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). 

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.

The Hipster’s Epigone

 

The essay is followed by the lyrics to Cab Calloway’s “Hep! Hep! The Jumping Jive” and “Are You Hep To The Jive?” 

  

1.  Apologia

     It was perhaps inevitable that an app has been developed that will locate for travelers the nearest “hipster” neighborhood.   A number of sites had already compiled travel guides toward the same end, taking into account an area’s median age and the availability of bike trails but primarily “the density of hipster-friendly businesses,” meaning such things as “coffee shops, craft breweries, record stores, organic markets.” [1]

     From the point of view of a septuagenarian one-time resident in the Haight-Ashbury, it seemed that a group hardly distinguishable from those unashamedly consumption-oriented squares called yuppies in the eighties, were, with the simple addition of a few days of stubbly beard (now tolerated in the office) and a taste for Ethiopian food, transformed into hip people.  Of course, this verbal shift parallels the replacement of the underground papers of the sixties in which the radical visual style matched the politics with consumer-oriented free (advertising-supported) weeklies that like to describe themselves as “alternative.” [2]

     Yet I feel I must rise in defense of the older meaning of the word, however useless such arrière-garde defenses, for, just as the introduction of a new word may signal formulation of a new meaning, loss of a definition is generally accompanied by the loss of the concept that underlies the word, and I lament the loss of the old hipster. 

 

2.  What’s hip?  Who’s a hipster?

      The words hip and hipster have conveyed a number of well-attested meanings over the years.  Apart from the basic anatomical signification of the body part and the fruit of the wild rose (from two different old Germanic roots), the word was used in the nineteenth century to mean, according to the OED “to affect with hypochondria, to render low-spirited.”  During Prohibition a hipster was one carrying a hip-flask and in the thirties a wild dancer (with lively movements of the hips).  Such usages have no part in the principal twentieth century definitions suggesting one in the know, an insider who can see what others cannot.

     The source of this meaning of hip is in fact unknown, though several unsatisfactory origins have been suggested.  Some have proposed that the word referred to the posture of opium smokers reclining on one hip.  In the 1960s many jumped to accept the attractive but apparently highly speculative etymology  of David Dalby that the term derived from the Wolof meaning “to open the eyes, to see clearly.”  [3] 

    Apparently the earliest written usage is in a story about “the great blizzard of 1899” in which a Washingtonian is quoted as saying, “And as soon as I get out I’m hep that the water’s froze. What do you think of that?” [4]  It appears then in a cartoon in 1902 and in novels in 1904 and 1914. [5]  By the late 1930s it had attained sufficient currency to be listed in slang dictionaries. [6] 

     Far more significant, though, in terms of disseminating the word widely was the popularity of two musicians, Cab Calloway and Harry “the Hipster” Gibson. In the late thirties Calloway was one of the most popular bandleaders in the country, well aware from the outset of the fascination that jive talk held for the general population. His “Minnie the Moocher,” a huge hit, was full of such slang. [7]  In 1938 he published a booklet titled Cab Calloway's Cat-ologue: A "Hepster's" Dictionary [8], which remained, until the publication of Mezz Mezzrow’s autobiography Really the Blues (1946) [9], the best guide to hip language.

     A great showman who practiced exaggerated mugging and wore attention-getting costumes, Calloway recognized the exotic appeal of Harlem slang.  Calloway’s 1939 song “Hep! Hep! The Jumping Jive” mixes nonsense syllables (including the graceful lyric line (“Palomar, shalomar, Swanee shore”) with a two-syllable refrain (“hep hep”) and a call to “dig your jive on the mellow side,” suggesting good times partying.

     The use of argot itself implies transgressive associations, most dramatically recreational drug use.  References to cocaine and opium and the artificial paradise of getting high fill “Minnie the Moocher” (though Calloway was careful to excise them from his dictionary).  Hip slang arose from the confluence of everyday Black culture, musicians’ shoptalk, and drug-users’ cant.  These three worlds overlapped in part, but they also shared an important characteristic.  Each sought through the codes of a subcultural patois to reinforce their identity with their own group and to exclude outsiders.  The assertion of membership as an insider, the possessor of valuable secrets inaccessible to others, is the essence of the concept of hip.

     Further popularization of the term occurred with the performances of a white musician, Harry “the Hipster” Gibson who would tell his audience, “Gather round, all you hipsters,” and soon embraced the name himself with the song “Handsome Harry The Hipster.” [10] While performing the most extreme facial mugging in American show business prior to Jim Carrey Gibson muted the drug references, saying of his persona only that “he digs those mellow kicks.”  [11]  Though Gibson was only briefly a nationally known performer – he did appear in the film Junior Prom in 1939, but his song "Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?" (1946), while enjoying a modest succès de scandale, also caused him to be banned from radio play.  While hip was reaching a wider audience beyond Blacks, dopers, and jazz musicians, it retained associations of counter-cultural, even criminal values. [12]

     In the nineteen-fifties America as a whole heard about hip through the popular magazines’ coverage of the Beat writers and, to a lesser extent, the jazz milieu.  The term was also debated on the margins of intellectual life, and controversy arose in the intellectual quarterlies.  Significantly, proponents and critics agreed to a large extent on the term’s meaning, differing only in the associated value judgment.        

     In Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro” [13]  Mailer described “the American existentialist—the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as l’univers concentrationnaire, or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled (at what damage to the mind and the heart and the liver and the nerves no research foundation for cancer will discover in a hurry).”  Mailer begins his essay with a quotation from a popular journalist [14] who says that a hipster “is rarely an artist, almost never a writer. He may earn his living as a petty criminal, a hobo, a carnival roustabout or a free-lance moving man in Greenwich Village.”   In order to live more intensely, according to Mailer, “the hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.”  In his rewriting of DuBois’ double consciousness, he notes “the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries.”  He seeks “to encourage the psychopath” in himself, a psychopathic personality that Mailer notes ominously, “may indeed be the perverted and dangerous front-runner of a new kind of personality.” 

     The most direct riposte to Mailer’s enthusiasm was Norman Podhoretz’s piece “The Know-Nothing Bohemians" [15] the title of which reveals at once the level of vituperation leveled against the Beats in the fifties. [16]   To Podhoretz, Kerouac and the Beats were totally nihilistic, sometimes verging on violence.  To him the hip are “spiritually underprivileged and the crippled of soul—young men who can't think straight and so hate anyone who can.”  Not only are they “anti-intellectual,” and “primitive,” with “an inability to express anything in words” and a “hostility to intelligence,” more shocking yet, they are “attracted to criminality” and Podhoretz conjures up reason to associate Kerouac with attacks on a homeless man and a nine-year-old.

     The view of the hipster as an inarticulate impulsive juvenile delinquent is evident in late 1950s popular culture.  Feiffer’s Huey character appeared first in Sick, Sick, Sick (1958) as a cool, jiving antithesis to the neurotic Bernard and Geets Romo, Del Close’s character in How to Speak Hip (1959) manifests his hipness in the difficulty of communicating with his square interlocutor.  Such a pose held a certain allure, even some commercial possibilities.  By the late fifties, tourists could be certain of spotting a genuine bohemian since Wally Hedrick [17] was hired by Vesuvio’s across the alley from City Lights to sit in the front window decked out in beard and beret daubing a canvas.  In New York In 1959, Fred McDarrah established the Rent-a-Beatnik service to provide colorful party guests, even Black ones including Ted Joans and Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka). 

     The cooptation and dilution of the idea of the hipster advanced wholesale during the sixties.  “Hippie,” which had originally been a pejorative diminutive referring to younger aspirants to the scene. [18]  Though in fact the social scene in the Haight-Ashbury included all sorts of elements from the psychopathic through the petty criminal to the striving artist and the college student just passing through, their image was dominated by flowers, daisies, and soap bubbles.  The Summer of Love replaced the feral cunning of the fifties hipster with ingenuous naiveté.   

   The crowds clogging Haight Street and Telegraph Avenue might have been called heads or freaks but most often hippies resulting in a power vacuum about the semantic territory of the word hipster.  Meanwhile with the general social reversion to avarice as a career goal came the inappropriate nineties coinage eco-hipster, or green hipster.  The notion, if not the term, doubtless originated among marketing departments seeking a cachet among young consumers.  Closely related is the concept of bobos, or bourgeois bohemians, a term oxymoronic in both English and French. [19]  Whereas voluntary poverty had been widespread among earlier counter-cultures, this group indulged in conspicuous consumption so long as it called attention not only to one’s means but also to one’s taste.  Preserving the semantic element of a discerning insider, the word here applied to purchasing choices.  Though the “green” element of this newly defined group drew on the radical revolutionary allegiances associated with some earlier hipsters, this new grouping adopted a far more cautious political line, in particular never suggesting the fatal entanglement of capitalism with the impending ecological disaster. 

     An easy slide from such eco-hipsters to the contemporary usage of the bare term hipster occurred around the turn of the twenty-first century.  In the early months of 2000 several journalistic treatments of the gentrification of Williamsburg referred to the area’s popularity with “arty” types not using the term hipster, but the term’s application was soon clear with the publication in February of 2003 of The Hipster Handbook by Robert Lanham. [20].

     Today many dictionary definitions retain only trace elements of the earlier meanings. In Merriam Webster’s a hipster is still a bit of a rebel, “someone who rejects the established culture; advocates extreme liberalism in politics and lifestyle,” while for Merriam Webster that element has vanished: “a person who is unusually aware of and interested in new and unconventional patterns (as in jazz or fashion).”  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most up-to-date definition appears in Wikipedia whose entry is quite clear.  “The 21st-century hipster is a subculture (sometimes called hipsterism) that is defined by claims to authenticity and uniqueness yet, ironically, is notably lacking in authenticity and conforms to a collective style.  The subculture embodies a particular ethic of consumption that seeks to commodify the idea of rebellion or counterculture.  Fashion is one of the major markers of hipster identity.  Members of the subculture typically do not self-identify as hipsters, and the word hipster is often used as a pejorative for someone who is pretentious or overly concerned with appearing trendy or fashionable in a non-mainstream way.” 

 

3.  My Hipster, Ma Bohème

      As language is always in the process of evolution, every individual in a lifetime will notice changes in usage and lexicology.  Naturally, then, every generation of elders is likely to consider some innovations improper.  There is a considerable history both of writers denouncing the degradation of language in their own day and of satire ridiculing old people clinging to outmoded usages.  Those with a taste for pedantry are particularly prone to such lexical conservatism.  A glorious example is H. W. Fowler’s impassioned and lengthy objection to the use of meticulous to mean closely attentive to detail on the basis of its derivation from Latin metus (“frightened”).  His demonstration that the current definition is not Classical is buttressed by the accusation that it arose first in France.   Of course, such reasoning, however sound it may be, cannot influence the development of the word.  (Fowler also considered asset “a false form”, individual “often a colloquial vulgarism”, and elevator “properly used only of a grain hoist”.) [21]

     I am, then, well aware that, as writers have more often realized than teachers, the criticism of new and popular verbal usages is fruitless. [22]  I persist, nonetheless, hoping not to halt the semiotic drift but to flesh out the older sense of hip and hipster, lovingly preserving this ghost of a word if only as an exhibit in the museum of the mind.

     Still, were I to locate a sweet spot in the hipster history, a definition that fills an otherwise vacant place in the lexical structure and, more importantly, one that appeals to me, a signification unfortunately now faded, I would select one close to that suggested by Anatole Broyard in 1948 essay in Partisan Review, “A Portrait of the Hipster,” [23] which, even as it took the hipster seriously, describing him as an “underground man,” bearing both the burden and the freedom of being “of the minority,” also foresaw its cooptation in the very intellectual sympathy that led to both Broyard’s essay and to mine.  “The hipster—once an unregenerate individualist, an underground poet, a guerilla—had become a pretentious poet laureate. His old subversiveness, his ferocity, was now so manifestly rhetorical as to be obviously harmless. He was bought and placed in the zoo. He was somewhere at last—comfortably ensconced in the 52nd Street clip joints, in Carnegie Hall, and Life. He was in-there...he was back in the American womb. And it was just as hygienic as ever.” 

     I am well aware of the problems associated with hip as an aesthetic category [24], yet it remains for me a significant and novel twentieth century artistic concept. For all his topicality, all the talk of Hiroshima and Auschwitz and existential Angst, the hipster is surely the mid-twentieth century successor to a legion of earlier artists who claimed to know more than their fellows: shamans, prophets, and seers. To me the hip will always penetrate lies, the vicious claims of all forms of prejudice, most prominently racism, and the lethal lure of war, that old love-killer misogyny, the lies of criminals in high places, and the spirit-killing programming that teaches people that the way to joy is possessions. That sort of hip had its start in Black peoples’ certainty that society was based on fraud, musicians’ winking certainty that art trumped money, and dopers’ intuition that everyone else was as hooked as they but simply didn’t know it, yet that people could still almost miraculously salvage their corrupt and materialistic society through art, beauty, and spiritual ambition. If those insights are lost, a new counter-culture will likely be required to restore the species to a path of progress.

 

 

1.  The app is called Where Is Williamsburg?  The travel guide I mention is for rent.com.  

2.  To be fair, a few of these journals (the Chicago Reader and the Bay Guardian, for instance) have provided investigative reports and arts criticism beyond features on movies, television shows, food, and merchandise.  During its long decline even the Village Voice sometimes pleasantly surprised its readers.

3.  This etymology, though rejected by most linguists, has survived and spread through secondary books such as J. L. Dillard’s Black English (1972).  It is repeated in John Leland’s Hip: A History (2004).  Dalby had ingeniously suggested African origins for a number of other terms current in his own day’s slang, most of which are not accepted by other authorities. 

4.  The Washington Times (Washington, District of Columbia), 12 Feb., 1899.

5.  T. A. Dorgan featured a character “Joe Hip,” “Son of old man Hip.”  The 1904 novel by George V. Hobart, called Jim Hickey: A Story of One-Night Stands (the title refers to musical jobs) -- preserves a great deal of slang used among musicians.  The 1904 novel, Rex Beach’s The Auction Block, was made into a film in 1917.

6.  Examples include Jack Smiley’s Hash House Lingo (1941) in which hipster is defined as “a know-it-all” and the glossary for Mezz Mezzrow’s Really the Blues (1946) in which a hipster is “a man who’s in the know, grasps everything, is alert.”. 

7.  “Minnie the Moocher” was the first recording by an African-American (and the first categorized as jazz) to sell over a million copies.  Calloway went on to be the first of his race to have a national radio show.  He appeared as well in films including both features such as International House (1933) and short films for Paramount such as 1934 Cab Calloway’s Hi-De-Ho, as well as in cartoons including three Betty Boop animations.  Like Dr. John and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins Calloway was a crossover artist bringing a version of African-American culture attractive to white listeners.

8.  Republished in an expanded version the next year as Professor Cab Calloway’s Swingformation Bureau.

9.  Co-written by Bernard Wolfe.

10.  Recorded in 1944, but composed years earlier.

11.  He was busted a number of times, including once with Billie Holiday in a Florida hotel room in 1956 when he was her accompanist at the Ball and Chain. 

12.  Those unfamiliar with the forties popular music scene may be surprised to learn that a listing of the top eighty records of 1946 included tunes by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Django Reinhardt. See https://playback.fm/charts/top-100-songs/1946.

13.  Dissent, fall 1957.  Perhaps equally influential were the columns Mailer wrote for The Village Voice, such as the lists comparing hip and square.

14.  “Caroline Bird, Born 1930: The Unlost Generation,” Harper’s Bazaar, Feb. 1957. 

15.  Partisan Review, spring 1958.  After a leftist youth, Podhoretz became an agent of reaction.  The Partisan Review was, of course, funded by the CIA as part of its effort to counteract the influence of leftist intellectuals.  Podhoretz himself worked for the USIA in the sixties, at a time when collaboration with the government was unpopular among artists and scholars. 

16.  A certain fascinated repugnance is evident not only in literary reviews but also general interest magazines such as Time and Life.  For a detailed general perspective see Anna Lou Jessmer, Containing the Beat: An Analysis of the Press, Coverage of the Beat Generation During the 1950s, available at https://mds.marshall.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1425&context=etd.

17.  Hedrick, a pioneering artist in conceptual and performance modes, had founded the Six Gallery where the historic poetry reading occurred in 1955. 

18.  In my first memory the word meant something teeny-bopper.  Both hippie and beatnik were scornful labels popularized by the decidedly non-hip Herb Caen.

19.  among the satirical reactions see David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (2000) and the French cartoon book Bienvenue à Boboland (Welcome to Boboland, 2008).

20.  Stories appeared in "The Bedford Files," Time Out New York (TONY) (February 3–10, 2000) and in "Brooklyn Nights Turn Brighter," The New York Times (February 11, 2000). 

21.  See the entries for these words in Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage.  I think as well of the elderly British teacher I met in my youth who denounced the word television as “a monstrous bastard” because it combined elements derived from both Greek and Latin.  He had spent his career in India, always more conservative of British standards than the U. K.

22.  One may easily compile a list of canonical authors who use double negatives, sentences beginning with conjunctions, and the like. 

23.  Partisan Review, June 1948.

24.  See “The Legacy of the Beats” on this site.

 

 

 

1939 Hep! Hep! The Jumping Jive

 

Hep hep

De-boodle-de-ack, de-boodle-de-ackasaki

Hep hep

Oh, rang-tang, te-dah-dah

Hep-hep

Gonna tell you 'bout the jumpin' jive

Hep hep

Jim, jam, jump, the jumpin' jive

Hep hep

Cats gonna beat out this mellow jive

Hep hep

Beat it out on the mellow side

Boy

Whatcha gonna say there, gate?

Oh, boy

Whatcha gonna say there, gate?

Palomar, shalomar, Swanee shore

Let me dig that jive once more

Boy

Lay it right on down to the gator

Oh, boy

Lay it flat as a gator

Now, can't you hear those hep cats call?

Yeah

Come on, boys, let's have a ball

The jim, jam, jump on the jumpin' jive

Makes you dig your jive on the mellow side

Hep hep

Hep hep

The jim, jam, jump is the solid jive

Makes you nine foot tall when you're four foot five

Hep hep

Hep hep

Now, don't you be that ickeroo

Get hep, come on and follow through

Then you get your steady foo

You make the joint jump like the gators do

The jim, jam, jump on the jumpin' jive

Makes you like your eggs on the Jersey side

Hep hep

Hep hep

The jim, jam, jumpin' jive

Makes you hep hep on the mellow side

Hep hep, hep hep

Hep hep, hep hep

The jim, jam, jump on the jumpin' jive

Will make you dig your jive on the mellow side

Hep hep

Hep hep

The jim, jam, jump, the solid jive

Makes you nine foot tall when you're four foot five

Hep hep

Hep hep

Now, don't you be that ickeroo

Get hep, come on and follow through

Then you get your steady foo

You make the joint jump like the gators do

The jim, jam, jump on the jumpin' jive

Makes you like your eggs on the Jersey side

Hep hep

Hep hep

The jim, jam, jumpin' jive

Makes you hep hep, on the mellow side

Hep hep

Hep hep

Now, I've told you 'bout the jumpin' jive

The jim, jam, jump, the jumpin' jive

I know you dug this mellow jive

Oh, you dig it on the mellow side

 

 

 

Are You Hep To The Jive (1940)

 

Are you full of pep? (Yes, yes, yes)

Are you hep-a-hep-a? (Yes, yes, yes)

Are you full of step-a

What do ya know, gates?

Are you in know, or are you a solid bringer-downer?

Listen here, jack

Take it slow you can learn just what I mean

Are you hep to the jive? (yes, yes)

Are you hep to the jive? (yes, yes)

Are you hep, are you hep, are you keepin' in step, are you hep to the jive?

Do you lace your boots high? (yes, yes)

Are you fly, are you fly? (yes, yes)

Do you dig, do you dig, do you swing on the gig, are you hep to the jive?

Do you get in the in the grove? (yes, yes)

Does the beat make you move? (yes, yes)

Do you send yourself jack and then trilly on back and you know that it's smooth?

Oh, are you hep to the jive? (yes, yes)

Are you hep to the jive? (yes, yes)

Are you hep, are you hep, are you keepin' in step, are you hep to the jive?

Are you hep to the jive? (yes, yes) (dah-doo-dah)

Are you hep to the jive? (yes, yes) (dah-doo-dah)

Are you hep, are you hep, are you keepin' in step, are you hep to the jive?

Do you lace your boots high? (yes, yes) (dah-doo-dah)

Are you fly, are you fly? (yes, yes) (dah-doo-dah)

Are you hep, are you hep, are you keepin' in step, are you hep to the jive?

Do you get in the in the grove? (yes, yes)

Does the beat make you move? (yes, yes)

Do you send yourself jack and then trilly on back and you know that it's smooth?

Are you hep-hep-hep to the jive? (yes, yes)

How do you dig-dig-dig-dig the jive? (yes, yes)

Are you hep, are you hep, are you really in step, are you hep to the jive?

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.