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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
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