This rousing anthology features the work of more than twenty-five writers from the great twentieth-century countercultural literary movement. Writing with an audacious swagger and an iconoclastic zeal, and declaiming their verse with dramatic flourish in smoke-filled cafés, the Beats gave birth to a literature of previously unimaginable expressive range.



The defining work of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac provides the foundation for this collection, which also features the improvisational verse of such Beat legends as Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure and the work of such women writers as Diane DiPrima and Denise Levertov. LeRoi Jones's plaintive "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note” and Bob Kaufman's stirring "Abomunist Manifesto” appear here alongside statements on poetics and the alternately incendiary and earnest correspondence of Beat Generation writers.



Visceral and powerful, infused with an unmediated spiritual and social awareness, this is a rich and varied tribute and, in the populist spirit of the Beats, a vital addition to the libraries of readers everywhere.

Carmela Ciuraru is the editor of the anthology First Loves: Poets Introduce the Essential Poems That Captivated and Inspired Them, and the former editor of the Journal of the Poetry Society of America. A graduate of Columbia University's School of Journalism, she lives in New York City.

Foreword



RAY BREMSER (1934?98)

From Poems of Madness (?City Madness?)



GREGORY CORSO (1930?2001)

Hello

From Ode to Coit Tower

From Transformation & Escape

I Am 25

Poets Hitchhiking on the Highway

Away One Year

After Reading ?In the Clearing?

Writ on the Eve of My 32nd Birthday

Second Night in N.Y.C. After 3 Years



ELISE COWEN (1933?62)

?Trust yourself?but not too far?



ROBERT CREELEY (1926? )

Chasing the Bird

The Dishonest Mailmen

I Know a Man

The End

The Hill

The Rain

For Love



DIANE di PRIMA (1934? )

Revolutionary Letter #1

Poem in Praise of My Husband (Taos)

The Quarrel

April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa

Poetics



LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI (1919? )

#9 (?Truth is not the secret of a few?)

#13 (?It was a face which darkness could kill?)

#22 (?crazy to be alive in such a strange world?)

#39 (?A blockage in the bowel?')



ALLEN GINSBERG (1926?97)

From Howl

?Back on Times Square, Dreaming of Times Square?

My Alba

Song

Malest Cornifici Tuo Catullo

Tears

From Kaddish

A Supermarket in California

Sunflower Sutra

From America



BARBARA GUEST (1923? )

Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher

Sunday Evening



LEROI JONES (Amiri Baraka) (1934? )

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note

Sex, like desire

War Poem

Political Poem



LENORE KANDEL (1932? )

Enlightenment Poem

Blues for Sister Sally

Junk/Angel



BOB KAUFMAN (1925?86)

Benediction

West Coast Sounds?1956

Fragment

Ginsberg (for Allen)

Abomunist Manifesto



JACK KEROUAC (1922?69)

Mexican Loneliness

How to Meditate

A Sudden Sketch Poem

116

Hymn

From Mexico City Blues



TULI KUPFERBERG (1923? )

?I dreamed of a bum seven foot tall?

?My muse goosed me?



JOANNE KYGER (1934? )

?It is lonely?

?My father died this spring?

May 29

?It's a great day?



PHILIP LAMANTIA (1927? )

From Hypodermic Light

High

?Man is in pain?



DENISE LEVERTOV (1923?97)

The Gypsy's Window

The Flight

The Marriage

The Marriage (II)

Poem from Manhattan



JOANNA McCLURE (1930? )

A Vacancy



MICHAEL McCLURE (1932? )

The Flowers of Politics (I)

The Flowers of Politics (II)

Mad Sonnet 13



DAVID MELTZER (1937? )

From the Untitled Epic Poem

6th Raga: For Bob Alexander

15th Raga: For Bela Lugosi



HAROLD NORSE (1916? )

Picasso Visits Braque

I Would Not Recommend Love

?I Have Always Liked George Gershwin More than Ernest Hemingway?

I Have Seen the Light and It Is My Mind

Hotel Nirvana



FRANK O'HARA (1926?66)

Personal Poem

Autobiographia Literaria

Today

My Heart

Avenue A

Now That I Am in Madrid and Can Think

Having a Coke With You



PETER ORLOVSKY (1933? )

Peter's Jealous of Allen

?Writing poems is a Saintly thing?

Some One Liked Me When I Was Twelve

Collaboration: Letter to Charlie Chaplin



MARIE PONSOT (1921? )

Take My Disproportionate Desire

Matins & Lauds

Communion of Saints: The Poor Bastard Under the Bridge

Easter Saturday, NY, NY

Rockefeller the Center



GARY SNYDER (1930? )

Migration of Birds

A Sinecure for P. Whalen

Under the Skin of It

August on Sourdough, a Visit from Dick Brewer



ANNE WALDMAN (1945? )

How the Sestina (Yawn) Works

Revolution

Diaries

The Blue That Reminds Me of the Boat When She Left



LEW WELCH (1926?72)

?Whenever I make a new poem?

?I know a man's supposed to have his hair cut short?



PHILIP WHALEN (1923? )

For C.

20:vii:58, On Which I Renounce the Notion of Social Responsibility

Prose Take-Out, Portland, 13:ix:58

Something Nice About Myself

True Confessions



JOHN WIENERS (1934? )

A Poem for Tea Heads

From A Poem for Painters

A Poem for the Insane



LETTERS, ENCOUNTERS, & STATEMENTS

ON POETICS

Donald Allen (1912? )

William Burroughs (1914?97)

Gregory Corso

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Allen Ginsberg

Jack Kerouac

Frank O'Hara

Peter Orlovsky



Acknowledgments

Index of First Lines