The Portable Beat Reader

ISBN-13: 9780142437537 / Angielski / Miękka / 2003 / 688 str.

Ann Charters

Opis

Beginning in the late 1940's, American literature discovered a four-letter word, and the word was "beat." Beat as in poverty and beatitude, ecstasy and exile. Beat was Jack Kerouac touring the American road in prose as fast and reckless as a V-8 Chevy. It was the junk-sick surrealism of William Burroughs; the wild, Whitmanesque poetry of Allen Ginsberg; and the lumberjack Zen of Gary Snyder.
The Portable Beat Reader collects the most significant writing of these and fellow members (and spiritual descendants) of the Beat Generation, including Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, Bob Dylan, Leroi Jones, and Michael McClure. In poetry, fiction, essays, song lyrics, letters, and memoirs, it captures the triumphant rudeness, energy, and exhilaration of a movement that swept through American letters with hurricane force.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-datetranslations by award-winning translators."

Recenzje

"A deft and definitive collection. It catches the flavor of playful, serious defiance of the whole generation." Gary Snyder

Spis treści

The Portable Beat ReaderIntroduction
"Variations On A Generation"

Part I
"The Best Minds Of A Generation"
East Coast Beats

Editor's Note

1. Jack Kerouac
On the Road (excerpt)
The Subterraneans (excerpt)
Mexico City Blues (excerpt)
211th Chorus
239th Chorus
240th Chorus
241st Chorus
242nd Chorus
"Essentials of Spontaneous Prose"
"Belief & Technique for Modern Prose

2. Allen Ginsberg
"Howl"
"Footnote to Howl"
"A Supermarket in California"
"Sunflower Sutra"
"America"
"Kaddish"
"Song"
"On Burroughs' Work"

3. William Burroughs
Junky (excerpt)
The Yage Letters (excerpt)
Naked Lunch (excerpt)
"Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness"

4. Herbert Huncke
"Elsie John"
"Joey Martinez"

5. John Clellon Holmes
Go (excerpt)

6. Carl Solomon
Mishaps, Perhaps (excerpt)

7. Gregory Corso
"I Am 25"
"The Mad Yak"
"Vision of Rotterdam"
"Bomb"
"Marriage"
"Variations on a Generation" (excerpt)

Part 2
"Heart Beat"
Enter Neal Cassady

Editor's Note

1. Neal Cassady
Letters to Jack Kerouac, 1947-1950

2. Jack Kerouac
Letter to Neal Cassady, early 1951

3. Neal Cassady
The First Third (excerpt)

4. Jack Kerouac
Visions of Cody (excerpt)

Part 3
"Constantly Risking Absurdity"
Some San Francisco Renaissance Poets

Editor's Note

1. Kenneth Rexroth
"Thou Shalt Not Kill"
"Poems from the Japanese"
"Rexroth: Shaker and Maker" by William
Everson

2. Lawrence Ferlinghetti
"Dog"
"Constantly Risking Absurdity"
"In Goya's greatest scenes . . ."
"One Thousand Fearful Words for Fidel Castro"
"Horn on Howl

3. Michael McClure
"Peyote Poem"
Scratching the Beat Surface (excerpt)
Includes Snyder's poem, "A Berry Feast," Whalen's poem, "Plus Ca Change..."
McClure's poems, "Point Lobos: Animism" and "For the Death of 100 Whales"

4. Gary Snyder
"Mid-August at Sourdough Montain Lookout
"Milton by Firelight"
"Riprap"
"Praise for Sick Women"
"Night Highway Ninety-nine"
"Toji"
"Higashi Hongwanji"
"Notes on the Religious Tendencies"

5. Philip Whalen
"Sourdough Mountain Lookout"
"A Dim View of Berkeley in the Spring"
"Prose Take-Out, Portland 13:ix:58"

6. Philip Lamantia
"High"
"The night is a space of white marble"
"I have given fair warning"
"There is this distance between me and what I see"
"Fud at Foster's"

7. Lew Welch
"Chicago Poem"
"The Basic Con"
"Taxi Suite After Anacreon"
"Not Yet 40, My Beard Is Already White"
"The Image, as in a Hexagram"
"I Saw Myself"

8. Bob Kaufman
"Round About Midnight"
"Jazz Chick"
"On"
"O-Jazz-O"

Part 4
"A Few Blue Words To The Wise"
Other Fellow Travelers

Editor's Note

1. Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)
"In Memory of Radio"
"Way Out West"
"The Screamers"
Letter About Kerouac's Prose

2. Ray Bremser
"Funny Lotus Blues..."

3. Diane DiPrima
"Three Laments"
"Song for Baby-O, Unborn"
"The Practice of Magical Evocation"
"Poetics"
"Brass Furnace Going Out"

4. Bob Dylan
"Blowin' in the Wind"
"The Times They Are A-Cahngin'"
"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"
Tarantula (excerpt)

5. Brenda Frazer (Bonni Bremser)
"Poem to Lee Forest"

6. Tuli Kupferberg
"Greenwich Village of My Dreams"
1001 Ways to Beat the Draft (excerpt)

7. Jack Micheline
"Poet of the Streets"

8. Frank O'Hara
"Les Luths"
"Post the Lake Poets Ballad"
"Personal Poem"
"The

O autorze

Ann Charters, a Jack Kerouac and Beat Generation scholar, is professor of American Literature emerita at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. in 1966, she worked with Kerouac to compile his bibliography, and was the only biographer who interviewed him about the circumstances in which he wrote his books. She is the author of his first biography, Kerouac, in 1973. She edited his posthumous poetry collection, Scattered Poems. She is also the editor of numerous books on Beat and other literature, including The Portable Beat Reader, The Portable Sixties Reader, Beat Down to Your Soul, The Portable Jack Kerouac Reader, and two volumes of Kerouac s Selected Letters.