Beat Poets & Poetry
Poems, quotes, articles, video clips, websites, and images associated with the Beat Generation Poets.
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Posts I like
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“
Sweetheart
when you break thru
you’ll find
a poet here
not quite what one would choose.I won’t promise
”
you’ll never go hungry
or that you... -
Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.
I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line.Excerpt from The Secret by Denise...
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How Poetry Comes To Me
It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
... -
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Song
The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction
the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.
... -
“America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?”— Allen Ginsberg, “America” -
This is my second tattoo. I got it for two reasons that overlap a bit. First, the line “I’m with you in Rockland” is from the poem “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg. “Howl” is my favorite poem and reading it has helped me through some tough times. Second, Rockland, ME is one of my favorite places in the world, particularly the breakwater and lighthouse there. While the two Rocklands are not the same place, they both mean something to me.
Done by Adam Gordon at Mr. Adam’s Tattoos in Farmington, ME.
Allen Ginsberg’s Buddha’s Footprint.
Allen Ginsberg is my favorite poet, so of course I would get this tattooed on myself! It’s the first tattoo I’ve gotten. (On my eighteenth birthday which was June 19th!) It was a fantastic experience. I thought it would hurt a lot more than it did, but it was pretty much painless. I got it done at True Love, which is in Kemah, TX. The artist who did it was a fantastic guy and talked to me about poets and books pretty much half the time I was being tattooed. All in all, this will not be my last tattoo!
“I never did know exactly what was meant by the term ‘The Beats’, but let’s say that the original meeting, association, comradeship of Allen [Ginsberg], myself, Michael [McClure], Lawrence [Ferlinghetti], Philip Whalen, who’s not here, Lew Welch, who’s dead, Gregory [Corso], for me, to a somewhat lesser extent (I never knew Gregory as well as the others) did embody a criticism and a vision which we shared in various ways, and then went our own ways for many years. Where we began to come really close together again, in the late ’60s, and gradually working toward this point, it seems to me, was when Allen began to take a deep interest in Oriental thought and then in Buddhism which added another dimension to our levels of agreement; and later through Allen’s influence, Lawrence began to draw toward that; and from another angle, Michael and I after the lapse of some years of contact, found our heads very much in the same place, and it’s very curious and interesting now; and Lawrence went off in a very political direction for awhile, which none of us had any objection with, except that wasn’t my main focus. It’s very interesting that we find ourselves so much on the same ground again, after having explored divergent paths; and find ourselves united on this position of powerful environmental concern, critique of the future of the individual state, and an essentially shared poetics, and only half-stated but in the background very powerfully there, a basic agreement on some Buddhist type psychological views of human nature and human possibilities.”
gary snyder (via soledadysilencio)
wish i could listen in
“Come back, hair, come back !
I want to grow sideburns !
I want to wash you, comb you, sun you, love you !
as I ran from the wild before —
I thought surely this nineteen hundred and fifty nine of now
that I need no longer bite my fingernails
but have handsome gray hair
to show how profoundly nervous I am.”
Gregory Corso, from the poem Hair (via stateomaine)
“Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.”
William S. Burroughs (via ticket-ride)
