Beat poets
18 January, 2003
It's a night for poetry. If I thought I could write a half decent poem, I'd write one for you. But I don't think that, so I won't bore you with my insubstantial poetic offerings. You'll just have to put up with my scattered ramblings as I finish off a bottle of champagne.
I've been reading the Beat poets lately. Charles Bukowski, Richard Brautigan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg. Man, those guys knew how to write about sex. They could write about love, too, but that comes later. Sex first, then love. Poems like this one. And this one. And this. And this:
I've never had it done so gently before
The sweet juices of your mouth
are like castles bathed in honey.
I've never had it done so gently before.
You have put a circle of castles
around my penis and you swirl them
like sunlight on the wings of birds.
— Richard Brautigan
Who would've thought that a blow job could be so beautiful? I mean that completely without sarcasm. I've always liked blow jobs, and thought there was something incredibly empowering about being able to do that well. But that's the champagne talking and I'm more than a little drunk. This entry isn't about blow jobs.
I was first introduced to the Beat writers and the whole concept of the Beat generation in my teens. I remember reading Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-aid Acid Test and being astounded at discovering a whole world that I knew nothing about. Having grown up in an overly-protective and claustraphobic small town, I yearned for that kind of freedom and craziness. But I couldn't see me anywhere in those books. There were no female role models for me there.
If you look through an anthology of Beat Poets, you won't find many women. Diane di Prima, Denise Levertov. Not many others. Probably not surprising, given the era and what was expected of women at that time. Certainly not that sort of freedom and that earthy way of expression.
A few years later, of course, I did discover women writers from that era and earlier who were strong, sensual, intelligent — Anais Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, Gertrude Stein. They had existed all along, but it turns out they were in Paris, a long way from Greenwich Village, and my fifteen-year-old literary horizons had not yet stretched that far.
When I decided to study English literature, I left the Beats behind and immersed myself in the classics, in Shakespeare, in the Romantics. Only recently have I returned to the Beat writers. Except now when I read them, it's not with the same naive longing for their experiences and that so-called crazy free lifestyle, because nothing's free and everything has its chains. Nor do I have the need any longer to find female role models in everything I read.
Now when I read the Beats, I read with an appreciation for the words that they use. Visceral and succinct. Describing emotions and experiences that at 15 I couldn't even begin to relate to, but that now, at 39, I can relate to all too well.
Here I Am... by Charles Bukowski is one of my favourite poems. It's about an old man's anger at growing old — unable to make love, or make words, “maddened for the flesh of young girls in this dwindling twilight”. Sapped of juices, creative and otherwise. And yet “there is still more left here at 3:00am” — not only in the wine bottle, but in him. I love the sexual imagery of inserting a new piece of paper into the typewriter and “mak[ing] love to the fresh new whiteness” and the humorous irony of the last two lines.
As I get older, I have a growing appreciation for such sentiments — ones that are well-said with few words.
Boo, Forever
Spinning like a ghost
on the bottom of a
top,
I'm haunted by all
the space that I
will live without
you.
— Richard Brautigan
I almost cry whenever I read that poem. It just aches with a longing for something that can never be.
Unrequited love in 22 words. Few words, well-said. Good poetry is like that.
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