Beat Poetry

Question 1

Beat Generation
Beat poetry
Diane Di Prima

Answer 1

• Very involved in artistic and literary world:
  
  • The Floating Bear.
  • New York Poets Theater.
  • Poets Press.
  • Timothy Leary’s psychedelic community.
• Poetry often women- centered.
• Influenced by:
  
  • Ezra Pound
  • Charles Olsen
  • Frank O’Hara
  • Buddhist practices

“Revolutionary Letters”

Question 2

Beat Generation
Beat poetry
Joanne Kyger

Answer 2

• Associated with
  - Beats (Gary Snyder)
  - Black Mountain Poets (Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn)
  - San Francisco Renaissance (Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley)
• Poetry:
  - Ordinary experience, everyday life.
  - Form and shape based on content.
  - Immediate, accesible speech.
  - Humor and wit.

“The Tapestry and the Web”
- Pan as son of Penelope.
- Playing with inconsistencies of mythological knowledge.
- Disrupting Homeric myth.
- Liberating Penelope’s passive sexuality through humor.

“Poison Oak for Allen”

Question 3

Beat Generation
Beat poetry
Anne Waldman

Answer 3

• Cultural activism + pracitce of Tibetan Buddhism.
• Language as political act.
• Collaboration with different artists.
• Poetry as performance, song, chant, etc.
• Angel Hair
• St Mark’s Poerty Project
• Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics
• Concerned with connection between language and gender.

“Battery”

“Hungry Ghost”