The Beats Black Mountain And New Modes In American Poetry

The Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes of American Poetry explores correspondences amongst the Black Mountain and Beat Generation writers, two of most well-known and influential groups of poets in the 1950s. The division of writers as Beat or Black Mountain has hindered our understanding of the ways that these poets developed from mutual influences, benefitted from direct relations, and overlapped their boundaries. This collection of academic essays refines and adds context to Beat Studies and Black Mountain Studies by investigating the groups’ intersections and undercurrents. One goal of the book is to deconstruct the Beat and Black Mountain labels in order to reveal the shifting and fluid relationships among the individual poets who developed a revolutionary poetics in the 1950s and beyond. Taken together, these essays clarify the radical experimentation with poetics undertaken by these poets.

The Beats and the Academy marks the first sustained effort to train a scholarly eye on the dynamics of the relationship between Beat writers and the academic institutions in which they taught. Rather than assuming the relationship between Beat writers and institutions of higher education was only a hostile one, The Beats and the Academy begins with the premise that influence between the two flows in both directions. Beat writers' suspicion of established institutions was a significant aspect of their postwar countercultural allure. Their anti-establishment aesthetic and countercultural stance led Beat writers to be critical of postwar academic institutions that tended to dismiss them as a passing social phenomenon. Even today, Beat writing still meets resistance in an academy that questions the relevance of their writing and ideas. But this picture, like any generalization, is far too easy. The Beat relationship to the academy is one of negotiation, rather than negation. Many Beats strove for academic recognition, and quite a few received it. And despite hostility to their work both in the postwar era and today, Beat works have made it into syllabi, conference resentations, journal articles, and monographs. The Beats and the Academy deepens our understanding of this relationship by emphasizing how institutional friction between the Beats and institutions of higher education has shaped our understanding of Beat Generation literature and culture—and what this relationship between Beat writers and the academy might suggest about their legacy for future scholars.

The coverage of this book ranges from Jack Kerouac's tales of freedom-seeking Bohemian youth to the frenetic paintings of Jackson Pollock, including 60 years of the Beat Generation and the artists of the Age of Spontaneity. Beat Culture captures in a single volume six decades of cultural and countercultural expression in the arts and society. It goes beyond other works, which are often limited to Beat writers like William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, and Michael McClure, to cover a wide range of musicians, painters, dramatists, filmmakers, and dancers who found expression in the Bohemian movement known as the Beat Generation. Top scholars from the United States, England, Holland, Italy, and China analyze a vast array of topics including sexism, misogny, alcoholism, and drug abuse within Beat circles; the arrest of poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti on obscenity charges; Beat dress and speech; and the Beat "pad." Through more than 250 entries, which travel from New York to New Orleans, from San Francisco to Mexico City, students, scholars, and those interested in popular culture will taste the era's rampant freedom and experimentation, explore the impact of jazz on Beat writings, and discover how Beat behavior signaled events such as the sexual revolution, the peace movement, and environmental awareness.

In these critical essays Gregory Stephenson takes the reader on a journey through the literature of the Beat Generation: a journey encompassing that common ethos of Beat literature—the passage from darkness to light, from fragmented being toward wholeness, from Beat to Beatific. He travels through Jack Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend,following Kerouac’s quests for identity, community, and spiritual knowledge. He examines Allen Ginsberg’s use of transcendence in “Howl,” discovers the Gnostic vision in William S. Burroughs’s fiction, and studies the mythic, visionary power of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poetry. Stephenson also provides detailed examinations of the writing of lesser-known Beat authors: John Clellon Holmes, Gregory Corso, Richard Fariña, and Michael McClure. He explores the myth and the mystery of the literary legend of Neal Cassady. The book concludes with a look at the common traits of the Beat writers—their use of primitivism, shamanism, myth and magic, spontaneity, and improvisation, all of which led them to a new idiom of consciousness and to the expansion of the parameters of American literature.

Who was Harold Norse? Despite publishing over a dozen volumes of poetry between the early 1950s and the new millennium, until now, the Brooklyn-born Norse has been relegated to a footnote in accounts of twentieth century literary history. Harold Norse: Poet Maverick, Gay Laureate is the first collection of essays devoted to this enigmatic poet and visual artist. As this volume explores, Norse, who developed his craft while living in Europe during the 1950s and 1960s, is an important figure in the development of mid-twentieth century poetics. During the 1950s and 1960s, Norse was a notable figure in the plethora of little poetry magazines published in the USA and Europe through to skirmishes with respectability and acceptance (Penguin and City Lights). Norse is a key figure in the development of the cut-up process made famous by his friend, William S. Burroughs. His correspondence with his mentor, the poet William Carlos Williams, captures his poetic shifts from formalism to the development of his Brooklyn idiom, while his gripping autobiography, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, documents his transatlantic networks of writers and artists, among them James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Bukowski. And after returning to the US in the late 1960s, Norse emerged as leading figure in Gay Liberation poetry. List of contributors: Jan Herman, Erik Mortenson, A. Robert Lee, Fiona Paton, Daniel Kane, Steven Belletto, Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo, Ronna C. Johnson, Kurt Hemmer, Chad Weidner, Benjamin J. Heal, Tate Swindell, Andrew McMillan, Douglas Field, Jay Jeff Jones, Todd Swindell, and James Grauerholz.

An essential selection of one of the most important twentieth-century creative movements Black Mountain College had an explosive influence on American poetry, music, art, craft, dance, and thought; it’s hard to imagine any other institution that was so utopian, rebellious, and experimental. Founded with the mission of creating rounded, complete people by balancing the arts and manual labor within a democratic, nonhierarchical structure, Black Mountain was a crucible of revolutionary literature. Although this artistic haven only existed from 1933 to 1956, Black Mountain helped inspire some of the most radical and significant midcentury American poets. This anthology begins with the well-known Black Mountain Poets—Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov—but also includes the artist Josef Albers and the musician John Cage, as well as the often overlooked women associated with the college, M. C. Richards and Hilda Morley.

This book is the first comprehensive introduction to the richness and diversity of American poetry from 1945 to the present.