Fall Samhain Moon
The beats. for beatific. A generation I have begun to feel more now, reading them in ModPo. I never read them, ignored them as quaint, anachronistic for the rebellion, my rebellion, our rebellion, the 60’s. Now looking back at them, imagining them as outriders on the buttoned up, nuclear overcast, post-war suburban build out to conformity culture in which I was young, now I can see. And hear. They inhabited a margin unimaginable from the center of Levittown, a world of China and tea with no oriental associations, a rootless, roving busload of wearers of black, makers of poetry, listeners to jazz, respecting no sexual or social conventions. Out there, man.
(Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Lafcadio Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso in 1956)
Now. Now I hear the Howl and have listened to Kerouac’s strangely charismatic voice, speaking through digital technology only barely coming to be in his own time. These are not my people. I am not of them. But they are our people, our American outsiders. Buoys on the shipping lanes of middle class culture warning out beyond here there be monsters. My people are political. The beats were not. We used acid and mescaline and peyote, they turned to heroin. They found their place in poetry and wandering and improvisation; we found ours in the street, organizing, fighting. Different. But the same.
(Carl Solomon, Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs at the Gotham Book Mart, New York City, 1977)
American outsider voices. All amplified in that strange alien language spoken only where the commuters never ride. Where the matron never serves tea. Where the only hope is purity and clarity and the archetypal. Never sullied by bills and jobs and diapers and cars breaking down. Out there surfing the big breaks of idealism that crest upon the shore of America the Capitalist and America the Conformist.
(Train Station, by Bernice Sims)
I hear them now, speaking in their cadences at night in coffee houses, pounding small drums and shouting into the microphone about pain and angels and doomed love.
