wordtennis

Still thinking about The Beats

2011-04-18T20:51:00.000-04:00

It is the birthday of the man who inspired the word "beatnik" in the 1950s: poet Bob Kaufman (books by this author), born Robert Garnell Kaufman, in New Orleans, Louisiana (1925). Kaufman's mother was a Roman Catholic woman from Martinique who loved to play the piano and buy books at auctions. His father was a German Jew; "my Negro suit has Jew stripes," Kaufman often said of his lineage. Details of his life are hazy because he didn't keep a diary or leave behind any letters, and while he completed three volumes of poetry, he preferred to recite his poems in coffee houses rather than write them down.

As a teenager, he joined the Merchant Marine. In his 20 years as a sailor, he circled the globe nine times and survived four shipwrecks. On his first ship, the Henry Gibbons, he became friends with the first mate, who lent him books and encouraged him to read.

It was at sea when he first read about the Beat poets, many of whom also had maritime ambitions. Gary Snyder wanted to experience the culture in port cities around the world, and he worked as a seaman during the summer of 1948 and again in the mid-1950s. When Jack Kerouac, as a freshman at Columbia, failed chemistry and lost his scholarship, he joined the Merchant Marine to make money to re-enroll. Allen Ginsberg was suspended from Columbia for fighting with his dormitory housekeeper, and he followed Kerouac into the Merchant Marine. (Ginsberg tried marijuana for the first time on his maiden voyage.) When he was 22, Lawrence Ferlinghetti fell in love with the sea when he lived on the Maine coast for a summer and worked scraping moss off rocks. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he enrolled in Midshipmen's School and was deployed at different lighthouses and naval watch posts throughout World War II.

When Kaufman was back on land, he studied briefly at the New School in New York City, where he met William S. Burroughs and Ginsberg. The three eventually moved to San Francisco and joined Gregory Corso, Kerouac, and Ferlinghetti to form the heart of the Beat movement.

Improvisational jazz influenced Kaufman's street performances and earned him the nickname "The Original Bebop Man," but it also earned him the attention of local police. In 1959, he was tossed into jail 39 times for disorderly conduct. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen said he had Kaufman's spontaneous oral poetry in mind when he created the word "beatnik."

Later, Kaufman cofounded Beatitude magazine, which helped launch the careers of many other poets, but he continued to live a mostly itinerant life, filled with drugs, a stint at Bellevue Hospital, where he underwent electroshock treatments, and continued police harassment. By the mid '60s, he had published two volumes of poetry — Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (1965) and Golden Sardine (1967) — and in the early '80s, his friends gathered old recordings and notes and had them published as The Ancient Rain: Poems 1958 - 1978 (1981).

When President Kennedy was shot in 1963, Kaufman took a vow of silence and didn't speak again until he walked into a coffee shop in 1975 and recited his poem, "All Those Ships that Never Sailed." He said:

All those ships that never sailed
The ones with their seacocks open
That were scuttled in their stalls ...
Today I bring them back
Huge and transitory
And let them sail
Forever.

His wife encouraged Kaufman to write down his many poems, but he wished to stay hidden from history.

He said, "I want to be anonymous. My ambition is to be completely forgotten."

Neglected

2011-04-04T22:15:00.003-04:00

Neglected By, Molly Mellott

A shriek of agony,
Heard but not seen
A cry for help,
Ripping at the seams

"The Ugly" is like her disease
Scoffed and smirked at
By plastic royalty

There's a light within her naive heart
Few who see it
But she still yearns to be noticed

Neglected for life
Only a mirror image matters
Shipped off on her own
Known as an outsider

KEROUAC'S HAIKU EXPERIMENTS

2011-04-01T17:27:00.000-04:00

(Maybe this form will appeal to some of you. M )

Some Haikus by Jack Kerouac in which he opened up the genre and made a traditional Japanese form uniquely American.

Then I'll invent
The American Haiku type:
...
Seventeen syllables?
No, as I say, American Pops:--
Simple 3-line poems

The windmills of
Oklahoma look
In every direction

*

Useless! useless!
--heavy rain driving
Into the sea

*

Straining at the padlock,
the garage doors
At noon

*

The tree
looks like a dog
Barking at heaven

*

Crossing the football field,
coming home from work,
The lonely businessman

*

On Desolation
I was the alonest man
In the world
(Desolation is a mountain)

WHY THE FOUNDING FATHERS USED LATIN

2011-04-01T17:06:00.002-04:00

Check it out, you Latin-lovers!
http://www.wondersandmarvels.com/2011/03/why-the-founding-fathers-used-latin.html

Three Poems

2011-04-01T14:23:00.000-04:00

Hi Everyone! Here are drafts of poems by Rachel, Cody and Lucas. Would you please respond by telling them which phrases/lines you like best...which ones really move you.

CRIMSON (Rachel)

The air is heavy with musk
That deep sensual scent that wraps around
your mind and chokes away sanity
It smothers the smell of sweat and cheap perfume
As he tries to wipe the crimson from his
starched white collar
He throws some lifeblood in red light's direction
He's there staring in the scarlet mirror
Wiping at the collar
So he doesn't see red light drink his life blood
So he doesn't feel
Anything
When she tells another man to bleed for her
And he'll taste her crimson

THE OUTSIDER (Lucas)

One step taken toward the face of the earth.
Walk alone to no more fears without their worth.
My path, my life, should I approach the end,
or stay firm and die trying for what I defend.
No vales that call the sign of hope,
no hand extended to help me climb this rope.
Every day is never changing from the rest,
different from these norms as I shall always protest.
Without there being such to show me the light,
all I do is strive spiritually to search through this fight.
Determined to achieve PURSUIT OF A POWERFUL PERSISTENCE,
it's clear what's shown from my concrete ideals for resistance.
Am I truly just another outsider,
or am I just reaching out alone to something higher?

WHAT SHE DOES (Cody)

she sits alone,
because she has no-one to talk to
she speaks to herself,
only so somebody will listen

she's surrounded by nothing,
because that's all she's ever asked for
and she doesn't love,
because drugs make that easier

she relies on no-one,
because she's unreliable
and she believes in nothing,
because there's nothing to believe in

she doesn't live,
because that's easy
but she doesn't die,
because she lacks the conscience

she does what she does
because SHE is nothing

Greetings and Salutations

2011-03-30T19:41:00.002-04:00

Hello all! Rachel here :) So I figured I'd just write a comment. Has anyone picked their main focus for their poems? Like for my looking in poem, I was thinking of focusing on prostitution. Well, I think we should all share our ideas on here, that way we can all get to know eachother and our writing styles and techniques a bit more. We can all become just the bestiest of best friends while we're at it. Ok, that was a bit too cheerful even for my taste ^_^;

Hey there fellow poets :)

2011-03-27T21:49:00.000-04:00

So I'd like to start by pointing out how excited I am to be a part of this! Thursday was a seriously great time and I'm looking forward to the rest of our meetings.

I thought I'd share one of my favorite pieces of writing with you all, written by a true outsider himself. It's called The Artist by Oscar Wilde. It's sort of poetry, sort of prose... Maybe a poetic prose? I'll let you guys decide. I'd also post a link, but my iPod (which I'm posting from) isn't quite cooperating. For those of you who don't know about Wilde, he was a brilliant writer living in England in a time where the catholic church and the government saw homosexuality as both a sin and crime. Wilde faced many moral troubles being gay but married to a woman with children and also many legal troubles for his sexuality. I could definitely tell you more in person if you ask :)

I was also wondering, where exactly are some of you looking for inspiration in your second poem (someone looking at an outsider rather than being one)? I have plenty of inspiration coming from my own life, but I'm having trouble finding a subject and perspective for this one. Let me know in person or with a post, or even contact me on facebook! I'm Emma Bovill, and if you can't find me by name my email is emmabovill@yahoo.com.

See all of you Thursday!
-Emma

...and one more to consider

2011-03-24T20:57:00.002-04:00

...and another

2011-03-24T20:55:00.000-04:00

Looking from the outside

2011-03-24T20:54:00.000-04:00

Here's an image you might want to riff on.

This guy was a Beat, & Kerouac's friend

2011-03-24T20:30:00.002-04:00

It's the birthday of poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, born in Yonkers, New York (1919). His father, an Italian immigrant, died before he was born and his mother was committed to an asylum while he was still an infant. Ferlinghetti spent part of his childhood in a state orphanage. A French aunt took over custody of young Lawrence and moved him to France. After a few years, they returned to New York, where his aunt got a job as a governess with a wealthy family. Then his aunt took off, abandoning her nephew, but the family liked the boy so much that they took him in.

Ferlinghetti had access to good schools, went to college at the University of North Carolina, and then joined the Navy during World War II. He was the commander of 110-foot ship. He said: "Any smaller than us you weren't a ship, you were a boat. But we could order anything a battleship could order so we got an entire set of the Modern Library. We had all the classics stacked everywhere all over the ship, including the john. We also got a lot of medicinal brandy the same way."

He moved to New York, then Paris, and then settled in San Francisco. He loved the North Beach neighborhood, full of Italian immigrants, and he decided to open a bookstore there. In 1953, he opened City Lights, the first all-paperback bookstore in the country. It became a center for the Beat poets, and also a publishing house — City Lights Press made its name publishing Allen Ginsberg's "Howl."

Ferlinghetti wrote: "I have a feeling I'm falling / on rare occasions / but most of the time I have my feet on the ground / I can't help it if the ground itself is falling."

Ripple Effect 2011-2012

2011-03-20T17:14:00.000-04:00

Welcome Nashua High School poets! You're about to add a few more "ripples" to the Ripple Effect Project. This year's theme is "the outsider and we'll be examining the notion of what it means to be an outsider in any of its many forms. We'll be reading poems and stories on that theme, taking a field trip to the hometown of Jack Kerouac, one of the founders of the Beat movement, and talking with composer Ted Mann. We'll write our own poems which will be collected in a book, will be illustrated by NHS artists, and will be used as elements of an original choral composition performed in 2012 by the Nashua Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and the NHS Chorus.

We'll use the Word Tennis blog to post drafts of our poems-in-progress and share our thoughts and comments. Welcome!