Amiri Baraka's "In Memory of Radio": Marxist Dialectics

The paper discusses the dialectics of Baraka's Marxism in relation to "In Memory of Radio," one of his best poems written during his Beat period and published in 1962. Though much of his poetry written during this period is judged by critics as having nothing to do with Marxism and thus no attempt is to be made to discuss his poetic production in the light of this literary theory, other literary critics prove that the seeds of establishing himself as a Marxist poet can find its roots in his Beat poetry prior to his transition to other two phases, namely the phase of Black nationalism and the phase of Marxist-Leninism.

Material Overconsumption as Ecological Polemics in Allen Ginsberg’s “Plutonian Ode” and Gary Snyder’s “Smokey the Bear Sutra”: Re-Envisioning Beat Critiques of Anthropocentric Materialism

Beat poetry, since its origination in the American milieu in the 1950s until its further maturation in the late 1960s and 1970s, has embodied ecological visions. Allen Ginsberg’s and Gary Snyder’s Buddhist poetics of the emptiness of material phenomena evoke one’s awareness ofthe true nature of material goods. This ecological awarenessenlightensanyoneto not overconsume the goods in fulfilling his/her daily necessities. In this recent era, Ginsberg’s “Plutonian Ode” and Snyder’s “Smokey the Bear Sutra” memorialize this Beat green poetics against anthropocentric materialism and its potential detrimental impacts on the natural environment. These poems view human’s material attachment as a recurring melancholia even in today’s digital technology era. Their ecological criticisms through the Buddhist poetics pave the way for anyone to cherish rather than objectify any material thing in living the biotic community.

Zelig in La La Land

Harry Dean Stanton's career expanded over the next decade with multiple appearances on television and in films such as director Monte Hellman's Ride in the Whirlwind in 1966 and a year later Cool Hand Luke, which fixed his face, if not his name, in many moviegoers' minds. Between roles he hung out with fellow actors such as Jack Nicholson and Warren Oates at Schwab's Pharmacy and Chez Paulette. He and Nicholson even became housemates for a while and took acting lessons from blacklisted actor/teacher Jeff Corey and actor Martin Landau, both influenced by the Stanislavski-inspired Method school of acting eschewed at the more traditional Pasadena Playhouse. Harry Dean and his pals discussed philosophy and Beat poetry and became part of the hip set in Laurel Canyon. Meanwhile, back home, Ersel moved to Florida with her new husband, Stanley McKnight. She and her actor son stayed in touch but often through horrific fights over the phone. Stanley died at 51 the same year Cool Hand Luke came out. Harry Dean's father never remarried, worked his barbershop, and lived in a room behind it.

La poesia Beat in Italia: uno studio translocal

Building on recent transnational Beat Generation scholarship and focusing on poetry, this essay aims to expand the geographical scope of Beat culture by including Italy. It does so considering a number of questions, such as what ties Beat poets had with Italy and Italian culture; how and when their texts migrated to Italy and with what effects on the receiving culture, including publishers, journalists, general readers and poets. It investigates the ramifications of Beat poetry as a transatlantic flux between the United States and Italy during roughly two and a half decades (1956-1980), re-discovering an otherwise neglected Italian American writer, and assessing whether the Beats’ aesthetics did impact Italian culture glocally.

Creeley, Robert White (1926–2005)

Robert Creeley was a postmodernist American poet whose concern for the emotional content of the quotidian influenced Deep Image poetry, the Black Mountain School of poets, and Beat poetry. Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, on May 21, 1926. Before the age of five he had lost his physician father, and in an automobile accident the use of his left eye. Following the death of his father, Creeley moved with his mother and sister to a small farm in West Acton, where he enjoyed spending time in the woods. The relative isolation of his upbringing made him greet even strangers generously, a grace for which Creeley was known even after he had achieved literary fame. Following formative years in the Holderness Academy in Plymouth, New Hampshire, Creeley attended Harvard University, where he received little support for his writing. In 1944, restless and discontented, Creeley was suspended from the university for shenanigans, and subsequently sought relief and adventure in the American Field Service in Burma and India. When the war was over, Creeley returned to Harvard and helped to edit an undergraduate literary magazine, The Wake, founded as a counter to the Eliotic, New Critical bent of Harvard’s The Advocate. Through his earliest publications in The Wake, Creeley began to experiment with the quotidian subjects and diction that ran counter to the rhetorical, analytical style of poets such as Eliot and Stevens.

Poe and Modern(ist) Poetry

This chapter considers not only how Poe’s impact on European symbolism prompted US poets—both expatriates (Eliot, Pound) and the natively grounded (Williams)—to rehash Poe’s literary import but also how the influence of ambivalent perceptions of Poe (the visionary, the ratiocinative hoaxer, the antididactic) extended to poet(ic)s of the Americas, eventually transcending their borders with a radiance that invites thinking of “phosphorescence” as a poetical category. From Baudelaire’s seminal reception to Mallarmé’s shift into the prose poem, from Pessoa’s elaborations on rhythmical versions of the original to Jakobson’s emphasis on paranomasia in “The Raven,” Poe was a cornerstone of the development of modern(ist) poetry on a transnational scale. Translational negotiation, along with defamiliarization and varied understandings of the “legitimate province of the poem,” would inform emerging poetics of the modern lyrical genre. T. S. Eliot’s reading of Poe as the unwitting but productive initiator of a continuous detachment of poetry from meaning, leading up to the French symbolist tenet of “la poésie pure” and culminating in Valéry, had the merit of placing Poe in the context that facilitated high modernism. On the other hand, this reading disregarded the significance of Poe for early Spanish American modernism(o)s, which this essay will recuperate, along with other Latin language proposals for the relation of poetry with aesthetic and cultural inventiveness. It also addresses the effacement of the erudite and popular in language and media, and the echoes of Poe in countercultural movements such as surrealism, concrete poetry, and beat poetry.

Peter Gunn and social fissure on US network television

Producer Blake Edwards’ Peter Gunn (1958–1961) appeared on US network television at a time when Beat poetry and bebop jazz were just making their mark on American culture. While Peter Gunn didn’t represent a drastic shift in the reactionary values of US television, the series reconfigured radicalism and counterculture in ways that are reflective of deeper cultural contradictions. In order to explore these issues, this article seeks to explore the industrial and production history of Peter Gunn in relation to its use of bebop jazz, Beat poetry and its representation of law and order.