The Portable Beat Reader

...Charters succeeds very well at detailing the importance of the bohemian way of life to the movement, even to repeating the entirely charming and very revealing anecdote that at the now-famous reading of the six poets at The Six Gallery in San Francisco in October 1955 Ginsberg appeared on stage dressed in a gray suit with a white shirt and a tie while Snyder wore blue jeans...

...Today this might well seem to be a benign respectability balancing a gentle eccentricity...

...But while thousands of adolescents and young adults were learning to sip espresso in dimly lit basements and all too gladly letting themselves be called "beatniks," the beats themselves were proclaiming loudly that their drug of choice was virtually anything but caffeine...

...Commonweal 8 May 1992: 27...

...Fortunately for all concerned, the San Francisco Police Department brought a charge of obscenity against the publisher and the resulting trial with its publicity caused the book to go into many more printings than ever expected...

...However, to restrict one's reading to these three works is to miss the substantial accomplishment as well as the delightfully wild and crazy flavor of the whole...

...At the beginning of the beat movement the three major works were Ginsberg's two long poems, "Howl" and "Kaddish," and Kerouac's novel, On the Road...

...This anthology includes generous samples of major and minor pieces in the beat canon...

...The beats" began as a small group of writers centered around William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac in New York City...

...Ferlinghetti's role was critical: he was 26: 8 May 1992 Commonweal in the audience at The Six Gallery and after the reading offered to publish Ginsberg's "Howl" as a title in The Pocket Poets Series which his City Lights Books had begun...

...Some books tell us what we have been, others what we will be...

...With the participation of writers like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth, Michael McClure, and Gary Snyder, to name only a few, the movement took on a quite remarkable vitality...

...At a time when the country was long overdue for change the beats entered the scene and declared their freedom from virtually everything...

...The Portable Beat Reader is that kind of book: a compelling and fascinating account of a few writers who began a process of change that led to quite unexpected results...

...As the years passed they went on writing and exploring issues which at the beginning had been laid out so urgently and stridently...

...The rich prose cadences of Michael McClure are quoted by Charters to show the real thrust of the movement: "None of us wanted to go back to the gray, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellective void—to the land without poetry—to the spiritual drabness...

...More than thirty-five years later it is still in print and, presumably, still selling...

...We wanted voice and we wanted vision...

...Perhaps it is one of the supreme ironies that having begun as a harsh indictment of every aspect of the establishment this body of material enters mainstream literature in an anthology of such distinction...

...Particularly valuable now are Charters's introductions to the various authors and their work...

...While these writers abandoned much of accepted literary convention, especially the New Criticism, they also and most aggressively declared their independence of earlier sexual and social mores...

...In much of this work there was a persisting reference to the nineteenth-century Romantics, particularly Coleridge and Blake, for their devotion to mystical experience and altered states of mind...

...These writers sought their inspiration in the literature of alienation, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and the poems of Whitman and Artaud, as well as Pound's dictum, "Make it New...

...Achieving a degree of respectability that will never quite escape their astonishing beginnings, the outsiders become an establishment...

...The final sections of the anthology provide generous and representative selections from the poetry and prose of most of those who continued writing...

...Harold Isbell In detailing the complex interplay of influence among these writers and the various strands of the literary tradition which they chose to follow or reject, Ann Charters provides a compelling and fascinating account of a few who launched a literary aesthetic, a revolution of ideas, that in another decade would become a social and political revolution...

...We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it...

...For Ginsberg to announce that he wrote "Kaddish" while taking a combination of heroin, methedrine, and dexedrine was certainly startling to most of the American public...

...The pamphlet—Howl and Other Poems—was published in 1956 as fourth in the series...

...but a very few books define a moment after which most of us were never quite the same again...

...With an introduction by William Carlos Williams ("I never thought he would live to grow up and write a book of poems") and a dedication to Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, its place in American literature was asserted...

...Earlier, Ginsberg had arrived in San Francisco bearing a letter of introduction to Kenneth Rexroth from his one-time physician and later mentor, William Carlos Williams...

...Ginsberg and Kerouac later migrated to the West Coast where they contacted what was beginning to be called "The San Francisco Renaissance...

...In 1957 a verdict of "not guilty" was returned and almost at the same time an unusually enthusiastic review of On the Road appeared in the New York Times...

...More correctly, perhaps, the reality in spite of these appearances lay somewhere between a dedication to the most outrageous bohemian ethos and a strong residue of near innocence...

...The period has a pervasive tone of the raffish and the playful, if not the antisocial...

...At the same time, they were intensely autobiographical in their selection of material while the tradition gave them a ready, if somewhat unexpected, shape for the work they would produce, a work radically new and profoundly generative...

...It is fascinating to watch a maturity of years give rise to a maturity of style and content...