Here is another road map from the Beat poet Kerouac of the 1950s and 1960s....Ron in Tasmania
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ROADMAP
IN 1959
In the 1950s and 1960s there were evolving etymologies for the word beat. In "The Origins of the Beat Generation," originally published in Playboy magazine in 1959, the year I joined the Bahá'àFaith, the beat poet Jack Kerouac wrote that the word beat originally meant poor, down and out, deadbeat, on the bum, sad and sleeping in subways. He further noted that the word had gained an extended meaning connoting people who "have a certain new gesture, or attitude.�(1) Kerouac suffused the label with positive connotations, a move he later extended into giving "beat" a religious significance. The Beats were for a time, in this evolving etymology, saints in the making who were walking the Earth doing good deeds in the name of sanctitude, holiness and the beatific. There was certainly an element of this in the Bahá'àethos of the Ten Year Crusade of 1953-1963.
Kerouac had at one stage claimed that "beat" was the second religiousness in Western Civilization that the historian Oswald Spengler had prophesized in his Decline of the West in 1918.(2) But, by 1965, he had changed this view of the beats, the beatniks, the counter-culture and, in fact, strongly denounced its entire ethos. By the mid-soaring sixties he had come to see that generation of dissent and dissenters as the very opposite of Spengler�s second-religiousness. He called it �a soaring hysteria.�(3) -Ron Price with thanks to (1) Jack Kerouac, "The Origins of the Beat Generation," in Don Allen, ed., Good Blonde and Others Grey Fox Press, San Francisco, 1994, p. 61; (2) ibid., p.66 and (3) Ann Charters, ed., Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1957-1969, Penguin Books, NY, 1999, p. 464.
Your notion of Beat as a Spenglerian
second coming ended in a very bitter
disappointment�millennialbeliever
whose apocalypse just never arrived.
You denied all political---collectivist
implications for the beats & beatniks.
You had used the term back in 1951 to
describe guys who ran around the land
and country in cars looking for jobs and
girlfriends, kicks and fun.You remained
an on-again off-again beat.....throughout
your life, flirting with many religions but
always infusing them with a dose of your
Catholicism to which you ultimately went
back for its order, tenderness and piety as
you put in in one of your many letters.....
The word "beat" had extended to cover
all of America by the end of the sixties
and most of the world..youngsters used
your On the Road as a search-roadmap.(1)
But you abdicated your status as King of
the Road as well as King of the Beats.(2)
(1) Jack Kerouac(1922-1969), On the Road, 1957.
(2) I thank Bent Sørensen for his: �An On & Off Beat: Kerouac's Beat Etymologies,� in philament: An Online Journal of Arts and Culture, April, 2004.
Ron Price
2 January 2010
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FIRING A POETRY INDUSTRY
My conception of poetry in my teens and twenties changed as I got into my thirties and when I came across the poetry of Roger White at the age of thirty-five I found something which I could completely connect with. It was a rejuvenating experience. I had known poetry which was so obscure as to be quite indecipherable; I had known poetry which bored me to death; I had known poetry that for many years seemed to have the ultimate effect of turning me right off the genre. I began writing poetry in my late teens and early twenties and into my mid-thirties, but not until my late forties did the experience really come alive for me. Much of my poetic writing had the style of improvisation. I wrote with my voice; for the most part there was an ease, a flow. I was what Robert Pinsky called an improvisatory poet.
There was an intensity in my poetry, in my philosophy, a poetry based on the cauldron of experience and the search for vivid fragments that would open doors of perception and conception. Perhaps this intensity was born in the shadow of the bomb, the cold war, in the fifties and sixties: the beats, Kerouac, Ginsberg, etc. when I was growing up, part of those times, those decades; perhaps it came from belonging to a religion which was nothing if it was not intense; perhaps it came from my relatively peripatetic existence which collected towns and people, that fired the cauldron of experience with enough vivid fragments to fertilize a poetry industry. -Ron Price with thanks to John Tranter, "An Interview with C.K. Tower," Riding the Meridian, The Internet, 18 November 2001.
I remember those strange lines,
shorter than most of the others,
so often obscure, quite beyond
my figuring them out and then,
in high school, the wet arm pits
and the anxiety over what does
it all mean, whatever does it mean?
It seemed to be a world beyond,
strange, unattractive, completely
without purpose, at least any
purpose I could connect with.
And then, after my brain got
lithium-stabilized
and Roger White's verse
came into my life,
the whole picture changed.
Gradually, slowly, poetry
became a dominant force
in my life, a conduit
for my thought, my emotions,
my religion and all that was my life.
Ron Price
20 November 2001
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