http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20091012/LIFE/910120303
Literary group hosts a celebration of Beat Generation writers
By ROBIN BROWN
October 12, 2009
Bob Davis dug out his bongo drums and donned his beret, duding up his
Daddy-O for the beatnik times that will hit Newark Saturday.
"And I'm growing a beard," said cool-cat Davis, a board member of The
Delaware Literary Connection, a writers' group inviting the public --
with or without beatnik attire -- to celebrate a wild era that
altered American literature and life.
"Cooling It with Kerouac: A Beat Generation Reading," is set for 4 to
6 p.m. at The Deer Park Tavern, on Main Street. The $5 admission --
cash bar, snack trays provided -- benefits the nonprofit's programs.
The celebration aims not only to highlight widely misunderstood
writer Jack Kerouac, but also to honor the anniversary of poet Allen
Ginsberg's first public reading of "Howl," the spark of the Beat
literary and social movement. Both would eventually send many young
Americans on their own road trips, spawn the hippie movement, and
embolden American publishers to print all kinds of edgy material that
challenged Main Street values.
Ginsberg's poem "railed against 1950s' conformity, celebrated sexual
freedom and championed his friends, Jack Kerouac and William
Burroughs," said Bob Yearick, of Brandywine Hundred, also a board
member of the Literary Connection.
"The [first Howl] reading, at San Francisco's Six Gallery on Oct. 7,
1955, helped bring into prominence 'beat culture,' which sought bliss
in Cold War America while rejecting mainstream American values," he said.
Organizers hope that focusing on the Beat Generation will inspire
more local poets, as amateurs get a shot at open-microphone readings
and a contest for original Beat poems, with cash prizes.
It's a BYOB affair, and they're not talking alcohol: "Bring your own bongos."
Bongos will help create the event mood, Yearick said. Players will
include Davis, a Newark-area resident and yoga teacher, who will
introduce some participants.
"He's really into the Beat poets ... and he has a beret," Yearick said.
To that, Davis cops a guilty plea.
"I'm 63 years old and I read Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road' when I was
a junior in high school and that got me into playing bongo drums," Davis said.
Davis also will do the honors of reading the event's featured
selection from "Howl."
Female Beat poets will be represented by a reading from Anne Waldman,
the co-founder with Ginsberg of The Jack Kerouac School of
Disembodied Poetics, at The Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo.
"The school, which still exists, was founded by people who were
students of a Buddhist named Trungpa Rinpoche," Davis said. "Waldman
and Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were all into Buddhist ideas."
While "Howl" put Ginsberg on the literary map, Davis said, "On the
Road" brought trouble to Kerouac, who would die at 47. He became
reclusive after the instant fame that followed the book's publication.
Many of the book's fans mistook him for the autobiographical novel's
fast-talking ladies' man who drove cross-country, Davis said, but the
painfully shy Kerouac actually was his passenger, "more of a
fly-on-the-wall kind of person who observed everything."
Another impact of "On the Road" showed up, literally, on the road.
"That got people, young people, jumping in cars and driving across
the country," Davis recalled.
After Ken Kesey published "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and
"Sometimes a Great Notion," he helped to link the Beat Generation
with the Hippie Generation. The Beats began experimenting with drugs,
and the Grateful Dead played at parties where LSD spiked the punch.
Kesey and friends drove cross-country in a bus named Further. The
riders, dubbed "The Merry Pranksters," believed they were trying to
create art from everyday life.
The bus driver was Neal Cassady, the inspiration for Dean Moriarty,
the flamboyant driver in "On the Road." That added to Kerouac's
stress, when the tales were recounted in Tom Wolfe's "Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test," a non-fiction account of the hallucinogen-loving partiers.
Kerouac's novel, "Dharma Bums," also was influential in its
fictionalized accounts of two real events, Davis said.
The first was Ginsberg's "Howl" reading, hosted by San Francisco poet
Kenneth Rexroth. Since that day, Davis said, there's been a poetry
reading every day in the Bay Area.
"It got poetry back on the streets," he said. "Poetry began to be
read in coffee houses and bars across America -- and that hadn't
happened before."
Kerouac's hero of "Dharma Bums," published in 1958, was a poet based
on Gary Snyder, the Beat poet who would later win a Pulitzer Prize.
Snyder, who often mountain climbed in the Pacific Northwest, took
Kerouac climbing at Mount Tamalpais, just north of San Fran's Golden
Gate Bridge in 1956 -- recounted in the novel -- and they carried
gear in rucksacks, later known as backpacks, he said.
"Young hippies 10 years later would carry this book in their
backpacks, so Kerouac also launched the 'Backpack Generation,'" Davis said.
Fans also point to a huge impact by the Beat Generation on American
literature, because it changed what could be published.
After poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, founder of the famed City Lights
Bookstore in San Francisco, published Ginsberg's "Howl," Davis said,
it was confiscated by police and Ferlinghetti was arrested on
obscenity charges. Famous authors including Norman Mailer rallied to
support Ferlinghetti and the poem, testifying that "Howl" was not
pornography -- it was literature.
"And the judge ruled that 'Howl' was literature," Davis said. That
cleared the way for the first American publication of Henry Miller's
"Tropic of Cancer," a book published in Paris in the 1930s, but
banned in the United States.
The Beat Generation celebration will be The Delaware Literary
Connection's second annual reading.
Last October, the group for all kinds of writers held its first
reading event, "Channeling Poe," that drew nearly 100 to The Deer
Park to honor Edgar Allan Poe around the anniversary of his death,
said Barbara Gray, the writers group's board director.
When Davis thought it would be a "howl" to honor the Beats, the board agreed.
Guests are welcome to attend as a famous persona, Gray said.
"Otherwise, it's casual attire," she said.
--
Contact robin brown at 324-2856 or rbrown@delawareonline.com.
.
0 comments:
Post a Comment