Hit the Streets with the Beats

Hit the Streets with the Beats:

your name______block___

Section 1: Beatnik Background

The father of the Beatnik generation was none other than JACK KEROUAC. He believed that traditional poetry was often oppressive to the poet… that the rules of poetry need not apply.

Ode to Jack

By Annie Heidersbach

(light jazz beat in the background; soft cymbals)

My name is Jack, and that’s Kerouac, you dig?

Don’t try to spell it,

Just sit on it and smoke your cig, and blow

That smoke on America’s roads

and watch it float through America’s hopes

And loads

Of dreams.

My name is Jack, I’ve hopped from track-to-track

On The Road ‘cross my nation’s land, where I’d stop

And stand

And breathe that air they call

Ameri- CAN.

And this is where I wrote the most, and dug the most

Exquisite folks- who took me in, let me sin

And blessed me all the same.

“cause we’re all one,” I learned and soon

I burned

To go back from where I came.

1A- NOTES ABOUT BEAT GENERATION/ SPOKEN WORD (see Powerpoint):

1B- Prompts from Def Poetry- Full Figure Potential Write your opinion of physical attractiveness in your world (at West, in America, in the media, etc.)

1C.What do YOU make? After we watched the spoken word poet. What difference do you make?

Section 2: JAZZY JAM DAY

Jazzy Jammin’ Places: Use the music of the time to inspire some creativity

• Jazz and Rock-n-roll were the two major musical influences of the 1950’s.

Jazz of the time was very “rebellious” and against-the-mainstream. This is the music of the true Beatniks of the time.

2A- Listen to some Duke Ellington music and describe the 50’s jazz club in which it would be played (then character, then action).

Section 3: Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Ferlinghetti-Spaghetti: Imitative poems based on Lawrence Ferlinghetti work.

Ferlinghetti #1 poem

The world is a beautiful place to be born into

if you don’t mind happiness not always being very much fun

if you don’t mind a touch of hell now and

then just when everything is fine

because even in heaven

they don’t sing all the time

The world is a beautiful place to be born into

if you don’t mind some people dying all the time

or maybe starving some of the time

which isn’t half so bad if it isn’t you.

Oh, the world is a beautiful place to be born into

if you don’t much mind a few dead minds

in the higher places or a bomb or two

now and then

in your upturned faces

or such other improprieties as our Name Brand

society is prey to

with its men of distinction and its men of extinction

and its priests and other patrolmen

and its various segregations and congressional

investigations and other constipations that our fool

flesh is heir to.

Yes the world is the best place for all for a lot of such things as

making the fun scene and making the love scene and

making the sad scene singing low songs and

having inspirations and waling around looking at

everything

and smelling flowers and goosing statues and

even thinking

and kissing people and making babies and wearing pants and waving hats and dancing and going

swimming in rivers on picnics in the middle of the

summer and just generally

“Living it up”

Yes

but then right in the middle of it

comes the smiling mortician.

3A: List all of the things that you think are “wonderful” about a place (the world, high school, America, Kansas, etc)… then list the things that aren’t wonderful at all. Take your ideas and write a poem about them in the style of Ferlinghetti.

Ferlinghetti #3 poem

I am waiting for my case to come up and I am waiting

for a rebirth of wonder

and I am waiting for someone to really discover

America and wail and I am waiting for the discovery

of a new symbolic western frontier

and I am waiting for the American Eagle to really

spread its wings and straighten up and fly right and I

am waiting for the Age of Anxiety to drop dead and I

am waiting for the war to be fought which will make

the world safe for anarchy

and I am waiting for the final withering away of all

governments and I am perpetually awaiting a

rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Second Coming and I am waiting

for a religious revival to sweep thru the state of

Arizona and I am waiting for the Grapes of Wrath to

be stored and I am waiting for them to prove that God

is really American

and I am seriously waiting for Billy Graham and Elvis

Presley to exchange roles seriously

and I am waiting to see God on television piped onto

church altars if only they can find the right channel

to tune in on and I am waiting for the Last Supper to

be served again with a strange new appetizer and I

am perpetually awaiting a rebirth of wonder.

3B: What are you waiting for? Make a list of things you’re waiting for… whether serious or funny, heavy or light. Think about things for you personally, for your family, the world, etc. Create a poem like his from your ideas.

Section 4: JACK KEROUAC

On the Road” w/ Kerouac

• The Beatnik’s had a real fondness for travel, believing in experiencing everything first handed.
• There were “city” and “country” Beatniks. The country ones believed in living hand-to-mouth when on the road, eating whatever they could find or even steal… sleeping in train cars, etc.

• Jack Kerouac wrote the perfect Beat novel On the Road… a book that he literally wrote when inspired by a road trip across the country. (FYI: He actually specifically stopped for a while in Kansas City in order to see the “Place where jazz began”).
• Read excerpt from On the Road

4A “On the Road” prompt choice #1: create your perfect road trip… where would you go? Who would you choose to travel with that you feel alive around (think of Dean Moriarty)? What would you do? How long would you be gone? (Try putting some of your fictional experiences into poetry “with a beat.”)

4BJack Kerouac said that we “are all beautifully weird fingerprints on the Earth- none like the other.” Everyone wants to be special, unique. What makes you different? How are you like a “weird fingerprint”? Think of strange habits, cool talents, special interests, physical traits, etc.

Section 5: ALLEN GINSBERG

“The point of Beat is that you get beat down to certain nakedness where you actually are able to see the world in a visionary way, which is the old classical understanding of what happens in the dark night of the soul.” -Allen Ginsberg

5A Write about a time (or list many times) that you realized something important about your life or the people in it. What did this “epiphany” do to change you or your life? Explain.

“America”(an excerpt) by Allen Ginsberg

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go F*** yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic? …
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry. ..
(America) I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again… 5B Write to America, telling it what you think of it. OR What is your America?

“A Supermarket in California” by A. Ginsberg

• Below is the poem by Ginsberg, in which he speaks to his favorite poet, Walt Whitman (long since dead)

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked

down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking

at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon

fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at

night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!

--and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking

among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.

I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?

What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you,

and followed in my imagination by the store detective.

We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy

tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the

cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour.

Which way does your beard point tonight?

(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and

feel absurd.)

Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade

to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automo-

biles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America

did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a

smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters ofLethe?

5C Write a poem or essay directed to a writer of your choice- what would you say to him/ her? Questions you would ask?

Section 6: GENERATIONAL ISSUES

"This Is the Beat Generation"
A 26-year-old defines his times.
New York Times Magazine
November 16, 1952
by John Clellon Holmes

The wild boys of today are not lost. Their flushed, often scoffing, always intent faces elude the word, and it would sound phony to them. For this generation conspicuously lacks that eloquent air of bereavement which made so many of the exploits of the Lost Generation symbolic actions. Furthermore, the repeated inventory of shattered ideals, and the laments about the mud in moral currents, which so obsessed the Lost Generation does not concern young people today. They take it frighteningly for granted. They were brought up in these ruins and no longer notice them. They drink to "come down" or "get high," not to illustrate anything. Their excursions into drugs or promiscuity come out of curiosity, not disillusionment.

Only the most bitter among them would call their reality a nightmare and protest that they have indeed lost something, the future. But ever since they were old enough to imagine one, that has been in jeopardy anyway. The absence of personal and social values is to them, not a revelation shaking the ground beneath them, but a problem demanding a day-to-day solution. How to live seems to them much more crucial than why. And it is precisely at this point that the copywriter and the hot-rod driver meet, and their identical beatness becomes significant, for, unlike the Lost Generation, which was occupied with the loss of faith, the Beat Generation is becoming more and more occupied with the need for it. As such, it is a disturbing illustration of Voltaire's reliable old joke: "If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent Him." Not content to bemoan His absence, they are busily and haphazardly inventing totems for Him on all sides...

In the wildest hipster, making a mystique of bop, drugs and the night life, there is no desire to shatter the drugs and the night life, there is no desire to shatter the "square" society in which he lives, only to elude it. To get on a soapbox or write a manifesto would seem to him absurd.... Equally, the young Republican, though often seeming to hold up Babbitt as his culture hero, is neither vulgar nor materialistic, as Babbitt was. He conforms because he believes it Is socially practical, not necessarily virtuous. Both positions, however, are the result of more or less the same conviction -- namely that the valueless abyss of modern life is unbearable.

By the early 1950's, Kerouac and Ginsberg had begun to emphasize the "beatific" quality of "Beat", investing the viewpoint of the defeated with mystical perspective. "The point of Beat is that you get beat down to a certain nakedness where you actually are able to see the world in a visionary way," wrote Ginsberg, " which is the old classical understanding of what happens in the

dark night of the soul."

6A- How will your generation be remembered? OR How does it compare to the Beats?

My Father (from "Septuagenarian Stew" 1994)by Charles Bukowski( Top of Page )

was a truly amazing man
he pretended to be
rich
even though we lived on beans and mush and weenies
when we sat down to eat, he said,
"not everybody can eat like this."

and because he wanted to be rich or because he actually
thought he was rich
he always voted Republican
and he voted for Hoover against Roosevelt
and he lost
and then he voted for Alf Landon against Roosevelt
and he lost again
saying, "I don't know what this world is coming to,
now we've got that god damned Red in there again
and the Russians will be in our backyard next!"

I think it was my father who made me decide to
become a bum.
I decided that if a man like that wants to be rich
then I want to be poor.

and I became a bum.
I lived on nickles and dimes and in cheap rooms and
on park benches.
I thought maybe the bums knew something.

but I found out that most of the bums wanted to be
rich too.
they had just failed at that.

so caught between my father and the bums
I had no place to go
and I went there fast and slow.
never voted Republican
never voted.

buried him
like an oddity of the earth
like a hundred thousand oddities
like millions of other oddities,
wasted.

6B- After having read the article and the poem above, write about how you feel about your father’s generation OR write a poem to a parent about these differences.

BSection 7 INSPIRATIONS

Beatnik Quotes

“We beatniks were beautiful in an ugly, graceful new way.” –Kerouac

“BEAT: meaning down and out but full of intense conviction.” -Kerouac

“We wrote long poems celebrating the new “’angels’ of the American underground.” -Kerouac

“BEAT also means beato, the Italian for beatific: to be in a state of utter sincerity at all times.”

“BEATNESS is not a form of tired old criticism. It is a form of spontaneous affirmation.” -Kerouac

“The Beat Generation believes that there will be some justification for all the horror of life.” -Kerouac

“Man, I dig everything!” -Ginsberg

“I prophesy that the Beat Generation is going to be the most sensitive generation in the history of America, and therefore it can’t help but do good.” -Kerouac

“I wrote On the Road in three weeks in the beautiful month of April 1951.” –Kerouac

“Woe unto those who don’t realize that America must, will, is, changing now, for the better I say.” -Kerouac

(read excerpt from On the Road about the “Jewel Center”)

List of Essentials for Writers by Jack Kerouac:

Scribbled secret notebooks

Be submissive to everything, open and listening

Be in love with your life

Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind

Write the unspeakable visions of the individual

There’s no time for poetry but exactly what is

Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition

Tell the true story of the world in interior monologue

Write in amazement for yourself.

Accept loss forever

Believe in the holy contour of life

Don’t think of words when you stop but to see the picture better

Keep track of every day

Have no fear of shame in the dignity of your experience

Write for the world to read and see your exact pictures of it

Compose wild, undisciplined, pure stuff… the crazier the better.

You’re a genius all the time