Fall \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Samhain Moon<\/p>\n
The beats. \u00a0for beatific. \u00a0A generation I have begun to feel more now, reading them in ModPo. \u00a0I never read them, ignored them as quaint, anachronistic for the rebellion, my rebellion, our rebellion, the 60’s. \u00a0Now 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. \u00a0And hear. \u00a0They 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. \u00a0Out there, man.<\/p>\n
(Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Lafcadio Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso in 1956)<\/p>\n
Now. \u00a0Now 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. \u00a0These are not my people. \u00a0I am not of them. \u00a0But they are our people, our American outsiders. \u00a0Buoys on the shipping lanes of middle class culture warning out beyond here there be monsters. \u00a0My people are political. \u00a0The beats were not. \u00a0We used acid and mescaline and peyote, they turned to heroin. \u00a0They found their place in poetry and wandering and improvisation; we found ours in the street, organizing, fighting. \u00a0Different. \u00a0But the same.<\/p>\n
(Carl Solomon, Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs at the\u00a0Gotham Book Mart<\/a>, New York City, 1977)<\/p>\n American outsider voices. \u00a0All amplified in that strange alien language spoken only where the commuters never ride. \u00a0Where the matron never serves tea. \u00a0Where the only hope is purity and clarity and the archetypal. \u00a0Never sullied by bills and jobs and diapers and cars breaking down. \u00a0Out there surfing the big breaks of idealism that crest upon the shore of America the Capitalist and America the Conformist.<\/p>\n (Train Station, by Bernice Sims)<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fall \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Samhain Moon The beats. \u00a0for beatific. \u00a0A generation I have begun to feel more now, reading them in ModPo. \u00a0I never read them, … Continue reading Out There, Man<\/span>