Beats

DLaurent

Well-known member
What do you think about the beats, the poetry in particular? To me one moment stands out but I cant find the video anymore.

It was at this poetry reading.


A poetry reading by Harry Fainlight. You can kind of see what happens when he loses his words on stage when an audience member starts shouting Love, Love, Love.



But it's best watched if you can find the original unedited clip.

Probably my favourite beat poem is Ginsberg's A Supermarket in California....

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night!
 

DLaurent

Well-known member
I've never managed to find a Fainlight poem online but this is the reading I'm talking about, I found the video, quite an epic moment I think.



The whole documentary is on youtube. I might tried to buy his selected poems book on the back of this.
 

DLaurent

Well-known member
Reading what I can of Gregory Corso, Catholic enfant terrible of the Beats.

I like this one, gritty, and I'm drawn to Freudian poets. Who does he kill?

Screenshot 2021-02-14 at 16.03.29.png
 

borzoi

Well-known member
ginsberg is not someone i would defend from his detractors but a supermarket in california will always be one of my favorite poems. gary snyder's translations of han shan are also very important to me and led me to pound etc.

to me the beats are great when they're a conduit for a more ecstatic/hallucinatory spiritual force and not so good when they lapse into solipsism. ofc the line there can be blurry.
 

borzoi

Well-known member
from erik davis's newsletter today:

We don’t use the term “seeker” much these days, which is kind of a shame. As the religious historian Leigh Schmidt illuminates in his book Restless Souls, the modern sense of “seeker” emerges at the end of the nineteenth century, as liberal Protestantism gets so loose that it arguably ceases being Christianity, and becomes Transcendentalism, or New Thought, or Theosophy, or, increasingly, something undefined and personal, roving and uprooted from homegrown traditions, open to ideas and symbols and practices from around the world, particularly the East, and especially keen on cultivating direct experience of the sacred. The seeker sensibility would bloom significantly in the postwar world. The Beats took it up in the fifties, as did many of their beatnik followers, and so too the far more numerous hippies and travelers and self-realizers and proto-New Agers of the late ‘60s and ‘70s, many of whom would self-identify as “seekers.”

In the eyes of many social critics, the seeker was nothing more than the pupa stage for today’s spiritual consumer: an atomized neoliberal self-empowerment junkie, mixing and matching a “cafeteria religion” and pampering the ego they are claiming to overcome. Perhaps we no longer speak of seekers because we are more comfortable as finders, or better yet, buyers — not just of Goop chakra tech, but of lifestyles, or Instagram paradigms, or self-help regimens that buffer us from the dark nights and stark confrontations that arguably undergird authentic spirituality.

But let’s not toss the baby out with the Emotional Detox Soak bathwater. In my (admittedly slanted) view, a mature seeker is, like the Beats of yore, a spiritual existentialist. The seeker is not a finder, or a knower, or a master. They are always on the road, or traversing, even drifting, along Krishnamurti’s “pathless path.” As such, they distrust settled solutions or popular formulas, and prefer the company of fellow travelers or even reprobates to cults or congregations. Seekers can and do find teachers, and take up practices of discipline and devotion, just like Leonard Cohen did. But if one remains a seeker in one’s heart there is always a certain distance or tension. Longing fuels the entire quest, and that longing is always oriented to the beyond, to the not-yet, to a liberation that almost certainly won’t happen the way one imagines, and may very well not happen at all.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Reading what I can of Gregory Corso, Catholic enfant terrible of the Beats.

I like this one, gritty, and I'm drawn to Freudian poets. Who does he kill?
You know that book called Songs They Never Play on the Radio? Probably most of you at least know of the book cos it's pretty famous, but, just in case some don't, it's about Nico when she somehow ended up in Manchester in the 80s shooting heroin with a bunch of wannabe musicians and hipster junkies and so on. Anyway some Manc impresario sort of glommed on to her and found her an approximation of a backing band with a constantly revolving line-up and tried to make some money from her name by booking them a load of tours round Europe and the US. Anyway, the book is written by one of the longest standing backing musicians and it's pretty interesting and funny and depressing and so on... but (there is a point to this, honest), at one point she ends up doing a gig with Corso on the same bill. In fact, I think maybe he joins the tour for a bit and opens a few gigs. I don't know why he was in Manchester or Rotterdam or how he became associated with her, or who thought it was a good idea to have them perform on the same bill. But it might provide some information on the guy if you want another perspective on him and the final flickerings of his careers. I've got a feeling that Ginsberg might show up and perform at one point too although I may have misremembered yet again.
 
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