Beat Poets

This book is, also* an 'Everyman's Library Pocket Poets' compendium, comprised of a wide selection of poetry - between one and eight per poet chosen from major figures in the 1950's/60's Beat** movement, including: Ray Bremser, Gregory Corso, Elise Cowen, Robert Creeley, Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Barbara Guest, Leroi Jones, Lenore Kandel, Bob Kaufman, Jack Kerouac, Tuli Kupferberg, Joanne Kyger, Philip Lamantia, Denise Levertov, Joanna McClure, Michael McClure, David Meltzer, Harold Norse, Frank O'Hara, Peter Orlovsky, Marie Ponsot, Gary Snyder, Anne Waldman, Lew Welch, Philip Whalen and John Wieners.***

   There are almost no poems in this collection that aren't at least good, and most are excellent, a few truly sublime; I feel like most of the names listed above are poets whom I now am inclined to track down individual books from and just drink in most of what they had to write. There's something heady and mad and utterly addictive about Beat poetry; sometimes it buzzes with a pure uncontainable joy, sometimes it slides hot serrated knives of on-the-nose feeling into your stomach, sometimes it is grotesque or hilarious or just strange but never completely impenetrable - it is revolutionary and boundary-shattering and brilliant and honestly I'm not sure whether to recommend it explicitly because it's also something that I'm sure a lot of people**** won't like.

   If you are anywhere near me in enthusiasm for the reading or writing of poetry though, I heartily recommend this book - or at the very least seeking out material by the names listed within its collection. Just something about the Beat style of poetry (see ** &/ ***) echoes of a deep unfiltered humanity and gusto that sets it considerably out from much other stuff. Something about this book in particular that I liked was that it also had (alongside Carmela Ciuraru's foreword which has some good insights into the movement overall) a section at the end with letters, reflections, statements, and such on poetics, from Donald Allen, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara and Peter Orlovsky - these are such idiosyncratic and purposeful bits that they can be mulled over as much of any of the poems in here, and moreover are not unhelpful in informing how one thinks about the production and reception of poetry, especially in the Beat style and form.

   Anyway that's it.

   Thnak you

* This one was too.

** My thirteen-year-old brother upon seeing the title of this volume was amused & excited as he thought it was a book inciting its readers to literally "beat poets". #edgy

*** So whoever curated this book, which I could find out probably from the inside cover apart from I don't care as it's not the point the poetry is obviously the point, either has the advantage of historical oversight of Beat as an artistic movement, or else disagrees on the finer points of its defined-included-crowd with Kerouac - who writes of "the new American poetry as typified by the SF Renaissance (which means Ginsberg, me, Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, Corso, McClure, Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, Philip Whalen I guess)". It's cool that they were all mates, or at least a bunch of them.
   The more you read of each you can see friendships and influences overlapping and seeping into each others' work, from Allen in Howl harking back to slithers of anecdote so bizarrely specific that they seem like they must have happened during one of their mad adventures because they also have their echoes in Jack's landmark novel On the Road, or fragments of abstract little nonsense that just smells like something one of them said to another when they were off on a jazz-and-drug-fuelled romp across the night and some weird turn of phrase just set itself in their memory such that it encapsulated something that would be perhaps incommunicable except in the shadowball haze of capturing that short sequence of words like a butterfly in a jar and squashing it down onto a page in a creative frenzy not caring whether the reader will entirely 'get it' because they don't need to and it sounds cool anyway and the spontaneity of it, the haphazard whimsical zigzags of thought and image and sound, works regardless, if uninterpretable it will simply be put down to artistic ambiguity and hailed as genius, which it may well be, but one unobserved, unpolished, raw and joyful and gutspilling as the true heart of the Beat Movement and its revolutionary approach to poetry was.

**** I mean, a lot of people don't really like poetry at all. A lot of people don't even read for fun. A lot of people would be genuinely happier in a shopping mall than an art gallery. These people do not read my blog (well, nobody does) so I feel somewhat vindicated in whinging about this utterly blinkered segment of the human population, who have never and possibly never will fully exercise or develop their aesthetic, let alone creative, capacities - because there are so many things it is easier to consume than art, which ultimately is not even something we consume but something we approach tentatively like a wild animal, gaze in the eye, wonder, speculate, ponder, meditate, only for it to run away into the bushes and leave us just slightly more aware of our smallness of self. I say this like the only value of art is the truly sublime experience but in all honesty there are many stripes of art and to start drawing distinctions is needlessly elitist - I enjoy mainstream cinema as much as anyone (or would were I not constantly picking films apart for their patriarchal-capitalist-imperialist biases during viewing). Whatever. I literally just said I feel vindicated in my whinges - why launch into recursive defense? People who can derive more satisfaction from buying a pair of trainers than, say, reading a relatively fresh accessible powerful poem, you baffle me and yet you are no mystery at all.