosa’s pioneering account is now largely rejected by Chinese scholars, Pound’s promotion of his ideas fertilized the Imagist movement and subsequent developments through Objectivism, Beat, and Deep Image poetry.  The fact that very few translators have even attempted to preserve the Chinese rhyme patterns, though similar patterns are common in English, has aided this misapprehension.  The use of free verse by many reinforces the impression that Chinese poetry is an immediate record of experience.  As a non-specialist reader of Chinese poetry in translation unable to appreciate the subtleties of pitch patterns and allusions, I continue to consume a poet like Wang Wei while much of his art remains inaccessible to me.  The immense growth in accessible information in English concerning Chinese literary history has enabled deeper readings of the images though still without broadening the appreciation to other elements of the writing.   Indeed, just as African sculpture almost entirely shorn of its meaning in context enriched European art in the early twentieth century, Chinese poetry refreshed English writing with little attention to the vast and learned tradition that underlay it.  Some of the most influential translators, such as Ezra Pound and Kenneth Rexroth, had very sketchy knowledge of the language. 

 

Morning

 

The peach blossom is redder because rain fell overnight,

The willows are greener in the morning mist.

The fallen petals are not yet swept away by servants.

Birds sing.  The guest on the hill is asleep.

                                     trans. Li Fu-ning 

 

     This poem might pass for a journal entry simply recording the data observed by an early riser.  In this case it might seem a simple appreciation of the beauties of nature, flowers and greenery amid the melodious calls of birds.  A fructifying rain descends like grace.  Those who have no eye for beauty may still be asleep, but the author has included the reader in his delectation of the scene.

     This appreciation of nature is, however, perfectly consistent with Daoist and Buddhist belief.  With this in mind, the “fallen petals” may be a reminder of the transience of this world, and the sleeper may be a soul caught yet in delusion.  These associations are not dependent on association with earlier poems, but peach blossoms have, since the Book of Odes, been a symbol of love, its red blossoms suggesting human passion as well as the returning vitality of springtime.  Yet, the willow suggests for the Chinese the longing resulting from the separation from a loved one (as in Li Bai’s “Hearing a Flute on a Spring Night in Luoyang”) and the mention of “fallen petals” seems surely a momento mori.  The willow  connotes separation while the singing of the birds is a testament to the continuing delight of nature, implying that the properly attuned human consciousness will sing as well.  Yet here the observer, the “guest,” is asleep, unaware of the grand machinery of creation and destruction evident on every side.

     The fact that one may read the lyric as a direct observation of the scene, a verbal cinema verité, and simultaneously as a highly allusive and philosophical rumination constitutes the strength of Wang Wei in common with other poets of his tradition.  The poems may be rewarding regardless of the reader’s degree of sophistication.  They offer a comprehensive and wise-sounding world view while holding all philosophical questions in suspension, an attitude the Pyrrhonian skeptics called ἐποχή. 

  

Visiting the Temple of Accumulated Fragrance

 

I didn’t know where the temple was,

pushing mile on mile among cloudy peaks;

old trees, peopleless paths,

deep mountains, somewhere a bell.

Brook voices choke over craggy boulders,

sun rays turn cold in the green pines.

At dusk by the bend of a deserted pond,

a monk in meditation, taming poison dragons.

                            trans. Burton Watson 

     Again, it is quite possible to read this poem as a simple record of a trek, wandering the hills in search of a remote monastery.  Yet it is also an image of a life-pilgrim restlessly in quest of enlightenment.  The harsh rocks, the chill, the close of day all conspire to suggest the suffering of this life that motivates the poet’s quest.  While the monastery bell in the distance and then the sight of the monk in meditation place liberation at a remove from the speaker, it is nonetheless in view. 

     Just as in “Morning” Wang has managed to be precisely and concretely immediate and at the same time applicable to all humanity.  The facts that the paths are “peopleless” and the pond is “deserted” imply the high isolation of the spiritual striver.  Scholars have differed over just which passage describing poisonous dragons Wang had in mind, but it scarcely matters as it is clear that they represent such hindrances as desires and illusions.   If not full-fledged bodhi he has at any rate gained the equipoise to confront suffering with open eyes and go on living, confident that release is as much a part of the scheme of things as enslavement to passion.

     Such experiences, both the direct sensual ones and the contemplative speculations, may indeed be quite solitary, even private records of subjective consciousness, but, as a court poet with some duties similar to those of British Poets Laureate, he wrote public verses in praise of the rulers.  Unlike the fulsome rhetoric of seventeenth and eighteenth century European dedications, Wang is elegant and oblique in his compliments.

  

Written at the Prince’s Command on the

Emperor’s Having Lent to

the Prince of Qi as a Retreat from Summer Heat

 

The emperor’s son bids farewell to the distant Red Phoenix 

        Turret:

An imperial edict has lent the faraway palace of blue-green 

        mist.

Outside the window vaporous clouds cling to our clothes;

With curtains rolled, streams and mountains come into the 

        mirror.

Below the woods the water’s noise resounds over talk and 

        laughter;

Between the peaks colors of trees obscure houses and 

        dwellings.

An immortal’s home would not perforce be finer than this 

        abode:

Need we play the pipes, looking toward the azure sky?

                                                 trans. Pauline Yu 

  

     Though explicitly written at royal command and including the obligatory glorification of the imperial family who enjoy accommodations equal to the immortals’, the poem’s real focus is the rewards of a retreat in the mountains.  Clouds and mist that surround the Jiucheng Palace not only cool the climate, they suggest as well its remoteness from the urban court and create an air of obscure mystery.  The outdoors and indoors mingle both visually as “streams and mountains come into the mirror” and audibly with the resounding “water’s noise.”  The “houses and dwellings” that mark a mundane human presence are obscured (though, unlike those strenuously pursuing enlightenment, the courtiers talk and laugh).

     The concluding lines certainly praise the emperor and his son, placing them on a level with the immortals.  The reference to Wangzi Qiao, a crown prince under Zhou Ling Wang, associates the current royal line with semi-divine antecedents.   Prince Qiao, called Jin, played pipes (and imitated phoenix cries), as he wandered the mountains. Ultimately, he mounted a crane and ascended to heaven. [7]  While complimenting his social superiors and thus assenting to the worldly order, Wang implies that removal from the distractions of the city are likely to prove beneficial for all.  The fine-spun fancy about a legendary prince signifies the spiritual uplift all might gain, even those who never ride a bird to the sky.

      On the other side of the social spectrum, Wang’s “Six Casually Written Poems” concern those who pay no heed to wealth or prestige, the sort of enlightened eccentrics far more commonly admired in Asia than in the West.  For them poverty naturally accompanies a life lived with integrity, but this need not preclude joy. 

  

One of Six Casually Written Poems

 

In a farmhouse lives an old man

With drooping white hair, in his humble retreat.

Sometimes when finished with chores in the fields,

He summons his neighbors with a jug of wine.

Noisily beneath the thatched eaves

They sit around and then stand up again.

Coarse woolen clothes are not too mean for him

And garden sunflower seeds delicacy enough indeed.

If he stirs, it’s just to bring up sons and grandsons;

He has never once gone to the city market.

The Five Emperors and Three Kings

Since ancient times have been called Sons of Heaven.

Compare using arms with polite abdication—

Which way is right after all?

If wishes gained make up happiness,

How then can a rustic farm be scorned?

For now I’ll set my mind at ease and go,

And travel on ‘til all my teeth are gone.

                                         trans., Pauline Yu 

One thinks of the penultimate poem of the Dàodé Jīng in which such an isolated life is seen as ideal.

 

Though they had boats and carriages, they should have no occasion to ride in them; though they had buff coats and sharp weapons, they should have no occasion to don or use them.

I would make the people return to the use of knotted cords (instead of the written characters).

They should think their (coarse) food sweet; their (plain) clothes beautiful; their (poor) dwellings places of rest; and their common (simple) ways sources of enjoyment.

There should be a neighbouring state within sight, and the voices of the fowls and dogs should be heard all the way from it to us, but I would make the people to old age, even to death, not have any intercourse with it.                                               

                                                             trans. James Legge 

 

 Similar sentiments are, of course, available to Westerners more conveniently from Vergil and Horace.  The general idea is that, not military skills, but agriculture is the essential human activity. And that those engaged in cultivation of the land have a more satisfying, a saner and wiser life than those who engage in politics, war, and commerce.  The other poems in this series include one the “crazy man,” Lu Tong, who pretended to be mad to avoid serving an unjust lord, one expressing the longing to retreat from a man still entangled in affairs, another on the poet Tao Qian who preferred drinking to his bureaucratic post, on eon the “husband of the girl from Chao” who drinks and gambles without regard for worldly reputation, and concludes with the touching poem of Wang on his old age, “too lazy to write poems,/ I have old age as my sole companion.”

      One of Wang Wei’s quatrains exemplifies his method in brief. 

  

Deer Park

 

Empty hills, no one in sight,

only the sound of someone talking;

late sunlight enters the deep wood,

shining over the green moss again. 

trans. Burton Watson [8]

 

      The Deer Park in Sarnath near Varanasi is the site of the Buddha’s first sermon following his enlightenment.   The “emptiness” of the first word is a Buddhist term (kong in Chinese, in Sanskrit śūnyatā), here instantly qualified by a vague “sound of someone talking,” though that may be understood as the voice of the poem itself.  The sunlight filters to the forest floor illuminating the moss “again,” implying the cyclic recurrence, reminding the reader of “the great return” which occurs with death.  

     The Chinese poets, far more frequently than those in Europe, pay tribute to the importance of friendship.  Poems on the occasion of parting are common.  Among the most affecting Tang poems are those describing the separation of men who had been close, often on the occasion of one receiving an official appointment in another region of the vast empire.  The pain of parting is then an illustration of the inevitable suffering that life entails, though a testament as well to the warmth of their relationship. 

  

Farewell to Senior Officer Yang

Going to Office in Guozhou

 

Baoxie Valley will not hold a carriage:

Where then will you be going?

A bird’s path for a thousand miles,

And gibbons’ cries all hours of the day.

By the official bridge, travelers offer wine;

Amid mountain trees, a shrine to the Young Maid.

After parting we will share the bright moon:

You should hear the cuckoo’s call.

trans., Pauline Yu 

 

The wildness and presumably the hazards of the journey are suggested by the reference to a narrow gorge, making travel difficult.  “A bird’s path,” after all, is no path at all.  The poet suggests that “for a thousand miles” his friend will be lost in nature.  The mention of sacrifices of wine is another reminder of the dangers of the trip.  The mention of the shrine to the daughter of Zhang Lu, the military leader who, despite his Daoist insight (as a “Celestial Master”) and reputation for humane wisdom, saw much of his family executed for political revenge and himself brought to surrender to Cao Cao, reminds the reader of the tumultuous turns of the wheel of fortune. 

     In a phrase that sounds like it comes from a love poem the concluding couplet with grace and poignance suggests that even in separation “we will share the bright moon.”   The call of the cuckoo became a conventional motif in poems of parting as it was imagined to resemble the words “It’s better to return” (bu ru guiqu)

 

      Perhaps this sample is sufficient to indicate the principal characteristics of Wang’s style and the basis for his appeal.  I and many others have felt such sympathy with him, Bai Juy, and others among ithese old poets?  For me the appeal is the direct recording of experience which, though seeming almost like improvisation, hints at intimations of a universal order, a Dao implied in all the phenomena that swirl about us, a finger on the pulse of the universe independent of revelation.   One need not translate culturally specific mythological terms into philosophic equivalents.  The Tang masters present moments of consciousness, compounded as they are of sense experience and the mind’s treatment of those data, but shaped in their expression by all the poems that went before.  Western lyric tradition is not far removed from the formulation attributed to the “Great Shun” by Liu Xie “Poetry is the expression of sentiments,” [9] but it is Daoist and Buddhist world-views that color the Chinese poets’ emotional reactions in a way rare in the West. [10]  Poets like Wang Wei seem easily assimilable because their concerns are our own.    

 

 

 

 

1.  Named by the scholar-artist Dong Qichang (1555-1636), the terms are not really geographical, but rather an analogy to the Northern and Southern forms of Ch’an Buddhism.

2. A type of regulated verse or  jintishi ("modern form poetry").

3. It is a sign of the level of artifice in the form that rhymes might be based on pronunciations no longer current but accessible in a rhyming dictionary. 

4. Guoyu or Mandarin has four tones.  Such tones play a significant role in a great many of the world’s languages (especially in Asia, Africa, and pre-Columbian American) 

5.  Burton Watson, Chinese Lyricism: Shih Poetry from the Second to the Twelfth Century, 171.

6.  Published in 1919.  Among Pound’s changes were the suppression of references to Buddhism and to the importance of sound patterns. 

7.  The story appears in the Book of Immortals (Lie xian zhuan).  Jin on the crane’s back is a popular motif for painters.

8.  For a fascinating translation study, see Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz, “Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese poem is translated.”  I add two more of my own in “Yet Two More Versions of Wang Wei,” available on this site.

9.  Liu Xie, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, Chapter VI. 

Notes on Recent Reading 36 (Norris, Rexroth and Laughlin, Sand)

The Pit (Norris)

     Might one write a good novel about the financial markets? Bonfire of the Vanities doesn’t make it, but Norris made a decent attempt with The Pit in 1903. Envisioned as the middle work of a trilogy following a crop of wheat from production through sale to consumption (hardly a promising theme), the story concerns Curtis Jadwin who initially eschews speculation but who is eventually seduced and finally ruined by it. His devotion to his wife, the much-admired Laura Dearborn, is gradually eroded by his addiction to the pursuit of the biggest of deals, cornering the market. (One recalls, of course, that the book was written in the time of anti-trust agitation.) Laura, on the other hand, is self-absorbed, far less mutual in the relationship of her marriage than her sister Page in hers to Landry Court. In fact, the married love themes coexist with the business and economic one without any real attempt toward synthesis or harmony. The conclusion is unconvincing, facile, and abrupt, as Jadwin, while ruined, sets off cheerfully to begin anew, sadder but wiser.
     Norris’ naturalist themes are apparent in his description of the commodities market as a great independent being in the coils of which humans are helpless. In the narrative, both Jadwin’s attempts to corner the market and his attempts at self-restraint are equivalent to challenging nature itself. As elsewhere in Norris, the world of business is contrasted to that of art, and his artist here Sheldon Corthell, charms the ladies and makes insightful observations from the sidelines. Though the book, which appeared after the author’s death, was widely reviewed and generally applauded, I would concur with those critics who find it weaker than the gritty lower depths of McTeague or the Cinemascope Western grandeur of The Octopus.


Kenneth Rexroth and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (Rexroth, Laughlin)

     Having valued Rexroth’s poetry, translations, and criticism for my entire life, indeed, having modeled some of my own studies after his own, I was perhaps over-sensitive to the more personal of these communications. While I was rewarded by finding Rexroth’s customarily knowledgeable and acute critical judgments on nearly every page (the Norton edition edited by Lee Bartlett is, if anything, excessively annotated), I was also put off by my man’s constant badgering, pushing repeatedly for more publications, scolding Laughlin for his refusal to completely discount the writers whom Rexroth calls academic, attacking him for his wealth while always trying to get a bit more of it out of him. In spite of the perils of irascibility and self-pity for those of us who deliberately chose poverty and the counter-culture, I salute Rexroth in the end for his simultaneous principled dedication to the classics and the avant-garde. And his translations from the Chinese can be quite wonderful even if, as the reader of these letters learns, he was capable of translating really from Judith Gautier’s fin-de-siècle French while pretending to work from Chinese. (Characteristically, Laughlin generously notes that he eventually learned quite a few characters and could work to some extent from the original.) He probably knew as much as Pound did, and Pound’s Cathay contains some of the greatest poetry of the twentieth century. The prose in this volume is rarely distinguished, but the literary history and the off-hand critical comments make it essential even for those to whom the hip ideal is less appealing.


Lettres d’un Voyageur (Sand)

     George Sand’s book is at once a memoir, a travel book, and a novel. She passes from one genre to the next as she relates her experiences in Italy and France. Some passages are in fact from actual letters she wrote at the time, while others were composed later. Though there is not enough plot to make a steady story line, she describes her emotional and geographic peregrinations at the center of a love triangle with a poet – the original was Musset – and her physician. The capping detail to this generic conundrum is that parts of the book were first published in the Revue des Deux Mondes and the Revue de Paris. So these letters had a rather wide audience at the time of their publication. Perhaps the celebrity/romance/mystery aspect was significant in the book’s first readership who may have received it as a classier People magazine.
     Yet I am afraid that I feel as a French cookbook once said about a Provencal olive oil pastry touted as equally useful for pie crust, tarts, strudel, and pasta, “good for everything means good for nothing.” The incidents lack the principal desideratum of each sort of book: the structure of a novel, the detailed outward focus of a travel book, and the consistent fidelity to subjective experience of a memoir. The reader who may be satisfied with partial quotients of each will nonetheless find the book worth reading. Now no less than in her lifetime the author has a palpable charisma about her.

The Legacy of the Beats

     Numerous times, I have heard people say, “Reading On the Road changed my life.” They go on to tell of going hitch-hiking, taking LSD, or changing majors from sociology to comparative religion. What have these alterations to do with literature? Might not similar changes have followed a new lover, or perhaps just failing a course? Though I avoided that particular confessional declaration as a cliché, like many clichés, it bears some truth, including in my own case. As an adolescent, though I was reading the range of English poetry as well as great gulps of others, I admit to having read the Beats with a special attention and excitement. To some extent, this may have arisen from the sensational dope/sex straight and gay/madness revelations, but I was reacting also to the style of my own time, a novel style, one that has had a major influence on American writing since. In his “Notes for Howl and Other Poems” Allen Ginsberg refers to his poetry as “angelical ravings,” an expression that enigmatically but precisely expresses the specific distinguishing hip sensibility associated with Beat writing.
     One must return to the scornful pop culture references to “beatniks” and dismissive reviews from not just the academy, but almost the entire literary establishment (which did extend beyond ivied walls), to realize the impact of Donald M. Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960 which created a new canon, a sort of canon of the anti-canonical. It is notorious that the more conventional major anthology New Poets of England and America edited by Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson (with an introduction by Robert Frost), though it was published only three years earlier, had not a single author in common with Allen’s. Today nearly all of Allen’s poets have become accepted; many are featured in standard textbooks.
     Norman Podhoretz’ claim in 1958 that the Beats embody a bitter anti-intellectualism – he even implicates them in the scourge of the fifties, the juvenile delinquent – now seems utterly misguided. [1] It is almost as though Podhoretz had developed his view from the reportage of Life Magazine rather than from the Beat literary output.
     His notions, though, coincided with the attitudes of most Americans to whom the poetry and fiction that emerged from the Beat scene was far less striking than their reputed lifestyle: high on dope of various sorts, ecstatic with a range of sexual activities, many transgressive, yet claiming insight into the heart of things and holy visions of the sort that had gone out of style in the church only to reappear among artists reclaiming their vatic role. Indeed, in the Romantic view of these writers the semi-criminal and the beatified were likely to coincide. Clellon Holmes write in 1952, “the problem of modern life is essentially a spiritual problem; and that capacity for sudden wisdom which people who live hard and go far possess, are assets and bear watching.” [2]
     Contrary to what Podhoretz had heard, the Beats gave traditional learning its due. Corso had read voraciously and then loitered about Harvard while Kerouac and Ginsberg were well-educated and took pains to establish their literary lineage. The counter-cultural tradition featured scholars like Rexroth, Blackburn, and Gary Snyder. Most of the Beats accepted professorial posts before their days were done, and for decades they have had their own university in Naropa. At best, the schema that balances the reserved academic against the Bohemian avant-garde polarity is reductive.
     Furthermore, the field of poetry in the late forties was by no means homogeneous. Perhaps the most clearly “academic” group was associated with the New Criticism: the reactionary Southern Fugitives or Agrarians, Yvor Winters (apart from his earliest poems), and a host of associate professors with chapbooks. For the most part, these writers rejected ideals of sincerity and self-expression, preferring exacting formal values. To the New Critics who dominated literary studies in my own undergraduate years, authorial intention and affect were irrelevant, as the poem was a purely aesthetic object, valued for its formal qualities.
     At the same time as apolitical or overtly reactionary views governed most small quarterlies and poetry journals, a rump faction remained of revolutionary more-or-less Marxist poets like Kenneth Fearing, Walter Lowenfels, and John Beecher who once sold stacks of books, then swelled enthusiastic anthologies, but who were already largely forgotten in the early days of McCarthyism.
     The experimental and avant-garde traditions continued in Surrealism, Jackson MacLow, Armand Schwerner, and a wide range of others as well as in High Modernism itself which employed experimental techniques such as fragmentation and field composition. Pound and Eliot were still writing in this vein, and Zukofsky and Charles Olson after them.
     Meanwhile the Confessional poets like Lowell and Berryman were setting out their grave self-revelations, albeit couched in tight rhyme and rhythm at first, and the New York poets associated with abstract expressionism wrote expressive and personal verses that could seem like spontaneous improvisation.
     By far the most popular English poet of the era during which the Beats emerged was Dylan Thomas. If the only choices are to be rebellion or tradition, his position is problematic. His Collected Poems, 1934–1952, elicited immense critical praise and Philip Toynbee was not out of step with many others when his review in The Observer declared Thomas “the greatest living poet in the English language.” Thomas’ demanding craftsmanship had calculated in detail the impact of each extraordinary rhythm and every plosive consonant. He had served his apprenticeship writing for the Ministry of Information during the war and for the notoriously staid BBC afterward.
     Yet this same writer was also associated with the New Apocalyptic group (though he disclaimed a connection) which owed much to Surrealism. He was a celebrity bad boy more famous for his drinking than his lyrics and known (like Hemingway) to millions who had never read a line of his work. Skilled at oral performance, he was a “personality” as much as an artist, at the time the only poet who could pack halls of every city and college town for readings.
     In his oddly ambivalent essay “Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation” Kenneth Rexroth focuses on “two great dead juvenile delinquents . . . Charlie Parker and Dylan Thomas” whom he portrays as desperately trying to save themselves with gestures of pure art, both ultimately overcome by “the horror of the world.” [3] To him both are virtuosos left without hope when they found that pure manipulation of form could not enlighten or liberate. His epithet of “disengaged” is not only startling when applied to two such apparently passionate artists; it is, in fact, a condemnation of Beat poetry by its own midwife, the producer of the 1955 Gallery Six reading.
     To simplify and avoid questions of definition, I shall take Rexroth at his word when he limits the Beats to Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Corso. [4] Far from being “know-nothing Bohemians,” the most likely descriptive category for this group is neo-Romantic. Their privileging of spontaneity, directness, sincerity, interest in the vernacular, sympathy for children and the underclass, looseness of form, visionary claims, revolutionary political views, even drug use; all are directly traceable to the circles around Wordsworth and Shelley. Corso actually managed to have his body buried in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery alongside Keats and Shelley. [5]
     Kerouac was arch-Romantic in citing as “an American masterpiece,” “the greatest piece of writing I ever saw,” and his literary model a very long December 17, 1950 letter from Neal Cassady sometimes called the Joan Anderson letter. “I got the idea for the spontaneous style of On the Road from seeing how good old Neal Cassady wrote his letters to me, all first person, fast, mad, confessional, completely serious, all detailed . . . I remembered also Goethe’s admonition, well Goethe’s prophecy that the future literature of the West would be confessional in nature . . . Cassady also began his early youthful writing with attempts at slow, painstaking, and all-that-crap craft business, but got sick of it like I did, seeing it wasn’t getting out his guts and heart the way it felt coming out . . . We also did so much fast talking between the two of us, on tape recorders, way back in 1952, and listened to them so much, we both got the secret of LINGO in telling a tale and figured that was the only way to express the speed and tension and ecstatic tomfoolery of the age.” [6]
     Ginsberg’s phrase “angelical ravings” combines two elements that might at first seem incompatible. He promises his poetry is “angelical,” renewing for his age the old prophetic role of the poet, dominant in all traditional and oral societies and recalled by medieval Christian apologists, then by the Romantics, Whitman, and fin-de-siècle aesthetes. The promise is that poetry provides access to a level of truth unavailable by other means. Whether the information the poet passes along is said to derive from a god or goddess, a muse, a shamanic journey, a vision, the unconscious, or another privileged source, it is thought to be revelation. All theories that literature can provide a unique storehouse of information must rest on some such claim of a specialized artistic insight.
     The second term in Ginsberg’s formula “ravings” emphasizes the gap between the the hip and the square. To the Romantic the artist is alienated, misunderstood, likely to appear “crazy” to most members of society. Of course, in a sense the marginalization of art means that one must forego the conventional rewards of salary and prestige to practice poetry, and, since the Romantic era, artists have increasingly embraced an identity as counter-cultural.
     The value of such a special perspective, varying from the norm, was recognized with the arrival of the twentieth century and Du Bois’ theory of double-consciousness. Even apart from issues of race, the last hundred years has seen the proliferation of a series of ironic aesthetic systems that likewise see phenomena both in the conventional way and in another: the camp, the kitsch, and the hip. Each assumes that most will decode the object in one way, but that some will have a more complex reaction, containing but not limited by that first concept.
     The hip cultivated a sort of double consciousness in which any experience can seem both utterly inconsequential and profoundly meaningful. This simultaneously detached and deeply engaged regard for everyday reality is also called goofing (see Philip Whalen’s Goof Book) or, using Heinlein’s term, grokking (used prominently in Wolfe’s fundamentally derisive The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test).
     Jack Kerouac’s story “The Time of the Geek” defines a sort of trinity of hoodlum, junkie, and poet. [7] Each of the three is a Romantic outsider, a nonconformist who has a vision that does not coincide with the received truth of his society. The poet Leon Levinsky – an Allen Ginsberg figure – relates his “mad description” of the Nickel-O, a Times Square amusement center where, at four in the morning, patrons enter solely to be “sheltered from the darkness.” They look “with that sightless stare that comes from too much horror.” “Everyone looks like a Zombie. . . seeking each other . . . but so stultified by their upbringings somehow, or by the disease of the age, that they can only stumble about and stare indignantly at one another.” “Everybody looks like a geek.” [8] The poet offers to demonstrate though his “subway experiment” that “the atomic disease has already made great headway.” [9] In the subway car Levinsky begins staring at a stuffy old gent through a hole in his newspaper and proceeds to tear long strips from the page with a look of serious concentration, galvanizing his fellow riders in self-consciousness with his “mad” display. The only ones who understand his gesture are the semi-enlightened ones: a child, a young student, a black man, and a lover (with a box of candy).
     In an insane world, one with Auschwitz and Hiroshima, ultimately one that includes one’s own most perilous and peculiar human existence, the most significant move will appear to be mad. (Salvador Dalí commented, “There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.”) The straight people in the subway car seek refuge in comforting (but in the end illusory) received ideas, and fidget uncomfortably in the face of irregular behavior, while the hip vision, available only to a few, revels in a direct confrontation with reality, what Burroughs called in his introduction to Naked Lunch “a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”
     The essence of the hip perspective is the claim, annoying to squares, that one has a more accurate “inside” perspective, allowing apprehension of a greater part of the truth than is vouchsafed to others, perhaps even the Whole Truth. This need not occur wholly in the realm of the page. When Aldous Huxley visits the World’s Largest Drugstore, a Rexall’s at Beverley and La Cienega, tripping on mescaline during the early 1950s, the everyday banality of the scene contrasts dramatically with the vision of his altered consciousness. Coming upon a “large, pale-blue” late-model American car, he sees neither a useful tool nor a desirable possession. “At the sight of it, I was suddenly overcome with enormous merriment. What complacency, what an absurd self-satisfaction beamed from those bulging surfaces of glossiest enamel! Man had created the thing in his own image – or rather in the image of his favorite character in fiction.” [10]
     But the hip person’s double insight does not require such a popular target as the image of our most swollen consumerism, the American automobile, immense, wasteful, and showy. Gazing at a simple lawn chair, Huxley finds it “inexpressibly wonderful, wonderful to the point, almost, of being terrifying. And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad.” [11] The disjunction between ordinary and altered consciousness registers as apparent madness, just as in the Beat formulae.
Ginsberg follows his Romantic forebears in the extravagance of his claims. To him the poet’s “angelical ravings” reveal “the secrets of individual imagination,” which are equivalent to “unconditioned Spirit” and thus to “the music of the Spheres.” “Who denies the music of the spheres denies poetry, denies man, & spits on Blake, Shelley, Christ, & Buddha.” [12] This assertion ignores the fact that language is itself entirely conventional, and just as there is no necessary link between signifier and signified, but only a code to be learned, similarly in literature the meaning of rhythms and sounds and associations does not arise spontaneously but rather is acquired through familiarity with a body of poetry. Literature’s codes are collectively constructed over time; the claim of utter self-revelation is an ancient rhetorical device.
     The corpus of work identified with the Beats did establish a new pattern for the poetic sensibility. The hip persona is defined by the distance between his vision and the dominant world-view of his time, claiming a superior insight, a prophetic vision which, for all its power, is always out of step with the commonplaces of his age. Though it mythologizes the man in the street, in the end the hip attitude insists on art’s marginalization since only a small coterie can be privy to the secrets of life. Once Kerouac’s prophecy in Dharma Bums “I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans” came more-or-less true ten years later or so, the populist Haight-Ashbury wave left virtually no literary remains. Even among the rock songs, most of the best were old blues numbers.
     The Beat claim to spontaneity and sincerity is in fact one of the oldest rhetorical devices. Kerouac advising “no pause to think of proper word,” “not ‘selectivity’ of expression but following free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought, swimming in sea of English with no discipline” [13] or Ginsberg’s celebrated dictum from Chogyam Trungpa, “First thought, best thought,” are in fact identical to the after-dinner speaker who says “unaccustomed as I am to public speaking” or who pretends to discard the written speech to extemporize. Literary statements along these lines occur throughout poetry’s history. Wordsworth suggested something similar when he spoke of making poetry of “the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement,” though for him the poet has “a more comprehensive soul” than others. [14] When Sidney began his highly conventionalized Astrophel and Stella, saying “‘Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart, and write,’” he was striking a pose.
     What had seemed innovative in the early fifties now looks like another swing of the pendulum between classicism and romanticism. Social norms have altered so that virtually no content is forbidden or even capable of producing scandal. Furthermore, much of what had seemed not only startling in technique in the forties and fifties has now been assimilated. Not only has Kerouac’s image been used for advertisements for the Gap, On the Road is now assigned to reluctant high school classes, and footnotes bloom at the bottom of textbook reprintings of Howl. [15] The excitement with which my generation received Beat writing is unavailable today. Indeed, it seems to me that no new writing elicits a comparable response.



1.. According to his 1958 Partisan Review essay “The Know-Nothing Bohemians” Kerouac is handicapped by “his simple inability to express anything in words.” To him the Beat movement suffers from, of all things, “a pathetic poverty of feeling.” They are “young men who can’t think straight and so hate anyone who can.” The basic issue is whether one is “for or against intelligence itself.” His essay is so vituperative and wide of the mark that it reads today as pure bluster.
In fact many of the best more traditional poets such as Berryman, Roethke, and Lowell altered their practice and adopted the confessional content and the open forms of the counter-culture.

2. John Clellon Homes, “This is the Beat Generation,” New York Times Magazine, November 16, 1952.

3. See The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men, edited by Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg (New York: Citadel) 1958, p. 323-338.

4. p. 12, The Sullen Art, interviews by David Ossman (New York: Corinth) 1963

5. Not only was Corso nominally Catholic, but the cemetery had been closed to new burials for fifty years, but Corso’s friends managed to make him an exception.

6. See Kerouac’s May 22, 1951 letter and his Paris Review interview, 1968. Kerouac complains about others having lost this marvelous letter, but a good piece of it may be read at http://staff.oswego.org/ephaneuf/web/Beat%20Miscellany/Cassady,%20Neal%20-%20Joan%20Anderson%20Letter.pdf

7. Apart from opium users Coleridge, Shelley, de Quincey, and Crabbe, great jazz artists had sanctified the sensitive heroin addict. See also the glorified hoodlum of Algren’s Chicago: City on the Make who, upon hearing his death sentence tells the judge “’I knew I’d never get to be twenty-one anyhow’ – and snapped his bubble-gum.” (p. 22 of the 1961 Contact edition). Even more remarkable is Norman Mailer’s “existential” justification in “The White Negro” for “two strong eighteen-year-old hoodlums” who conspire “to beat in the brains of a candy-store keeper.”

8. Page 87-88, The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men, edited by Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg (New York: Citadel) 1958.  The meaning of geek that borders nerd has eclipsed the weird old usage Kerouac intended. Though in 1965 Dylan used the carnival meaning in "Highway 61 Revisited," it now requires a footnote to inform readers that a geek was a sort of degraded “wild man” who opened a freak show, biting the head off live chickens. As Leslie Fiedler noted in Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self, “But ANYONE, merely by altering consciousness can become a Geek, become for others the Freak he has always felt himself to be.” (346)

9. The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men, p. 93.

10. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (New York and Evanston: Harper Colophon Edition, 1963), p. 59-60.

11. The Doors of Perception, p. 54

12. Allen Ginsberg, “Notes for Howl and Other Poems,” in The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, edited by Donald M. Allen, 417.

13. From “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” Black Mountain Review 1957.

14. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads.”

15. A teen-age fan of Kurt Cobain who had told me that he was forced to read “some boring book” by his English teacher eventually revealed that the title was On the Road. His teacher doubtless had his own enthusiasm and may have puzzled over the students’ indifference in precisely the same way that his own teacher a generation earlier had wondered why the youth did not properly appreciate Tennyson.