Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Another Look at the Beatniks


The New York Review of Books runs a story on a photograph exhibition at the National Gallery of Arts in Washington, DC, titled: Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allan Ginsberg. The photographs, as the exhibition's title suggests, have been taken by Allen Ginsberg between 1953 and 1963. The article discusses how some of the Beatniks secured some financial comfort in their last years not by selling their poetry and prose or by giving lectures and talks, but rather by selling art - pictures and photos. Moreover, it is a look on some of the features of the so-called Beat generation.

It seems that the Beatniks were a small but cohesive group, which managed to leave its own, discernible mark in the conformity of the '50s and the early '60s. Sexual relations among the group's members probably strengthened its cohesion. They led a lifestyle quite contrary to the norms of that time with many excesses, many of them experimenting and getting addicted to drugs and one of them (Burroughs) even shot and killed his companion in a drunken William Tell game gone awry.

Their appeal to younger generations is based, to a significant extent, on their free, bohemian lifestyle. Their prose and poetry was also characterized by motion and fluidity and very often by rhythm, someone could even recognize rhythmical patterns similar to those of jazz music in their writings. Their seemingly care-free attitude and the disregard for the dire consequences of some of their actions is reflected in their poetry; so is a dark psyche, which rejects the societal rules and niceties imposed on them.

Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" is one of the typical works of the Beat Generation. This is how it begins:

      I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by 
      madness, starving hysterical naked, 
      dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn 
      looking for an angry fix, 
      angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly 
      connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, 
      who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat 
      up smoking in the supernatural darkness of 
      cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities 
      contemplating jazz, 
      who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and 
      saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated ...

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