Hearing the Voices of the Beat Generation

When I moved to San Francisco in the mid-1980s, came under the influence of its electric and eclectic performance poetry scene, and began to read my own poems out loud at the pressure-cooker Cafe Babar Thursday night open mike, the Beat generation was the primary influence on Bay area literary culture. We were the next generation, the “post-Beats” — but many of the original Beat poets were still around, still writing and reading their poems, and you could still run into them on the streets and in the cafes of North Beach and the Mission. Now, more than 20 years later, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder are still here — white-haired eminences all, and all still writing poems of pertinence and protest in this 21st century — but Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Jack Micheline are gone. That’s why Chuck Workman’s 1999 documentary film The Source is such a treasure. It’s a collage history of the origins of the Beat generation and its influence on later decades featuring Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Jack Micheline, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and many others, with lots of great footage from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, fascinating interviews filmed later, and performances of Beat literature by Johnny Depp, Dennis Hopper and John Turturro — dense, richly textured, and definitely worth watching more than once.

More on Allen Ginsberg:
Allen Ginsberg, Beat American Buddha Bard, by Bob Holman
Our profile of Ginsberg
The Bard His Own Self: Allen Ginsberg says “That’s all Goodnight”
Encounters with Allen Ginsberg, by Bart Plantenga

On Ginsberg’s poetry:
Allen Ginsberg’s American Sentences, An introduction to his variation on haiku
Chorus of Poets Gather for “Howl” Celebration: the 50th anniversary, an account by Teresa Conboy
You can read the poem in print or listen to it on the Internet -- but you won’t hear it on the radio -- “Howl”
Hear Ginsberg’s first “Howl”