The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats

  Also by Allen Ginsberg

  POETRY

  Howl and Other Poems

  Kaddish and Other Poems

  Empty Mirror: Early Poems

  Reality Sandwiches

  Angkor Wat

  Planet News

  Airplane Dreams: Compositions from Journals

  The Gates of Wrath: Rhymed Poems

  The Fall of America: Poems of These States

  Iron Horse

  First Blues

  Mind Breaths

  Plutonian Ode and Other Poems

  Collected Poems

  White Shroud Poems

  Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems

  Death & Fame: Last Poems

  Wait Till I’m Dead: Uncollected Poems

  PROSE

  Indian Journals

  The Yage Letters, with William Burroughs

  Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness (Gordon Ball, editor)

  Journals: Early Fifties, Early Sixties (Gordon Ball, editor)

  As Ever: The Collected Correspondence of Allen Ginsberg & Neal Cassady (Barry Gifford, editor)

  Composed on the Tongue (Donald Allen, editor)

  Straight Hearts’ Delight: Love Poems and Selected Letters 1947–1980, with Peter Orlovsky (Winston Leyland, editor)

  Howl, Original Draft Facsimile, Fully Annotated (Barry Miles, editor)

  Journals: Mid-Fifties (Gordon Ball, editor)

  The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice (Bill Morgan, editor)

  The Letters of Allen Ginsberg (Bill Morgan, editor)

  Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews (David Carter, editor)

  Family Business: Selected Letters Between a Father and Son (Michael Schumacher, editor)

  Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters (Bill Morgan and David Stanford, editors)

  The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder (Bill Morgan, editor)

  Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952–1995 (Bill Morgan, editor)

  The Essential Ginsberg (Michael Schumacher, editor)

  I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career: The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg (Bill Morgan, editor)

  WITH A FOREWORD BY

  ANNE WALDMAN

  EDITED BY BILL MORGAN

  Grove Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2017 by The Estate of Allen Ginsberg

  Foreword © 2017 by Anne Waldman

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  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2649-8

  eISBN 978-0-8021-8948-6

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: April 2017

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  Contents

  Foreword by Anne Waldman

  Editor’s Preface

  A Definition of the Beat Generation by Allen Ginsberg

  1. Course Overview

  2. Kerouac’s “Origins of the Beat Generation”

  3. Reading List

  4. Visions

  5. Jazz, Bebop, and Music

  6. Music, Kerouac, Wyse, and Newman

  7. Times Square and the 1940s

  8. Carr, Ginsberg, and Kerouac at Columbia

  9. Kerouac, Columbia, and Vanity of Duluoz

  10. Lucien Carr’s Influence on Kerouac

  11. Kerouac and Vanity of Duluoz, Part 2

  12. Meeting Burroughs and Ginsberg’s Suspension from Columbia

  13. Kerouac and The Town and the City

  14. Kerouac and Visions of Cody, Part 1

  15. Kerouac, Cassady, and Visions of Cody, Part 2

  16. Kerouac in Old Age

  17. Burroughs’s First Writings and “Twilight’s Last Gleamings”

  18. Burroughs, Kerouac, and And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

  19. Burroughs, Joan Burroughs, and Junkie

  20. Burroughs and Korzybski

  21. Burroughs and the Visual

  22. Burroughs and The Yage Letters

  23. Burroughs and Queer

  24. Burroughs and Naked Lunch

  25. Burroughs and the Cut-Up Method

  26. Burroughs and The Ticket That Exploded

  27. Neal Cassady and As Ever

  28. Kerouac and the “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”

  29. Kerouac and On the Road

  30. Kerouac and The Subterraneans

  31. Jack Kerouac and Fame

  32. Kerouac, Sketching, and Method

  33. Corso and The Vestal Lady on Brattle

  34. Corso and Gasoline and Other Poems

  35. Corso and The Happy Birthday of Death

  36. Corso and “Bomb”

  37. Corso and “Power”

  38. Corso and Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit

  39. Ginsberg’s Early Writings

  40. Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams

  41. Ginsberg and “The Green Automobile”

  42. Ginsberg and “Howl”

  43. Ginsberg, “Howl,” and Christopher Smart

  44. Ginsberg and Cézanne

  45. Ginsberg and the San Francisco Renaissance

  46. John Clellon Holmes

  47. Peter Orlovsky

  48. Carl Solomon

  49. Kerouac’s “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose”

  Works Cited Within the Text

  Allen Ginsberg’s Reading List for “A Literary History of the Beat Generation”

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Credits

  Foreword

  By Anne Waldman

  Allen Ginsberg devotedly, and with a loving perseverance, incubated these lectures on his primary literary Beat colleagues during his first teaching job at Naropa Institute, the first Buddhist-inspired university in the west, which was founded in the summer of 1974. It is a remarkable delineation, focused on the writing of his colleagues, their lives, and their intricate relationships.

  Our visit to Boulder, Colorado, a small college town on the spine of the Rocky Mountains resulted in a poetic
s department he and I founded with poet Diane di Prima: The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. And Allen and I worked together twenty-three years during the summer writing sessions until his death in 1997 as I continued on. We landed on this rocky mountain site somewhat spontaneously, yet with the rock-solid twenty-five-hundred-year old foundation of Tibetan Buddhism at the helm. This was something unique in contemporary literary annals. We had no permanent building then, no library, no stationery, scant budget, were sans telephone.

  But we had a curious American aspiration toward a more expansive poetics, as we sat between the kinetic poles of east and west near Denver, a place where Neal Cassady had roamed and hustled and pondered the thoughts of a speedy alchemist. Denver, the place of all possible crossroads. Negative ions dancing on the spine of the continent. And we had a project in mind—an “academy of the future” (apt phrase from a John Ashbery poem), which was spurred by our confidence in poetry and its attendant poetics as a spiritual practice. “Keep the world safe for poetry” became a trenchant motto.

  Allen was inspired to create the Poetics Program at Naropa, with its Buddhist ambience, as an extraordinary opportunity to bring his “best minds” together, to gather his people to a safe haven where they could continue the sacra coversazione and emotional dynamics and literary work. All that messy imbricated history would find rest and purpose here. Kerouac’s ghostly consciousness hovered over the premises. Allen would create a Beat Literary canon while most of his compadres were still alive. Where it all began, who met whom when, under what circumstances. His own unique eye-witnessed version. Gregory Corso quipped instead how it was getting time to set up the Beat retirement home! I was in my twenties when we began Naropa, having helped found the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, in New York, developing my own sense of Outrider community that straddled all the schools of the New American Poetry. The Beat archive resonated in me, I had grown up with it, and the movement was not over. Everyone was productive. This Colorado iteration wasn’t a “second act” for the Beats. Allen wasn’t yet fifty. He was writing constantly; he was a motivated teacher.

  We were guests at the invitation of the Tibetan Buddhist meditation teacher Chögyam Trungpa, who was gathering students, scholars, artists, and meditation teachers from many traditions. We mused about a lama steeped in an ancient tradition coming to the United States with the odd and charming request: “Take me to your poets!” Whoever arrived in America specifically looking for poets? And subsequently invited poets to start their own program, within an institute that was to be “a hundred-year project at least”? We had no formal training as teachers. We did not hold those kinds of academic credentials and had no English department backing us. We weren’t a writing program, but a reading and writing program, a live experiment, a “conglomeration of tendencies,” and a poetry sangha inspired by the contemplative backdrop of impermanence and by “specimens of spiritual breakthroughs.” Allen summed up the modus operandi of the Beat Literary movement as “inquisitiveness into the nature of consciousness, with literature as a ‘noble means.’” Kerouac most of all seered this profundity. We were all phantoms in space. The transitoriness of existence was the basis of everybody’s tenderness. This was the spiritual insight of the Beats as Allen nailed it. And this could also include Burroughs’s less holy history, the prophetic clarity of his cut-up apocalyptic futures, the ones we all now seem to be living in. Allen hoped Naropa would be an experiment in visionary tenderness. Allen was also the astute impresario and ingenious PR agent of this worldwide cultural intervention. This unique body of lectures is a testament to his canon building and his imperatives for understanding and propagating the Beat ethos.

  We named our pedagogical experiment The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics because Kerouac had realized the first Buddhist Noble Truth of Suffering. “Disembodied” because we had none of the accoutrements of a poetics department and we were going to teach ghosts like Shakespeare, Kit Smart, Blake, Whitman, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Allen also taught an English poetry and prosody class guiding students through the mazes of the Norton Anthology.

  It was the Beat course, however, that galvanized Allen’s energy and purpose. He often said he would not have joined Naropa were it not for the meditative “hook.” These lectures therefore are enhanced by Allen’s deepening understand of the Buddhist view (he had taken vows with Trungpa). Not that he hadn’t insights of emptiness and read D. T. Suzuki and sought out the Dalai Lama in India but he had found a practice—shamatha vipassana—insight meditation, which located a larger existential view. The four noble truths, particularly the strongly emphasized truths of suffering and impermanence, were already haunting him. Allen was one of the most famous poets and celebrities in the world, and yet settling at Naropa grounded him enough to interpret and “transmit” his history and spiritual poetics and that of his closest literary friends. And a practice of compassion and view of the inter-connectedness of all life was understood as a way out of suffering.

  I watched Allen prepare for class in his town house apartment in Boulder and later at his rented house on Bluff Street assiduously reading, marking passages. Some of these were already in his marrow. He was always good at memorization. And it had been Kerouac’s prose, in particular his bop prosody, that had set his own course. Jack was the master here. It was through Jack’s work that he had found his own carriage, his “voice,” his power and purpose. Allen always had a sense of his personal debt to Jack. He would read great swaths of Jack’s text aloud, often weeping. His metabolism was adhesive to the heaves and rhythms, epiphanies and kinetics of the work he was so entangled in. He highlights particularly luminous phrases. They had pushed his own poetry into being, its quixotic rapture. Wild mind was invoked. “Mind is shapely, Art is shapely.” This wild mind work was shapely, was elegant, was exquisite, and he emphatically wanted the world to understand this.

  In these lectures, the primary focus is on the heart buddies and the generative years and writing in New York: Jack, William, Gregory, with minor appearances by Neal Cassady, John Clellon Holmes, Peter Orlovsky. West Coasters Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder, coming later into Allen’s sphere, are absent. There are lectures on Allen’s own writing methods as well. The book includes chunks of the core texts interspersed with Allen’s personal insider exegesis. His intellectual, psychological scrying. I can’t think of any other contemporary writer so generous with his peers.

  This is a male/queer book. It touches on erotics, on male camaraderie, crime’s karma, heart-to-heart communication, influence, literary pursuit. And pushes to disabuse the world of the juvenile delinquent bad boy reputations. It is a compendium of useful knowledge, a mandala for future study, and an area of scholarship begging wider critical attention. Ginsberg’s scrutiny is riveting and obsessive and generous perhaps to a fault to his comrades, but it is a wild ride for the students on the other side of the equation.

  Allen’s commentary is riddled with “takes” gleaned from Jack, and he invokes the instinctual hipness of Jack himself. The subvocal mind flashes. His teaching here is refreshed, unfiltered. It’s straight talk. You hear intimate details throughout, perhaps more than you ever want to know about William Burroughs’s preferred sexual posture. But William holds gravitas as the elder, eminence grise, with cool prophetic clarity, a brilliance. Gregory—whose formative years were spent in a prison library, in love with Keats and Shelley—is on the other hand a “dousing wand for poetic beauty.”

  Editor Bill Morgan has done an admirable, heroic, and exhaustive job of winnowing down and of siphoning many pages from the Naropa classes, the ur-classes, but much more substantively from the Brooklyn College lectures, which is this book’s core, covering additional texts and Allen’s commentary. This was not a dead Lit 101 class. It evolved, gathered steam. Many friends and former students I know firsthand benefited from the Brooklyn years. This was a rare pedagogical experience and included the often startling legendary narrat
ives.

  But what is most interesting and new to me, beyond the spiritual and personal investigation, is Allen’s assessment and insistence on the influence of black culture and jazz on the Beats, which is also a “spiritual” thing. This is the imperative I come away with. An understanding that Black America really is the salvation of the USA. Proclaiming “jazz a clarion of a new consciousness” is correct and a tribute to Allen’s perspicacity. This is what we need to remember. This needs saying again and again, and given recognition more than ever now. That’s what makes this book of Allen’s talk real, true, and fiercely relevant. And it is a heartening survey from that perspective. I love the lists of what these guys were listening to; not only Brahms’s Trio No. 1 and Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, but more excitedly, it’s “Salt Peanuts” and “Oop Bop Sh’Bam” by Dizzy Gillespie, it’s King Pleasure and Charlie Parker, and “The Chase” by Dexter Gordon, and Billie Holiday’s “Fine and Mellow” and “I Cover the Waterfront.”

  Allen is giving credit where credit is more than due, but his analysis constitutes an accurate prophecy. Jack Kerouac had said, “The earth is an Indian thing,” as it continues to be, and this too is a cogent axiom as the planet and its denizens suffer the effects of climate change and there’s an urgent necessity on the part of many to look to native knowledge and wisdom. As I write this tribal activists are protesting an egregious pipeline at Standing Rock in North Dakota, and Black Lives Matter is changing the frequency toward full civil rights, equality, recognition, reparation. There is so much more work to do. The walls of white supremacy are tumbling down in spite of the recent political debate and outcome, with its bigotry and racism. The Beats were on the progressive side of this.

  And where might we position, in our current dystopia, our fragile Anthropocene, the provocative dismembering body of work that constitutes the opus of William Burroughs? And the prescience within this “body” that destabilizes many concomitant and parallel realities, revealing identity and gender to be fluid constructs? I speak of this often, and publicly, to help my own cognitive dissonance within our contemporary society. I would say the “Burroughs effect” defies categories. “The basic disruption of reality” is what he posits. In the last decade and more, we have witnessed a self-fulfilling prophecy mirrored in Burroughs’s work, his vivid revelations and resonance and constructs, in his dark investigation of the “limits of control.” We have disturbing images of torture from Abu Ghraib, from Bagram, the force feeding at Guantánamo; we see “terrorists” in perpetual “lockdown”; we have the drone wars taking out “suspects”; there are hundreds of thousands of deaths on our hands in the combined horrific Middle East follies. There are the horrors of displacement and forced migrations. We have the “extraordinary renditions,” “waterboarding,” and the ominous threats of greater suffering, greater divides in the culture, and planet meltdown.