The Beat Generation
Whistlestop Bookshop opened in 1985. When I think about writers or categories or particular books that have sold steadily, without flagging, for over 30 years, I think I learn about my own philosophy of bookselling, I learn about my customers over time and generations, and I learn about the literature. Sometimes it is a book (Goodnight, Moon, say, or Killer Angels), sometimes it is a category (science fiction/fantasy or nature guides), and sometimes a particular author (Kurt Vonnegut, Jane Austen). I am both surprised and pleased that the Beats have sold since the beginning and show no signs of slowing down.
The history of the Beat Generation is complex and absorbing. Think of analogies being the Transcendentalists or the Lost Generation. Briefly and unfairly summarized, think of a small group of writers from very different backgrounds meeting at Columbia University after World War Two, creating the beginnings of a network that was nurtured in New York City but soon found simultaneous developments in San Francisco and the Pacific Northwest.
The Beats recognized and valued spontaneity, non-conformity, spiritual quests outside of social structures, suspicion of materialism, the intimate conversation between music (especially jazz) and language, and a burning, sometimes self-destructive, passion for freedom.
As you can see in our offerings here, Jack Kerouac was a central figure, as were Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Other names are here, too -- William S. Burroughs, Jr., Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Carolyn Cassady. I will add titles and writers as I remember the associations, and as new critical or historical evaluations are published. Enjoy what my customers have been celebrating for three decades plus now!
Jack Kerouac: Collected Poems
Jack Kerouac: Collected Poems
Poetry was at the center of Jack Kerouac’s sense of mission as a writer. “I’d better be a poet / Or lay down dead,” he wrote in “San Francisco Blues.” The celebrated “spontaneous bop prosody” of his prose was a direct outgrowth of the poetry that filled his notebooks throughout his writing life. This landmark edition gathers for the first time all of Kerouac’s major poetic works—Mexico City Blues, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity,Book of Blues, Pomes All Sizes, Old Angel Midnight, Desolation Pops, Book of Haikus—along with a rich assortment of his uncollected poems, six published here for the first time.
Kerouac wrote poetry in forms as diverse as the classical Japanese haiku (and his own American variants of it, which he sometimes called “Pops”), the Buddhist sutra, the prose poetry of Old Angel Midnight (which he described as “the haddal-da-babra of babbling world tongues coming in thru my window at midnight”), doggerel ballads and free-form songs, the psalms preserved in early notebooks, and the poetic “blues” he developed in Mexico City Blues and other serial works, seeing himself as “a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday.”
But his sense of form was closely allied to a commitment to spontaneous utterance—to a poetry awake to “All the endless conception of living beings / Gnashing everywhere in Consciousness / Throughout the ten directions of space”—and a longing for transcendent experience that marked his work from the beginning. “My only ambition,” he wrote in 1943, “is to be free in art.” That freedom came at a high personal price. Kerouac’s collected poems immerse us in what editor Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell describes as “the impenetrable complexities, engulfing vulnerabilities, and insoluble demands that life made on his heart and mind.”
Many poets have found Kerouac a liberating influence on their work. Robert Creeley called him “a genius at the register of the speaking voice, a human voice talking”; Michael McClure saw him as using “the whole of his life . . . as an instrument of perception”; for Allen Ginsberg he was “a poetic influence over the entire planet”; and Bob Dylan singled out Mexico City Blues as crucial to his own artistic development.