Re: Mostly Off topic.. who am I kidding? Completely Off topic


Subject: Re: Mostly Off topic.. who am I kidding? Completely Off topic
Omlor@aol.com
Date: Wed Jun 26 2002 - 17:38:18 EDT


Hi Maurya,

Every so often I teach an undergraduate seminar on the Beats. Putting their
work fairly into the structure of classroom and course is a serious
challenge, especially given some of their ideas concerning revision and
composition and spontaneous poetics, etc. Of course, they are a widely
diverse group (the question of revision is a good one to illustrate this,
with Ginsberg and Kerouac having passionate and interminable arguments over
the matter). I did a radio show with Ginsberg once and met Burroughs in
Kansas and I do love some of what the generation produced. Corso makes me
laugh out loud and Jack's *The Subterraneans* is like listening to Parker
when he's soaring. They produced a lot of awful stuff, too, of course and
eventually, like Hem, started to parody themselves in the bad way. But I
will say this, I can get the students engaged and passionate about reading
poetry using some of this material. I can get them eager to talk after
reading "Howl" and get them to think seriously about pain as they read
"Kaddish" and I can get them to laugh at "Marriage" and "Holiday Inn Blues"
and learn with a smile from the works in *A Coney Island of the Mind* and
even get them to want to write when they read about Mardou Fox or Dr. Benway.
 And there are literary intertexts galore to discuss -- the Blake and Whitman
in Ginsberg and the Keats and the Italians in Ferlinghetti and all that
Melville in Jack and Kafka in Bill. They are easy to take pot shots at and
they are certainly not the major figures of the century, but their stuff
survives and has its uses and at the end of the day, in the right mood,
reading Jack's shameless exuberance and his poetry of phrase or Burroughs'
relentless, childish insistence on the unsayable can have its pleasures.

This fall it'll be a semester of Dostoevsky, but the Beats will return
eventually to my syllabus.

All the best,

--John

(who still insists that John Ashcroft bites the heads off live rattlesnakes
at night and offers blood sacrifices to his Lord Jesus to receive his
God-given right to dismantle the Constitution)

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