Clemson University Press: Beat Studies – serie

Who was Harold Norse? Despite publishing over a dozen volumes of poetry between the early 1950s and the new millennium, until now, the Brooklyn-born Norse has been relegated to a footnote in accounts of twentieth century literary history. Harold Norse: Poet Maverick, Gay Laureate is the first collection of essays devoted to this enigmatic poet and visual artist. As this volume explores, Norse, who developed his craft while living in Europe during the 1950s and 1960s, is an important figure in the development of mid-twentieth century poetics. During the 1950s and 1960s, Norse was a notable figure in the plethora of little poetry magazines published in the USA and Europe through to skirmishes with respectability and acceptance (Penguin and City Lights). Norse is a key figure in the development of the cut-up process made famous by his friend, William S. Burroughs. His correspondence with his mentor, the poet William Carlos Williams, captures his poetic shifts from formalism to the development of his Brooklyn idiom, while his gripping autobiography, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, documents his transatlantic networks of writers and artists, among them James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Bukowski. And after returning to the US in the late 1960s, Norse emerged as leading figure in Gay Liberation poetry.List of contributors: Jan Herman, Erik Mortenson, A. Robert Lee, Fiona Paton, Daniel Kane, Steven Belletto, Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo, Ronna C. Johnson, Kurt Hemmer, Chad Weidner, Benjamin J. Heal, Tate Swindell, Andrew McMillan, Douglas Field, Jay Jeff Jones, Todd Swindell, and James Grauerholz.

The Beats and the Academy marks the first sustained effort to train a scholarly eye on the dynamics of the relationship between Beat writers and the academic institutions in which they taught. Rather than assuming the relationship between Beat writers and institutions of higher education was only a hostile one, The Beats and the Academy begins with the premise that influence between the two flows in both directions. Beat writers' suspicion of established institutions was a significant aspect of their postwar countercultural allure. Their anti-establishment aesthetic and countercultural stance led Beat writers to be critical of postwar academic institutions that tended to dismiss them as a passing social phenomenon. Even today, Beat writing still meets resistance in an academy that questions the relevance of their writing and ideas. But this picture, like any generalization, is far too easy. The Beat relationship to the academy is one of negotiation, rather than negation. Many Beats strove for academic recognition, and quite a few received it. And despite hostility to their work both in the postwar era and today, Beat works have made it into syllabi, conference resentations, journal articles, and monographs. The Beats and the Academy deepens our understanding of this relationship by emphasizing how institutional friction between the Beats and institutions of higher education has shaped our understanding of Beat Generation literature and culture—and what this relationship between Beat writers and the academy might suggest about their legacy for future scholars.

Poet in Place and Time: Critical Essays on Joanne Kyger provides a much-needed re-evaluation of the work of Joanne Kyger, a remarkably productive poet associated with transformative literary movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Kyger uses time and place to anchor her writing in the present moment (as reflected in the title of her collected poems, About Now), and this collection employs a similar approach to present Kyger to readers who may be less familiar with her work. The essays take readers from her stay in Japan in the 1960s to her return to California and her life in Bolinas from the 1970s on, as well as her travels to places such as Desecheo Island and Mexico. The essays explore Kyger’s poetics through close readings of her poems and journals, as well as through her approach to issues which concerned her throughout her life; these issues include ecology, reinhabitation, the politics of NAFTA, and the War on Terror. Contributors also investigate her relation to feminism, Buddhism, and ecopoetics. Kyger’s connections to various movements in American literature are also emphasized, as well as ways in which she is part of but extends and improvises on the Beat Movement.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.Greening Bohemia is the first book to connect diverse Beat Generation literature to environmental concerns. What is the connection between the Beat Generation and the environment? Using careful textual and rhetorical analysis and integrating ecocritical concepts and critical vocabulary, this study shows the Beats' varied environmental contributions. It challenges the boundaries of Beat literature by including sometimes marginal voices in the discussion. Greening Bohemia suggests that Beat writing contains deep insights into the human-nature relationship, critiques of consumerism, spiritual quests, and a vision for a more harmonious future human existence. The book places the Beat Generation in a larger ecological and cultural narrative, emphasizing its lasting impact and encouraging readers to reconsider its legacy. The study challenges the American ecocritical focus on nature writing and suggests that Beat-bohemian literature has environmental potential and traces cultural change to the present day. This study thus expands our understanding by re-examining well-known and neglected Beat Generation texts and promoting ecocritical responses to art. It highlights the enduring significance of the Beat Generation, and it encourages readers to reevaluate its legacy, considering contemporary attention to environmental concerns. In short, Greening Bohemia clarifies ways Beat texts connect to the most extraordinary defining problem of our age.

In the Rebel Cafe: Interviews with Ed Sanders is a collection of interviews with Ed Sanders. Interviews have been selected representing each decade of Sanders’s career from the 1960s up to the present. All are previously published except for one conducted by a historian about Sanders’s involvement in the peace movement. Interviews have been selected for historical significance (such as his first interview, his appearance on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line TV program, history of the Fugs, history of the Lower East Side avant-garde, the evolution of his poetry) and for the depth and quality of the discussion of his work (interviews by poets and literary critics). Read in chronological order, the interviews constitute a career biography of Sanders as a writer, musician, and activist. In his own words, Sanders chronicles his transition as a poet from lyric to historical narrative to epic, the development of his fiction and journalism, the creation and revival of the Fugs (his satirical folk rock band), his role in the art and counter-culture of the 1960s, his subsequent historical assessment of the era, and his continuing social commitments. In addition to the interviews, the book includes a critical introduction to Sanders’s life and work, a chronology of Sanders’ career, a bibliography of his publications, and a discography of Fugs and Sanders albums.

This volume addresses integrating into the classroom Beat authors, texts, and themes associated with Beat writing, generally dated from the early 1950s to 1964-65, when the major social justice movements in the United States began to tear apart the fabric of post war containment culture and Hippie counterculture became a dominant movement. The book provides a robust foundation for discussions of the continued relevance of Beat literature in educational settings.The volume’s 22 essays are divided into six domains: 1) Foundational Issues, 2) Beat Literary Genres, 3) Beat Literary Topics, 4) Beat Lineages and Legacies, 5) Selected Resources, and 6) Sample Assignments. The volume presents a blending of authors and subject matters representative of current styles and methods of Beat scholarship. Literature-focused pedagogies dominate, but course materials and perspectives relative to history, composition theory and practice, religious studies, art history, film studies, and other cross-curricular courses are also represented. The sequencing of each part is hierarchical only in the sense that Part 1 is intended to be read first, since topics in that section speak to key practices and traditions undergirding Beat history and the teaching of Beat writing in general. The volume concludes with sample classroom assignments and examination prompts by Beat scholars.

In the Rebel Cafe: Interviews with Ed Sanders is a collection of interviews with Ed Sanders. Interviews have been selected representing each decade of Sanders’s career from the 1960s up to the present. All are previously published except for one conducted by a historian about Sanders’s involvement in the peace movement. Interviews have been selected for historical significance (such as his first interview, his appearance on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line TV program, history of the Fugs, history of the Lower East Side avant-garde, the evolution of his poetry) and for the depth and quality of the discussion of his work (interviews by poets and literary critics). Read in chronological order, the interviews constitute a career biography of Sanders as a writer, musician, and activist. In his own words, Sanders chronicles his transition as a poet from lyric to historical narrative to epic, the development of his fiction and journalism, the creation and revival of the Fugs (his satirical folk rock band), his role in the art and counter-culture of the 1960s, his subsequent historical assessment of the era, and his continuing social commitments. In addition to the interviews, the book includes a critical introduction to Sanders’s life and work, a chronology of Sanders’ career, a bibliography of his publications, and a discography of Fugs and Sanders albums.

The Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes of American Poetry explores correspondences amongst the Black Mountain and Beat Generation writers, two of most well-known and influential groups of poets in the 1950s. The division of writers as Beat or Black Mountain has hindered our understanding of the ways that these poets developed from mutual influences, benefitted from direct relations, and overlapped their boundaries. This collection of academic essays refines and adds context to Beat Studies and Black Mountain Studies by investigating the groups’ intersections and undercurrents. One goal of the book is to deconstruct the Beat and Black Mountain labels in order to reveal the shifting and fluid relationships among the individual poets who developed a revolutionary poetics in the 1950s and beyond. Taken together, these essays clarify the radical experimentation with poetics undertaken by these poets.