Word: beachings
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Allen Ginsberg is an epic poet of Jack Kerouac’s Beat Generation. Ginsberg represents the North Beach school—San Fancisco’s Greenwich Village, sixteen blocks of bookshops, bars, and jazz bohemia. His epic poem is a free verse tragedy called Howl...
...Ginsberg and his poem first vaulted to national attention two months ago when San Francisco police authorities arrested Lawrence Ferlinghetti, sometime painter and poet, and bookshop proprietor on the North Beach. Ferlinghetti, who had published Ginsberg’s poem in his Pocket Poet series, was charged with dissemination of “obscene and indecent writings” and brought to trial under California’s newly valid Obscenity...
...consisted mainly of a parade of poetry professors from nearby universities to justify Ginsberg’s sexual imagery as an instrument of rendering his vision of human experience. Mark Schorer (of Berkeley), Walter Van Tillburg Clark, and Kenneth Rexroth (strawman poet and loquacious spokesman for the North Beach literati) told Judge Clayton Horn that the language of vulgarity was for Ginsberg a natural vernacular. (Ginsberg, after a stint at Columbia had been educated in night-spots, ghost towns, and freight car pilgrimages west...
...verdict was not guilty. “Would there,” asked Judge Horn in his decision, “be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to innocuous euphemism?” The North Beach poets danced in court that day, and the word of cultural liberation spread...
...North Beach literati have suffered from their followers. In each generation, there are eternal college sophomores, the professional Bohemians, and the bored suburbanites ready to don both turban and sandals, grow a beard and go wandering down the beach screaming at the sea. Beat, cool, gone, way out—the anarchy which these terms imply immediately capture the anemic imaginations of minds exchanging ruts. IT to the audience (white collar San Francisco waiting in the Black Cat until girls go wild with wee hour jazz) is like slumming—the very method implies a kind of sacrilegious...