I should say upfront that I’m no great fan of Beat poetry in general. I’m glad and grateful that it beats its heart in the global body of poetry, that emerging subversive voices find kinship there, but I prefer a little more craft in the matter. The proof is in the poems: the chicks simply don’t ramble as much as did the boys, who no doubt aligned with Jack Kerouac that “the gesture he made in language was his mortal gesture, and therefore unchangeable” (read: unrevised). To the benefit of their poetry, the girls (not to be dubbed “Jack’s Chicks,” insisted Joyce Johnson, and anyway, Gregory Corso was the one who “put out”) didn’t have that luxury of being heard no matter how long-winded the expression.

“Words
are keys
or stanchions
or stones”

“I thought it was verboten to write about your life.... The subject matter in writing was different back then,” Hettie said. Leaving Queens and moving to the Village, “to know and be influenced by musicians, dancers, actors, and painters” -- was certainly a liberation, “but you still didn’t tell them what your ambitions were.” Janine agreed, “Boys could show their writing to others,” but when Joanne Kyger gave her manuscript of poems to Allen Ginsberg, “he was absolutely puzzled. He didn’t have a clue” (Meltzer). In fact, when Kyger would ask her then-husband Gary Snyder, Ginsberg, and the other Beat boys if they’d like to read poems together, “[T]hey would say sure -- but they would never ask [her] if [she] wanted to read” (Meltzer).

In her interview with David Meltzer, Diane di Prima explained, “I don’t think guys of that generation had ever encountered a girl who was writing but wasn’t particularly on the make. I slept around a lot, but I wasn’t on the make when I met a guy who was a writer. So it took them a little while to adjust. They did good.”

Having lost her second book’s manuscript several times, Janine hinted at how women perpetuate their own marginalization: “Part of the syndrome of lack of respect from others to you is lack of respect for self.” In 1959 New York, that was her trade-off for “looking for the poets... what they believed in politically, sexually... but they were all men... but I still wanted that.”

“I wanted to find all the roads that lead to consciousness,” Janine confessed, even if those roads were hallucinations. To my disappointment and even, I think, that of the panel, a disproportionate amount of time was spent inquiring about and discussing the Beat generation’s drug use. Unfortunately, and I’m guilty of this, too, “Beat” largely conjures a certain recklessness that characterized the generation’s major players, the post-mortem glamorization of which seems to eclipse the movement’s political and social strides.

John Clellon Holmes wrote in his 1952 New York Times article entitled “This is the B. Generation” that the “B. implies a feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness.” Indeed, hallucinogenic drugs did the trick, but so did the Beat’s exploration of alternative spiritual traditions, namely Zen and Tantric Buddhism, Hinduism, and erotic mysticism. That afternoon, the Chicks didn’t speak directly about their spirituality, but then again, goddesses don’t have to. “Writing is one of the ways that ego disappears,” Janine said.

And because “it makes your heart happy,” Hettie told us to read as many female writers of poetry and prose as we possibly can. Among the writers recommended by the Chicks were Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser, Wanda Coleman, Elizabeth Bishop, Gertrude Stein, and Emily Dickinson.

And then They read to us.

“...and the words crept under
the curtains of power, made little changes,
tilted precarious balance, and brought relief”
      (from “Mad Dogs of Trieste” by Janine Pommy Vega)

Marj Hahne

Marj Hahne is an educator and a poet, who recently relocated to New York City from Philadelphia, where she had served as our Philadelphia/South Jersey/Delaware Museletter correspondent. She endeavors to create a blissfully seamless life of poetry, teaching, and travel. She has written three feature columns for About Poetry before this one:

• “Reviews That Should Have Been Written: Poetry, The Press, and Public Space”
• “Painted Bride Quarterly Tossed Across Earthside Cyberstoops”
• “Herman Berlandt’s International Poetry Museum”