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.

Notes on Buddhism and Poetry

 

Can poetry be Buddhist?

     The existence of any Buddhist aesthetics may be questioned.  The tension between the enjoyment of art and the ideal of the Great Renunciation is evident in many East Asian poems.  For one scholar of religion [1], Buddhism is wholly aesthetic in its apprehension of the world.  “The goal of life for Buddhists is aesthetic.  It is the enjoyment of life itself as intrinsic value.”   Contemplative withdrawal is in fact that focus on intrinsic enjoyment.  “Nirvana is the complete willingness to accept this world as it is as the best of all actual worlds.”  “Nirvana is the aesthetic enjoyment of what is as it is.”  However, this apparent total embrace of beauty is accompanied by a lack of interest in privileging any specific object as better, more meaningful, or more pleasing than another.  Since Buddhist meditation consists of the pure “enjoyment of self” (presumably recognizing at the same time the non-existence of ego), any experience of a work of art will introduce a “distinction between subject and object” which is “not only irrelevant but even a hindrance to its enjoyment.”

     As the end of Buddhism is enlightenment, one might conclude that the twentieth-century American philosopher is correct that any distraction is an obstacle, yet traditions of Buddhist practice contradict his conclusion.  The fact is that Buddhist art has flourished from the earliest periods, from the reliquaries in which the Buddha’s remains, we are told, were distributed to groups of devotees to be placed in stupas. [2]  Since that time Buddhist arts has proliferated in all the countries where the religion was practiced, in architecture, painting, carving, literature, and dance. [3]

     These works were by no means made as part of a secular milieu, but rather as a form of spiritual practice.  The makers of Buddhist devotional objects clearly intended for their works to serve as meditative aids in individuals’ progress toward enlightenment.  Just as chanting the poetry of the sutras was a form of worship, so might shaping original poetic images or graphic forms direct the consciousness toward its liberation.  Representation of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas is meant to awaken the sufferer to the possibility of nirvana.  The koans of Zen are obstinately concrete and specific as are the lyrics of Wang Wei and Han Shan.  The destruction of the sand mandalas in Tibet, while intended to underline the evanescence of phenomena, is as well an aesthetic signifier as modern artists such as Banksy have realized [4].  all are meant as upaya, “skillful means,” with the ultimate goal of guiding spiritual development.

     Finally, of course, the Buddha recommended a Middle Way in the very opening words of the discourse regarded as his first after enlightenment, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, avoiding both sensual indulgence and asceticism.  Anyone possessing a body will tend to seek pleasure and avoid pain and to feel lust, hunger, and anger.  Even the bhikkhu remains human and must taste and welcome food, however frugal the meal.  Therefore, a blanket condemnation of aesthetic experience seems out of character compared to a measured use of art which may even embrace the accomplishment of religious ends. [5] 

     I can scarcely deny the often expressed ambivalence, though, of Buddhist practitioners, of which this passage from Bai Juyi is representative.

 

Since earnestly studying the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness,

I’ve learned to still all the common states of mind.

Only the devil of poetry I have yet to conquer—

let me come on a bit of scenery and I start my idle droning. [6]

                                                                             

 

The appearance of the dharma in American literature

     Though it competed with Hinduism, particularly Vedanta, for American devotees, Buddhism has been an influence in American literature for as long as the Asian texts have been available.  At certain periods Buddhism shaped the broad mainstream of American poetry, while isolated points of contact from individual writers occurred at all periods.

     The Transcendentalists introduced Buddhism to American readers.  In 1844 the Buddha was ushered into the drawing room of American thought when the Dial, at the time edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and George Ripley, printed a translation of The Lotus Sutra which had only that year appeared in a French version, the first access Europeans had to this seminal text.  [7]  The old East-West mythologies persisted in part (as they do yet today), and this new knowledge of authentic Buddhist thought was fragmentary, leading Emerson to refer to the “Bhagvat Geeta” as “the much renowned book of Buddhism,” [7] and to note vaguely that “all tends to the mysterious East.” [8]

     Still, respectful mentions of Buddhism became widespread.  Thoreau referred to “their Christ” in contrast to “my Buddha” in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers [9] and Melville wrote a poem addressed to Buddha asking for nirvana. [10]  Far from the Transcendentalist Northeast, Lafcadio Hearn converted to Buddhism and translated Japanese poems and stories.  Buddhism is thereafter never absent from the stream of American literature.  During the second half of the nineteenth century its most prominent contribution to American literature was to create an enlarged space for mysticism during a time when the Theosophical Society (whose Col. Alcott was a Buddhist), Spiritualism, and eventually the appearance of Swami Vivekananda at the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago were among the popular manifestations of a similar interest.

    In the early twentieth century, during the time of High Modernism, Buddhist poetry shaped the Imagist movement through Pound and Buddhist convert Ernest Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.  [11]  Among those later influenced by these were William Carlos Williams and the Objectivists,  Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Oppen and Rakosi.  Meanwhile, T. S. Eliot studied Sanskrit and Pali, took a course in Japanese Buddhist philosophy, and concluded that Indian philosophers make European thinkers “look like schoolboys.” [12]  Though there had been converts for decades, genuine Buddhist institutions receptive to non-Asians such as Christmas Humphrey’s Buddhist Society of America (established 1931) were appearing.  The main effect of this era’s Buddhist influence was, however, reflected in Williams’ slogan “no ideas but in things.”

     The writing of the Beat coterie in the fifties is surely the most prominent example of Buddhist influence.  With several prominent poets with Buddhist gurus (such as Allen Ginsberg), some who were actual monks (Philip Whalen), and a great many other practitioners (Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder), the appearance of Black Buddhists such as Bob Kaufman and, today, the fiction writer Charles R. Johnson, as well as a great many more who took a sympathetic interest, this group brought Buddhist ideas and texts to millions. 

 

 

Allen Ginsberg on Buddhism and poetry

     As the most influential and prominent Buddhist American poet of the last century as well as a founder of the Buddhist Naropa University with its Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics,  Allen Ginsberg is a case of particular significance.  Since Ginsberg is a scholarly man, familiar with a great deal of poetic and religious texts, as well as being a serious follower of Buddhist practice, his delineation of the intersections of poetry and Buddhism are uniquely revealing. 

     In the most general way, Ginsberg identifies poetry as a whole with meditation, saying “breath spirit is the vehicle for poetry and song as well as the air horse/ The mind rides during meditation practice.”  Thus, “fine art and other meditation practices are brother-and-sister-related activities.” Great poetry is “a probe into the nature of reality and the nature of the mind.”  The goal of such “probes of consciousness” is the “purification of mind and body” [13]  

     Yet he specifies certain of his own practices, in particular “spontaneous mind, on-the-spot improvisation,” poetry as the “art of spontaneity in the void” [14].  For Ginsberg, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s formula “first thought, best thought,” or, in slightly elaborated form, “the first thought you had on your mind, the first thought you thought before you thought you should have a formal thought,” defines poetry’s proper subject. [15]  For readers who fear the loss of the pleasures of meticulous craftsmanship, this method would substitute “the total delight in chance.”  [16]

     Drawing on several generations of translations of Chinese poetry including versions by Pound, Waley, and Rexroth, Ginsberg also emphasizes a focus on concrete objective imagery.  He quotes Trungpa: “Things are symbols of themselves,” and advocates “direct treatment of the ‘thing’” [17] 

     Thematically, both “first thought, best thought” and the deep focus on the object of meditation arise from the Buddhist conviction of the ephemeral and ultimately misleading experience of reality.  According to Ginsberg, the “transcendental wisdom” of the insight that life is “both real and dream, both once at the same time,” the realization of “dream as the suchness of the universe,” is the central theme of “the ‘Golden Ash’ school, as Kerouac qualified existence.”  [18]  The phantasmagoria of poetry is explicitly “daydreams,” [19]  but consciously recognized as such and thus pointing the way to an accurate assessment of all perception and leading the reader toward enlightenment.  Every poetic detail of a Buddhist poem signifies “the eternal gateless gate which if it has ‘form’ has an undescribable [sic] one – images of which are however innumerable.” [20]

     While Ginsberg’s Buddhism inspired a body of great poetry, his theoretical writing was always polemic, uninterested in the claims of other world-views and compositional techniques.  Like other partisans, he maintains the universality of his approach, saying that “’Form is no different from Emptiness, Emptiness no different from Form’.  That formulation is one that Keats and all subtle poets might appreciate.” [21]  He maintains that “beauty itself is the realization of simultaneous ‘emptiness and form’” [22] as though there were at bottom but one variety of beauty.   

 

 

final thoughts

     In that overgeneralization lies the difficulty with Buddhist poetics.  Not surprisingly, it is similar to the limitation of Christian or Marxist poetics, each of which may couch in comely terms a certain world-vision but which has difficulty accommodating any other.  The dialectic of form and emptiness in the dance of eye and object may constitute beauty indeed, though not necessarily any more than the contemplation of form alone, whether one’s beloved’s thigh or the cadences of meter. Impermanence has its own aesthetics as well, reflected in Bernadette Mayer’s stream-of-consciousness or John Cage’s verbal compositions.  With a sufficient metaphorical imagination a non-Christian reader can appreciate the value of a Christian poem, so likewise a non-Buddhist may delight in Wang Wei, or a bhikkhu might relish Milton.  Poetry is the record of moments of consciousness which, even for an advanced spiritual practitioner, does not reside always at the highest of altitudes. 

     The thematic contributions of Buddhism, the conceptual space for describing meditative revelation and the ambiguity of perceived reality, remain significant and lasting.  The study of East Asian poetry, one of the oldest and most sophisticated poetic traditions in the world, immeasurably enriched American poetry, particularly by encouraging a disciplined focus on imagery.  As for Truth, I dare say Gerard Manley Hopkins might bring a reader an illuminated moment just as surely as Han Shan might.  Furthermore, many poems are careless of theme and impress rather with ingenuity or sensuous sound beauty or powerful passion. 

     We are only just beginning to assimilate (and transform) the artistic and philosophic achievements of Asia.  Priceless though they be, they cannot govern American poetic practice in the twenty-first century while they certainly will contribute to it.  In fact Buddhist poetry from a dozen countries of the East has already both broadened and deepened American writing in both form and content.

 

 

 

1.  See Archie J. Bahm, “Buddhist Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Dec., 1957).

2.  See the Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta.

3.  A suggestion of iconoclastic fundamentalism is apparent in the reluctance for several centuries to represent Buddha himself.  Now, of course, images of the seated Buddha are the most common and recognizable theme of Buddhist art. 

4.  Banksy’s self-destroying work Girl with Balloon was more notorious than original.  Gustav Metzger had been making such works since the late 1940s.  See his article "Machine, Auto-Creative and Auto-Destructive Art," Ark, summer 1962.  In 1962 Jean Tinguely presented Homage to New York in the Museum of Modern Art’s Sculpture Garden, an assemblage composed primarily of objects collected in garbage dumps and wired to explode and burn immediately after its unveiling. 

5.  Even Augustine, who had been so ashamed of his fondness for the theater, came to feel that there was a place in Christianity for art which encouraged the soul toward God. 

6.  Translated by Burton Watson (who uses the form Po Chü-I) in cThe Selected Poems of Po Chü-I. 

7.  The French was by Eugène Burnouf; he had written it in 1839, but did not publish it until he had completed an introduction in 1844.  The English translation from French, once attributed to Thoreau, is anonymous in the text but by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody.  The sutra appears in the Dial immediately preceding a translation of a Hermetic text.  For a full account, see Arthur Christy, The Orient in American Transcendentalism.   

7.  Emerson to Elizabeth Hoar, June 17 1845, Letters III, edited by Ralph L. Rusk, 290. 

8.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 16 vols, eds. William H. Gilman, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960-1982), 1: 12.

9.  “I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing.”

10.  “Buddha” includes an epigraph from one of the more Buddhist passages of the Greek Testament, James 4:14 “Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.” 

11.  Pound’s preference for the social ideals of Confucianism led him to mock Daoist and Buddhist holy men, yet his poetry is not thereby affected.  Arthur Waley’s translations and critical writings were a major transmission source (including for Pound) as was the work of D. T. Suzuki.

12.  Spender said Eliot “almost became a Buddhist.  See Jeffrey M. Perl and Andrew P. Tuck, “The Hidden Advantage of Tradition: On the Significance of T. S. Eliot's Indic Studies,” Philosophy East and West, vol. 35, no. 2 (Apr., 1985).

13.  These passages are from two pieces, both titled “Meditation and Poetics,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995, 152 and 262.

14.  From Deliberate Prose, “When the Mode of the Music Changes, the Walls of the City Shake,” 251.  Compare also Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” which recommends “No pause to think of proper word but the infantile pileup of scatological buildup words till satisfaction is gained, which will turn out to be a great appending rhythm to a thought and be in accordance with Great Law of timing.”

15.  Ginsberg, Allen. “First Thought, Best Thought,” Composed on the Tongue (1971), 106–117.

16.  “Meditation and Poetics,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 258 and 272.

17.  “Meditation and Poetics,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 266 and 268.

18.  “Retrospect of Beat Generation,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 246 and 247.

19.  “Meditation and Poetics,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 152.

20.  “When the Mode of the Music Changes, the Walls of the City Shake,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 250.

21.  “Meditation and Poetics” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 265.

21.  “Retrospect of Beat Generation” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 246.

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.

Notes on Recent Reading 11 [Wright, Kerouac & Burroughs, Gilbert]

The Long Dream [Wright]

     Wright’s last novel, another coming-of-age account from The Jim Crow South, is rich in factual detail and convincing dialect. Fortunately, it has become necessary for Americans to acquire from written records a knowledge of what the relation between the races was like in the days before the sixties. Wright delineates the Southern variant of this fundamental American ratio with subtlety and accuracy. Like Mailer, he points his finger on the sexual element in American racism.
     Though dreams, visions, and fantasies are most often the heart of the stories in which they appear, I found the dream sequences of Wright’s novel distracting ornamentation reflecting little beyond the decay of Freudianism. Further, the conclusion of the plot is unlikely, loosing the thematic knots with Fish’s sudden flight to France (he would surely have had no passport), but then all is redeemed with a final sentence nothing short of luxurious.


And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks [Kerouac and Burroughs]

     This fictionalized account of the New York Beat scene in the middle forties including Lucien Carr’s killing of David Kammerer remained unpublished at Carr’s request until his death in 2005. Literary judgment might, however, have concurred. It’s loose as can be, but much of the book is dialogue, doubtless preserving the tone of conversation of that earlier time in this particular subculture. It has the same fascination of the tape transcript in Visions of Cody. It’s striking how much the people drink. Fancy drinks, often, like Pernod. Somehow I would have imagined this bunch, even with Carr among them, as more bookish than the story suggests. But maybe I’m thinking of me. The book is an entertainment, though it may have been an exorcism of the horrific incident for the people involved.
     Other versions of the murder appear in Kerouac’s The Town and the Country and Vanity of Duluoz as well as in Holmes’ Go, in Edie Parker’s memoir, a number of biographies, a much-read 1976 New Yorker article by Aaron Latham, and a story by John Hollander.


H. M. S. Pinafore [Gilbert]

     Reading Gilbert’s libretto for H. M. S. Pinafore I felt even more strongly than when I see the work performed that its pleasures are largely formal. What one enjoys are the Gilbertian chops that had been evident in the Bab Ballads, the marvelous melodious play of sound that all relish in nursery school, (but so many neglect afterwards) and the romance plot, proceeding so delightfully, seeming inevitable like a fugue.
     The social themes reflect upper middle-class concerns, but rarely do they imply political positions. For all the stress on marriages impossible because of the social hierarchy, it turns out that Ralph Rackstraw, the ideal of the British sailor, is such an impressive figure because he is, in fact, of upper class birth. His marriage is conventional after all. The enthusiastic nationalism that has led to so much suffering is celebrated every bit as much as it is mocked. Some things cannot be exaggerated. The unusually pointed song about the “ruler of the Queen’s Na-vee” is devastating and clearly directed at First Lord of the Admirality W. H. Smith despite Gilbert’s disclaimer, but, then, in the play at any rate, he doesn’t seem somehow to do much harm.
     And meanwhile the plot proceeds like very satisfying clockwork.

Baby Boomer Reads the Beats

     The term baby boomer has been stretched these days to include people born as late as even 1960, but when I was very young people said simply “post-war baby.” My brother was a “war baby,” which sounded considerably more dashing, while my birth date – August 13, 1946 -- came almost exactly nine months after my father’s return from a devastated Europe.
     My parents had come from the rural Midwest, but I grew up in an affluent suburb where my father and the fathers of all my friends donned suits with starched white shirts and fedoras to board commuter trains to travel to their desks in the city. A boy seemed destined in those Eisenhower years to take The Road to Miltown and become The Organization Man, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The increasing prosperity that continued for twenty-five years after WWII and the dominant role the USA had come to play in the world allowed many Americans to feel life was good in spite of racism and the threat of nuclear holocaust.
     A number of us middle-class laddies had been instilled with a love of reading with the encouragement of mothers who figured education would guarantee us our place in the grand American sun. I was among the many of my generation who proceeded to discover fascinating realms, both revealing and transgressive, in recent American writing. Though I got into everything from Gilgamesh to Updike, from Zhuangzi to Achebe, I do recall the unique excitement of finding in Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Corso a sensibility in which I felt at home (though I would not say, and I hope I do not hear for yet another time “Reading On the Road changed my life”). When The New American Poetry, 1945-1960 came out, I discovered further new directions. I read and reread Allen’s anthology and wrote to the small presses listed in the back to buy texts that allowed even a suburban bourgeois to feel hip.
     I was excited not merely by seeing voices in print that supported my views of art, vision, revolution, sex and love, and altered consciousness. I loved the return to the performative in poetry, to readings, with or without music, sometimes using the loping declamatory line of Ginsberg’s great long poems. I was charmed by the use of the personal in poetry – poems that mentioned friends as Sappho, the troubadours, and the Dadaists had done. The new poets’ pure joy of language seemed to me the very foundation of the aesthetic utterance, and my friends and I reenacted “Poets Hitchhiking on the Highway” while wandering suburban streets where few pedestrians passed. I couldn’t get over the Whitmanic catalogues in “Canticle for the Waterbirds,” the Wolfean rhapsodies in Kerouac, or the stately cadences of Robert Duncan.
     At the age of twelve I read copies of Paul Krassner’s The Realist a subversive high school teacher risked firing by giving to my brother. I devoured Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself (1959) which included “The White Negro.” I listened to jazz and blues, but also to transparent red lp recordings from Fantasy in Berkeley featuring Ferlinghetti and Rexroth.
     Paul Carroll’s Big Table originated in the banned issue featuring Kerouac and Burroughs (1959 again) of the Chicago Review. Carroll proceeded not only to put out four more issues that maintained the high standards of the first, but also hosted a poetry reading series at the Second City on Monday evenings which the owners must have figured would be a small loss even if audiences were few. I attended these readings as a teenager, hearing some great writers while sipping the over-priced non-alcoholic beverages that bought the customer a table for the evening. (I recall several years later feeling similarly uneasy in Greenwich Village’s Gaslight.)
     I began my work in literary translation with a particular admiration for Kenneth Rexroth as an exemplar of a tradition at once scholarly and creative, erudite yet rebellious, descending from Ezra Pound and extending on to Paul Blackburn and, I felt, to me. Yet I have written almost nothing on the Beats; I always felt they were too intimate, too close to being me and my friends to analyze from the outside.
    Later, during the 70s, I was involved with with Kush (Steven Kushner), Artful Goodtimes (Bontempi) and others in the Cloud House group in San Francisco which maintained a poetry gallery storefront and practiced guerrilla poetry techniques, principally street readings. Cloud House also sought out old North Beach poets, some fallen into SRO hotel isolation, for the mutual benefit of two generations of the hip. In this way I met people like Kirby Doyle, who had appeared in both Allen’s anthology and Carroll’s banned Chicago Review and had published his own collection Sapphobones. As the earth’s turned, he gave work to the Haight’s Communications Company and lived in communes in Marin County. Michael McClure said of him in memoriam, “Kirby was the gentle, human lion and pater familias of this scene [speaking of 1958] which was as close to magic as anyone could get.”
     Bob Kaufman used to hang out at Cloud House as well, dear Bob Kaufman who eschewed publication and when young offered his poems in his original poet’s voice to drivers whose windows were, in those days without air-conditioning, open, whether their minds were or not. His vow of silence had ended by the time of Cloud House but he had little to say. He had, I suppose, become accustomed to spreading his beatitude silently. And there were others less celebrated. I recall an old amphetamine veteran who mumbled so that we often could not understand him, but we knew he had been through much, and understood.

      We drove up to Elymakee, Gary Snyder’s place in the Sierras above Nevada City, twenty miles off the nearest paved road, but neighbor to Allen Ginsberg’s property and the tracts belonging to various gurus, devotees, and literary hangers-on, where we read under the full moon and a Tibetan flag.
     The performance poetry scene is clear in its Beat lineage, and all of us who have striven to restore poetry to its traditional place in the air recognize what a dramatic shift it was in the 50s for poetry readings to appear apart from universities with their occasional literary stars and ongoing pin-striped faculty readings. In bars and cafes, book stores and living rooms, poetry became not only audible but also participatory. Everyone who had taken the trouble to chase after the words had a vision to relate. The open reading is an integral part of contemporary poetry series. The boorish sometimes arrive after the main reading is nearly done, and the slightly less boorish come on time but page through their own work while the featured reader is on. And all this surely happened during the 1950s as well. But everyone understands that we are all the children of the Beats; we remember how one after another, the practitioners of tight and intellectual verses like (Robert Lowell) were converted to free composition and to freer statement of what most needed to be said. It is difficult for younger people to whom the Beats are simply a literary chapter to realize the scorn and derision these writers attracted when they were themselves younger. Were they the last literary generation with the ability to shock?
     To me, a most engaged partisan especially in my callow years, the Beats were the most recent team fielded by the Dionysians whose competition with the Apollonians had always to be refought on the printed page as well as in our minds. Perhaps I am a typical sexagenarian in that I find myself these days reading more old books than new, but the Beat writers I encountered in my prepubescence have never lost their savor. I don’t doubt that the weakness is mine if I have found so little later writing that for me says as much as well.
     This reaction is not inevitable, though. I was visiting the home of a Southern California super-affluent cousin of my wife’s when the alienated teen-age son who secluded himself to listen to Kurt Cobain excused himself from going out for dinner by saying he had to do a report for English. Incommunicative as he had been, I though we might have a bit of common ground, and I asked his assigned topic. “Awww, it’s just some boring book my English teacher gave us,” he said. “What’s the title?” I pressed on. “Some stupid thing I’m supposed to read . . . it’s called On the Road.”