BEATS IN KANSAS program sponsored
by Humanities Kansas, April 7, 2019
Beat Writers of Kansas: The Lawrence-Wichita Magnetic Pole by Denise Low
The book, The Beats, edited by Seymour Krim, is where my story begins. In the
mid-1960s I was a junior high kid in Emporia, when I found this paperback book in
a newsstand. George Laughead has told me, how at about the same time in Dodge
City, he found The Beats and began
his awakening to alternative literature. The book influenced many of us as soon
as we could get to a bookstore without parental supervision. It abetted our
rebellions.
This first Beatnik anthology,
copyright 1960, includes Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Diane
Di Prima, Jack Kerouac, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti—twenty-five writers in all. Wichitan
Charley Plymell moved to San Francisco after
this book was published by an East Coast press. Michael McClure also is
missing. But still, it is a good snapshot of the first decade of the movement.
In the 1950s, Beats began using
psychotropic drugs, drinking, writing, and art-ing together in New York City
and San Francisco. The bicoastal interaction, between the hip Village scene in
the East, and the Asian-influenced West, created a vital dynamic. Gary Snyder
was the first writer to bring Zen meditation from Japan to the U.S., to
California, as he told me himself,. He is the ultimate West Coast beat writer,
with his respect for Indigenous narratives and for processes of nature. His
first book was Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (1959). Burroughs, with
his suits and uptown bearing, might represent the East Coast Beatnik. Both
places fostered interest in alternatives forms of consciousness, whether
through Zen, meditation learned in India, psilocybin, uppers, downers, or
alcohol—or admixtures of all. Both Beat hangouts in New York and San Francisco
were havens for gay people, which is no coincidence. And Kansas—well it is in
the middle. All roads go through Kansas, and I understand there was a gay bar
in Wichita and a gay culture in Lawrence.
Writers especially are the
spokespersons for the Beat movement, and milestone publications are Allen
Ginsberg's Howl (1956), Jack
Kerouac's On the Road (1957), and
William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch
(1959). Each has had a tremendous influence on literature. Howl refreshes Walt Whitman’s distinctive style and breaks down
academic rules of poetics. On the Road
uses stream-of-consciousness as a strategy and celebrates the American
anti-hero. It also develops the distinctive road trip theme of United States
literature. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch
led to a censorship trial over its perceived obscenity. The first amendment was
upheld, finally, in 1966. This is a landmark legal case.
Beat writers found their work
unattractive to the literary establishment, and I once heard scuttlebutt that
Ginsberg was stung by his rejections from major poetry publications. Karl
Shapiro, a powerful critic, champions the Beats in the New York Times Sunday Review of Books when he describes the status
quo of 1960: “’Modern American poetry is rightly called academic; it is
textbook poetry, good for teaching. . . .
But nobody reads it except around examination time’” (9). Krim writes up
a description of what Beat writing stand for, beyond rebellion:
Beat and hip
writing—with its 1960-sudden combination of realism, surrealism, drastic
out-in-the-open acts of murder and love that do justice to what had been sickly
saved up for centuries, and with its jazz sentences and bad grammar or no
grammar or new grammar—has the excesses and rawness of every unmapped revolt;
but why pick on its goofs rather than the enormously positive power and Voice
of the movement, which even a deaf man can hear? (10)
This is still a good overview of
the writing, especially the break-down of the formality of sentences. Beat
poetics abetted Black Mountain poets and led to Language Poetry—and an
explosion of new entries into literary expression.
Ginsberg is the most vocal of the
Beat poets, and both Wichita and Lawrence share stories of his visits. Kansas
appears early in Ginsberg’s career, 1956, in Howl, the 22nd line: “who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the
Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at
their feet in Kansas.” He refers to Kansas as a mystical place where cosmic
vibrations intersect.
In the 1959 poem in Krim’s
collection, “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear,” Ginsberg begins
another poem with a reference to Kansas:
Poet is priest
Money has
reckoned the soul of America
Congress broken
thru to the precipice of Eternity
the president
built a war machine which will vomit and
rear up Russia out of Kansas
The American
century betrayed by a mad Senate which no
longer sleeps
with its wife (149)
Kansas here is a geographic
counterpart to Russia, representing the whole of the United States as a
synecdoche. In Wichita Vortex Sutra,” Ginsberg expands his idea of Kansas with
Wichita place names,
Ginsberg was a secular pilgrim
when he traveled to Kansas, which already was an important part of his poetic
geography. According to James Johnson, Ginsberg wanted to visit Wichita
because: “He wanted to see the city that produced so many great minds and so
many weapons of Death.” His friendships with Wichita-connected Beats made an
impression on him, according to the interviews in the Wichita Vortex documentary film, especially Charley Plymell,
Michael McClure, Robert Branaman, Bruce Conner, and David Haselwood. “Wichita
Vortex Sutra,” written in 1966, begins “I’m an old man now, and a lonesome man
in Kansas.” The poem interweaves snippets of Vietnam War facts with Kansas landscape
and history. With his visit to Wichita, he knit together his imagined poetic
Kansas with specific site references.
One of my great regrets was that
I attended KU a year after Ginsberg visited Kansas, including Lawrence. The
stories of Ginsberg were still fresh and influenced the arts scene at K.U. The
wonderful Abington Bookstore was a revelation, and I bought Ginsberg’s books
there. Those were wild times. I had a boyfriend in the 1960s who had turned
Jack Kerouac onto peyote—he was a Lakota guy. A man rooming in my boarding
house, Gene Bernofsky, had been part of the LSD experiments at Harvard in the
1960s and had lived at Drop City. Edward Dorn spent a semester in Lawrence and
vied to get a position despite showing up to class ripped. And so forth.
Through the 1970s and into the
1990s, Ginsberg made intermittent trips to Lawrence. First, he was brought as a
visiting reader, and he packed ballrooms. He was a great musician and
understood how to use sound, rhythm, and parables. Another perspective—he had
worked in an ad agency in New York before his poetry career, and he understood
how to promote himself. He understood staging, theatrics, spectacle. This
skill, in my humble opinion, amplified the public profile of the Beats. He was
a prime mover for that group.
After Burroughs moved to Lawrence
in 1983, Ginsberg visited every year or so to maintain their close friendship. Burroughs
had an appointment as a visiting writer-in-residence at KU—he was in his 60s
and needed some retirement credits. He was required to do so many public
appearances.
There were salons for him afterwards, where he and I were
introduced. It was normal to run into part of his entourage, both the local
residents like James Grauerholz, Wayne Propst, Ira Silverberg, sometimes George
Laughead, and also the visitors— Allen, Anne Waldman, Keith Haring, Patti
Smith, Kurt Cobain, Peter Weller, Steve Buscemi. Sometimes these were
superficial sightings; other times I was lucky to be invited to dinner with
Burroughs. He was a brilliant man who opened his mouth and paragraphs fell out.
He had a keen interest in alternative consciousness of all sorts, not just
drug-induced, and he had fascinating stories. He read a lot of science to
research cutting edge discoveries and fringe areas like cryogenics. A man
trained in Lakota ceremonies guided him through some ritual fasting. His
acquisition of a section of Albert Einstein’s brain in Lawrence has been
documented in the book Driving Mr.
Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain by Michael Paterniti. Shotgun
art, the Gentleman’s Quarterly
fashion shoot in Kansas City, the Japanese science fiction film crew—so many
stories.
A
bit about Gary Snyder in Lawrence. The KU Spencer Museum of Art has an
excellent Asian collection. They had a series of lectures and conferences based
on that collection, with Snyder as an honored guest several times in the 1970s
and into the 1980s. The English Department co-sponsored some of his visits, and
I was honored to interview him (with Robin Tawney) for Cottonwood Review. Snyder was such a powerful influence on the arts
scene in Lawrence that people collected together their Gary Snyder dreams—which
everyone had. He was social and enjoyed a number of informal meals with writers
and Zen practitioners in Lawrence. His early explanations of ecopoetics had a
large influence on my own writing and that of others.
Stories
of the Beats, or near-Beats, go on and on. Kansas, the center of the vortex, is
a complicated place, it is a place where much undisturbed land still exists, it
is a place with an intersectional heritage—not quite East nor West, not
Southern and not Northern. William S. Burroughs lived in Lawrence longer than
anywhere else in his adult life. The Koch brothers are born and bred Kansans.
Barack Obama’s grandparents who raised him are from outside Wichita. This is a
place of contradictions. The Beat movement has braided into different channels,
like the Arkansas River, but it has never stopped. No one story has the full
truth; only listening to many stories approximates the real narrative.
Ginsberg, Allen.
“Death to Van Gogh’s Ear.” The Beats,
ed. Seymour Krim. Fawcett, 1960. 149-153. This poem is reprinted from a Nov. 1959 London Times Literary Supplement issue.
Ginsberg, Allen.
“Howl.” Poetry Foundation. Accessed
April 4, 2019. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl
Grawe, Jim,
producer/director/writer. Wichita Vortex:
A KPTS Documentary. 2016. Accessed April 4, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NeSJNi0xcM
Johnson, James.
“The Wichita Group.” Beats in Kansas (website
maintained by George Laughead). Accessed April 5, 2019. http://www.vlib.us/beats/wichitagroup.html
Krim, Seymour. The Beats: A Gold Medal Anthology.
Fawcett, 1960.
Paterniti, Michael. Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain. Dial
Press, 2013.
Shapiro, Karl.
Quoted in Krim, The Beats, p. 9.
