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Poets' Corner
Number Twenty Five : 24th December 2015
Mad To Be Saved
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October 1955. A one-night performance in a jazzed-up garage known as The Six Gallery in San
Francisco’s Bay Area. Five men are reading their own poetry (“cosmic jottings”) to a small
audience that includes
Jack Kerouac handing
out jugs of Californian Burgundy. He would later describe the event in The Dharma Bums. It was the
Nativity
setting for the Beat mythos , although most of its founding texts had germinated on the East coast
during the decade after the war – Howl , Naked Lunch , On The Road. Throughout the 1940s , 50s and
60s San
Francisco had its community of anarchists, pacifists and experimental poets just as Greenwich
Village did in Manhattan.
Over the following years , the Beat authors were either over-acclaimed as radical hero-outlaws or
disdained as garrulous self-publicists tilting against the windmill of American conformity. Once
they became
marketable brands in the publishing world , any surviving scripts of their prose-poetry and
letters were bought by competing University Special Collection curators. It was a trajectory (“Go!
Go! Go!”) from
bebop bars , chemical addictions and dabblings with Buddhism to a venerable resting place in the
Beat Museum (“This Be The Box Set”). The ghosts of their younger selves were impersonated in films
and TV
documentaries as their work became what they’d once derided : part of the academic syllabus.
“The only people for me are the mad ones, mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of
everything at the same time,” wrote Kerouac. Their playground anarchy and promotion of wisdom
through excess
belied the fact that most of them had one foot planted firmly in the past. “Angelheaded hipsters
who studied Plotinus, Poe, St. John of the Cross, telepathy, Blake and kabbalah”, according to
Ginsberg's Howl. As he was
embraced by the self-indulging 60s , he exemplified the increasing difficulty of taking any of
them seriously. When he
kept up a continuous chant of “Om Ah Hum” while being mugged by two youths in New York City, they
yelled “Shut up or we’ll murder you !” Many who witnessed his platform performances felt the same
way.
The front-cover blurb on my English paperback copy of On The Road (from 1958) invited us to follow
“The zany antics of America’s Beat Generation in their endless search for Truth, Drugs, Kicks and
Sex”. It
was a fantasy of exuberant recklessness that every teenage rebel was bound to respond to. We first
heard Heartbreak Hotel about that time and the zany antics of America’s Beat Generation struck
much the same
chord. The earlier Sun recordings of the mid-50s proved to have been the pinnacle of Elvis
Presley’s work. After he was drafted into the U.S. army stationed in Germany , Elvis gradually
became a risible figure
with his conveyor-belt of abysmal films and middle-of-the-road music. After the success of On The
Road , Kerouac’s writing was just about done and he devoted his remaining years to loathing
hippies and anti-war
protesters , watching football on TV and becoming a full-time alcoholic.
By the start of the new decade, we return to Howl for commentary on those who had blazed the trail
that lay ahead : “who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the
yellow morning
were stanzas of gibberish”. In 1961 the young Bob Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village , then mad
for fame and two decades later , mad to be saved..
Wig
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Archive
Poets' Corner #1 – Poetic
Pessimism, 13th September 2012
Poets' Corner #2 – The Workman's
Friend, 10th October 2012
Poets' Corner #3 – On The Trail of
Two Dylans, 12th November 2012
Poets' Corner #4 – Omar Khayyam,
14th December 2012
Poets' Corner #5 – William Blake,
25th January 2013
Poets' Corner #6 – A Minor Poet,
19th February 2013
Poets' Corner #7 – Thomas Hardy,
20th March 2013
Poets' Corner #8 – Shakespeare's
Sonnets, 21st April 2013
Poets' Corner #9 – Edward Thomas,
20th May 2013
Poets' Corner #10 – Harry Smith's
Anthology, 19th June 2013
Poets' Corner #11 – William
Plomer, 21st July 2013
Poets' Corner #12 – Ghosts ,
20th August 2013
Poets' Corner #13 – William
Dunbar, 20th September 2013
Poets' Corner #14 – Bathtub
Thoughts, 20th October 2013
Poets' Corner #15 – Bagpipe Music,
20th November 2013
Poets' Corner #16 – Sylvia &
Emily, 20th December 2013
Poets' Corner #17 – The Fall Of
Icarus, 16th January 2014
Poets' Corner #18 – Those Gone
Before, 20th February 2014
Poets' Corner #19 – Rudyard
Kipling, 20th March 2014
Poets' Corner #20 – Martin Bell,
20th April 2014
Poets' Corner #21 – Another Modest
Proposal, 20th May 2014
Poets' Corner #22 – Thomas Gray
and The Eighteenth Century, 20th June 2014
Poets' Corner #23 – Edgar Allan
Poe, 18th July 2014
Poets' Corner #24 – Tread Softly,
19th August 2014
Poets' Corner #25 – Mad To Be
Saved, 24th December 2015
Poets' Corner #26 – Wants,
20th January 2016
Poets' Corner #27 – Samuel
Johnson, 15th February 2016
Poets' Corner #28 – T.S.Eliot,
10th March 2016
Poets' Corner #29 – Alfred Lord
Tennyson, 18th April 2016
Poets' Corner #30 – Leonard Cohen,
12th November 2016
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