What do you get when you mix post-war American values, a dissatisfied generation of writers, and hard drugs? The most obvious answer in the Beat Generation of Poets. This group of poets paved the way for the rise of counter-culture and gave voice to many social causes, and they made their fame by throwing good taste to the wind.
First of all, the Beat Generation, a term coined by Jack Kerouac, took one look at mainstream writing conventions and gave it a big old middle finger. Measured rhyme and meter? No thanks. Appropriate and inoffensive language? Fuck that! Topics one would talk about in mixed company? Get out of here. These poets, living in post-WWII America, were disillusioned, tired of the way society expected them to think. They threw away that which the West valued and actively sought to write about what would get them in trouble. Their writing covered topics ranging from casual sex to criticism of the U.S government and public.
“America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck 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 will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?”
-Ginsberg, Allen, “America”
In all honestly, Ginsberg and his buddies did not give a single DAMN about looking unpatriotic or “uncivilized”. These were people who wanted to write about the underdogs of society, antiheroes who Americans vilified regularly. This included the homosexual community, the mentally ill, the poor, the addicted, and many others.
Now, this was the mid-20th century. There was no way that American society turned the other cheek to the work of the Beat Poets. Specifically, Ginsberg’s work got published in the work Howl and Other Poems after performing it live in the Sixth Gallery in San Francisco. The following is a snippet from the poem:
“who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,”
-Ginsberg, Allen, “Howl”
Public reception went about as well as you’d think. The publisher of the book, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was soon after arrested on obscenity charges in August, 1956. Through the assistance of the ACLU, however, he was acquitted of the charges on the grounds that the government was violating his First Amendment right to free speech. William S. Burrough’s Naked Lunch went through the same drama with the same results. These cases set a precedent for U.S Courts, making it all the more possible for us flag-burners to do our thing.
These writers went to court for their work. If that’s not putting your money where your mouth is, then I don’t know what is. The Beat Generation wasn’t all bark and no bite.
The reason why I’m harping on Ginsberg so much is because he was active long after the original Beat days. He worked to demystify drugs, decriminalize homosexuality, and also advocated for the victims of many foreign conflicts, such as those of the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. This, coupled with his extensive travel to India make him an intellectual who has some worldly experience. And he was an environmentalist to boot!
I have my problems with the Beat Generation. Mostly, they were very guilty of orientalism; that is, the often represented ideas and concepts from Asia (Buddhism, Hinduism) in a way that stereotypes and often gets them plain wrong. And their (perhaps unintentional) conflation of Eastern philosophy and religion with hard drugs, sex, and profanity not only misses the point entirely, but also puts a bad taste in my mouth. But I’ll be dead before I say that these poets, particularly Allen Ginsberg, were not absolute badasses.
Works Cited
A Brief Guide to the Beat Poets. (2004, May 03). Retrieved January 31, 2017, from https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/brief-guide-beat-poets
Bochynski, Pegge. “Beat Generation.” Salen Press Encyclopedia (2016)” Research Starters. Web. 8 Feb. 2017
Sax, Richard. “Allen Ginsberg” Salem Press Encyclopedia (2016) Research Starters. Web. 8 Feb. 2017