- 1 The term “intellectual” or “liberal” consensus was coined by Godfrey Hodgson in his book, America i (...)
1Studying the issue of temporality in the Beat Generation is, as they say, “timely.” Timely because we now read Beat writing through a certain skepticism about the validity of linear, developmental time thanks to the impacts of digitization, nanotechnology, globalization, and biocultural realities, the latter embodied by changes in daily rhythms due to the COVID pandemic. It is also timely in reminding us of the degree to which Beat writing brought a renewed focus on the temporalities of lived experience—of the body and affect—that challenged cold war narratives about atomic futures and national consensus. According to the intellectual consensus of the period, myths of social progress based upon individualism, religious faith, and historical improvement had been replaced by mass society governed by an economic calculus.1 According to Daniel Bell, we had come to the end of ideology— “chiliastic hopes, millenarianism, apocalyptic thinking” that dominated the previous century” (370). So, what comes after the end? Were there no possibilities in the 1950s and 60s for utopian and apocalyptic thinking? Since Bell and other intellectuals tended to see Beat writers as a reflex rather than a critique of mass culture, this new counter-cultural effort seemed to validate the idea that ideology had come to an end. And perhaps it’s worth thinking about the perennial Beat revival that continues in the present day, a temporality in which we are all implicated.
- 2 Elizabeth Freeman describes the relationship of temporality and normative bodies as chrononormativi (...)
2I’d like to add another approach to Beat temporality through the writings of queer and disability theorists for whom the phenomenology of time is experienced by bodies regarded as “out of time,” either because they don’t conform to heterosexual scenarios of compulsory reproduction or because they fail to “fit” in norms of physical and cognitive health. For such individuals there is, in Lee Edelman’s terms, “no future” if futurity is defined by the procreative family or by the healthy, fit body. Disability theorists use the phrase “crip time” to describe the temporalities of bodies that, because of a physical or cognitive disability, require more time, who process time differently, who take longer to speak, and who live outside of the chronometric dependency syndrome most of us inhabit.2 Although Beat writers were no more disabled than the rest of the population, their emphasis on the centrality of the body in poetics calls attention to the poem’s registration of physiological and cognitive capabilities. Erik Mortenson observes that “the Beats base their poetics on a conception of language derived from the corporeal. From lungs that breathe to hearts that beat, language is intimately connected with a body that is continually fluctuating across space and time” (7). The best minds (and bodies) of Allen Ginsberg’s generation were, in many cases, considered deviant and mad for which the “concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia” were approved palliatives (“Howl” 130). If Cold War culture was epitomized by the corporate drone and domestic housewife, those who are “out of time” must be mad, or as Kerouac famously phrased his cohort— “the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved” (On the Road 5).
3Although the writers I discuss in this essay are not all disabled, mad, or queer, their approach to time—their situationist rejection of progress and purposive movement—could describe the queer artists discussed by Elizabeth Freeman in Time Binds who “engage the temporal politics of deconstruction (thought as an antirepresentational privileging of delay, detour, and deferral) to arrive at a different modality for living historically, or putting the past into meaningful transformative relations with the present” (xvi). “[A] different modality for living historically” is precisely what the Beat generation of writers offered for cold war America, a poetics that could be “lived” through ecstatic visionary experience, urban dérive, Zen meditation, drugs, and socially different (or deviant) behavior. One might add that Beat writing in its anti-representational, non-narrative, often desultory process—or to use Freemans terms, “delay, detour, and deferral”—gives material form to this alternative temporality. Kerouac’s Visions of Cody which utilizes what the author called “sketching” would be a prime example of a work that refuses closure, figuring the titular character through snippets of tape-recorded conversations, editorial asides, quotes from movie dialogue, lengthy descriptions of the cityscape, merged and blurred voices to render a “present” that is endlessly deferred.
4Kerouac’s romanticization of madness among the Beat writers should be set against the grimmer realities of cold war treatment of mental illness. As Steven Weine notes, referring to Ginsberg’s ongoing care for his mother, Naomi, and her bouts of mental distress and depression, “In the 1940s and 1950s, an era when psychiatrists had little to offer the severely mentally ill other than confinement and damaging treatments, far too many difficult responsibilities fell upon loved ones” (6). That “loved one” of course was Allen. Naomi was eventually incarcerated against her will at New Jersey’s Greystone State Hospital and later at Pilgrim State Hospital on Long Island, both of which institutions are immortalized in “Howl.” My title is taken from the conclusion to part 1 of that poem in which Ginsberg describes:
- 3 A thorough treatment of Ginsberg’s relation to mental illness is Weine’s Best Minds. Weine notes th (...)
5This passage condenses many aspects of my topic: the beat individual in history; the beat or base in musical time; the individual beaten down by time, and given my remarks on disability, the writer as mad. The role of madness in Ginsberg’s poetry—his mother Naomi’s, his friends, not to mention his own psychiatric incarcerations—becomes a leitmotif for those whose manic, mute, or distressed speech testify to alternate lives and times.3
- 4 Ginsberg’s note about Kerouac occurs in the annotated version of “Howl,” edited by Barry Miles (136 (...)
- 5 The definitive statement would be Ransom, “The Concrete Universal.”
6Ginsberg, in a note added to the poem, identifies the madman bum as Jack Kerouac, describing his isolation and loneliness at the end of Visions of Cody:4 “I’m writing this book because we’re all going to die—In the loneliness of my life, my father dead my brother dead, my mother faraway, my sister and wife far away nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world” (368). Despite the novel’s celebration of male bonding, transcontinental travel, and frenetic conversation, Kerouac’s present tense account is filtered through isolation and loss. Ginsberg seizes on this state of estrangement as a transcendent moment in which present tense writing—“putting down here”—offers a redemptive moment. Ironically given “Howl’s” subversive poetics, Ginsberg adopts a central trope of the New Critics: the artwork as a secular incarnation, the concrete universal manifested in the poem’s fusing of local particulars and transcendent values.5 Ginsberg inverts this formalist version of the incarnational model by focusing on the literal body of one person reincarnated in the jazz moment and remembered in “Howl,” a sacramental wafer “good to eat a thousand years.”
7This emphasis on the redeemed moment recognizes the centrality of presentness for Beat writers, the recovery of the “now” in knowledge that is a core principle in Zen Buddhism:
8Joanne Kyger in “Silver City Overlay” condenses an epistemology of temporal indeterminacy by refusing to “fix” the present in a sequence. Instead, she celebrates waking into awareness:
- 6 Although there are hints of western poets—Yeats and Wordsworth—embedded in these lines.
- 7 The Whalen reference is to his poem, “Duerden’s Garage, Stinson Beach” in Overtime.
- 8 The forms of immediacy I discuss here may seem somewhat dated, given our current digital, hyperreal (...)
9“[To] just look” could be the mantra for many Beat writers influenced, in various ways, by Zen Buddhist teachings and practice.6 We experience this heightened focus on the present moment in Ginsberg’s ecstatic illumination in a Harlem hotel, Kerouac’s nonstop typing of On the Road, Gary Snyder’s moment-to-moment perceptions while hiking, Philip Whalen’s reflections on a spider web in Richard Duerden’s garage, and as I will develop further, Kyger’s thoughts about washing her hair or doing the laundry.7 Mapping the quotidian requires a material form of writing that embodies immediacy, whether through variable lineation on the page, juxtapositions and breaks in narrative, or, in the case of Burroughs, the use of scissors to cut up an issue of Time magazine. The aesthetic monad of modernism is shattered by work that foregrounds acts of thinking and writing in the moment.8
10But when is now? What are the variable temporalities of presence and against what models of efficiency, rationality and progress could Beat time be measured? In this essay I focus on three variations on the theme: a poetics of dailiness and presentness; technologies and materialities of presence; and propositions of Beat futurity. Each is interconnected with the others. When Philip Whalen muses on his tendency to procrastinate and avoid work, he also contests a capitalist culture of progress and efficiency. When Burroughs folds in or cuts up Life Magazine’s special issue on “The American Century,” he creates an alternate vision of what that historical category might mean and the material means for its dissemination. (Harris) When Michael McClure roars at the lions in the San Francisco Zoo, his “Beast Tantras” envision a biocultural synthesis of atavistic ritual and utopian promise. When Diane di Prima remembers coming of age during the 1940s and 1950s in Recollections of My Life as a Woman, she intercuts her narrative with outtakes from the 1990s that add post hoc commentaries on her recollections. The present is a horizon toward which the poem aspires. In its desultory progress, full of asides and detours, it rediscovers a reparative history.
11Writing that aspires to the condition of presence is hardly unique to postwar poetry. Modernist writers valued the present moment for its sensuous properties, whether by providing precise details of a peripatetic day in Dublin or the inner speech of a woman buying flowers for a dinner party. Dada and Surrealist experimentation sought a kind of temporal immediacy through chance operations and dream imagery. Pound stresses the poetic Image as “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time,” but he quickly qualifies that immediacy by saying that its immediacy gives a sense of “freedom from time limits and space limits” (4). Although modernists valued the quotidian for its sensuous richness and texture, it often served to buttress a subterranean narrative about time lost and recovered myth.
- 9 Stephen Ratcliffe’s two-volume Sound of Wave in Channel, is perhaps the ultimate example of real-ti (...)
12For postwar writers, the present is not the surface for a hidden mythic narrative but is the myth itself. Being in time repudiates the work ethic’s “being on time.” In the work of Kerouac, Kyger, Whalen, Snyder and later writers like James Schuyler, Bernadette Mayer, Ron Silliman, Leslie Scalapino, Hannah Weiner, and Steven Ratcliffe, attending to the present—the writing of real time—tracks the mind’s attentions occurring over time—often very long times—without editorial commentary.9 Such poetry refuses the epiphanic tendency in many mainstream writers, to transform an ordinary incident into transcendent awareness, what Charles Altieri characterizes as the “scenic mode” in contemporary poetry.
13In his definitive treatment of Beat temporality, Erik Mortenson situates Beat investment in the moment as a search for a new subjectivity, one not dependent on grand narratives of progress, improvement, and consensus but one “porous enough” to absorb and inhabit the environment—“History is not just another arbitrarily assigned grand narrative but a legacy of choices and conditions that can be utilized to do work in the future” (6). As I will indicate in my final section, emphasis on the granular particularity of the present provides the conditions for alternate futures. By insisting on alternate “choices and conditions,” Mortenson echoes disability studies’ emphasis on capabilities—the ways that thinking through the different bodymind forces a reconsideration of the “choices and conditions” required in an ableist society. Where “ability” is the measure of social normalization, “capability” is the variable measure of what the different body can accomplish on its own terms and in its own time.
14Writing about Philip Whalen, Leslie Scalapino notes that for him, “writing is the occurrence of time as being, or being as time; similar to Zen master Dogen’s articulation of being as past present and future which are occurring separate and simultaneous: ‘all times at once’” (xvi). The visionary moment for Whalen never comes with scare quotes but emerges in moments of attention and observation, often expressed by juxtaposing the writing about time with writing of time:
- 10 It is worth noting that the writing I’m designating under the terms “dailiness” or “presence” could (...)
15The impossible writing of the present, mentioned in the first stanza, is then undercut by the objectivist observation of the second, the two locked in a fatal embrace of the word and the world it erases. Poetry, as he says, is a “graph of a mind moving, which is a world body being here and now (“Since You Ask Me” 50).10
16The titles to Joanne Kyger’s books exemplify this process: All This Every Day, On Time, As Ever, About Now. In “November 12” written in the late 1960s, she chronicles her daily life in rural Bolinas:
17Somewhere between poem and journal entry, “November 12,” records the exasperated movements of Kyger’s attentions, moving from the present—drinking coffee—to the future (“what I want from Philip”) bookended by self-mocking references to her “social calendar” and “social graces.” She satirizes her desultory day, “lounging through Bolinas streets,” adopting the voice of a busy urban cosmopolite. Against this faux sophistication Kyger chronicles an otherwise ordinary day whose apotheosis will be doing the laundry. There are no apocalyptic revelations, no transcendent understandings, no mythic undercurrents. She ruminates on her confusion over a “movement of grass behind a tree” that could be her addressee (“I thought [it] was you”) but turns out to be a horse. “Spacing out” on these incidents offers a distinctly gendered response to Zen Buddhist presence in which doing the laundry might seem extraneous. Her “funk” at her distraction suggests a conflict between doing daily chores and imagining a more cosmopolitan existence. Perhaps like her New York counterpart, Frank O’Hara, Kyger creates an illusion of writing in “real time” but in the process reveals the fictions that frame the putatively unreflective consciousness.
Consider this machine and what it can do
Burroughs, Ticket that Exploded 205
- 11 I use the phrase, “Technologies of Presence,” in discussing the impact of portable tape-recorders o (...)
18For writers of the Beat generation a poetics of immediacy was produced through technologies of presence: Xerox copier, typewriter, offset printing, mimeograph. All were enlisted in the quick dissemination of poems in little magazines and chapbooks that complemented the poetics of immediacy contained in their pages.11 The typewriter, to take the obvious example of an enabling technology, is a key feature of Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse,” offering a “stave and bar” for recording the breath and physiological responses of the poet. Kerouac’s Benzedrine fueled typing of On the Road on a roll of teletype paper is the iconic instance of the typewriter as an aid to composition. Truman Capote’s infamous remark about that novel, “That’s not writing; that’s just typewriting,” misses the degree to which typewriting and other forms of mechanical reproduction transformed narrative, not as a post hoc reflection on a prior event such as Capote’s In Cold Blood, but an immediate record of attentions, conversations, perceptions. And if speed was an advantage for Kerouac, for the poet Larry Eigner, who had only the use of his right index finger due to a life with cerebral palsy, the manual typewriter offered a degree of control over the page, a “slow poetics” of patient and gradual placement of words. (Shaw 71-104) As he writes in the margin of one poem, “slow / is / the poem,” marking through enjambment the difficult process of typing one letter at a time (609). It is worth thinking of things like typewriters, tape recorders and offset printing technologies as important elements in the materialities of time.
19One poet who embraced the work of poetry in an age of mechanical reproduction was Allen Ginsberg. In “Wichita Vortex Sutra” he uses a battery driven cassette tape recorder while being driven to a reading in Kansas. He records the radio news of the ongoing Vietnam War and protests at home, interspersing the news with his own commentary on the passing scenery of middle America. He is surrounded by high tension wires, telephone poles, and radio waves that are the vehicles by which voice is distributed through the media:
20Ginsberg is a ghostly presence, a “lone man from the void,” sent to identify himself as a ‘PERSON’ in Kansas. His voice is intermixed with electronic sound—news broadcasts, crank telephone calls, and police alerts from their “radiocars.” As he moves from MacPherson (“The Biggest Little Town in Kansas”) to Wichita, he attempts to maintain a voice of prophecy against the electronically mediated voice of reporters listing the grim body count in Vietnam and discussing domestic politics in Washington:
- 12 Tony Trigilio provides an astute reading of “Wichita Vortex Sutra” in “’Will you Please Stop Playin (...)
21In “Wichita Vortex Sutra” the cassette recorder offers Ginsberg an opportunity to use the machine to compose in real time: “These lines” as he says “are arranged according to their organic time-spacing as per the mind’s coming up with the phrases and the mouth pronouncing them. With pauses maybe of a minute or two minutes between each line as I’m formulating it in my mind and the recording” (“Improvised Poetics” 29).12 Prophecy no longer emanates from a more authentic, internalized voice but is distributed across an electronic landscape, a voice that has seized the means of reproduction and adapted it to oppositional ends.
22For William Burroughs, who late in his career, also experimented with the tape recorder, challenging the temporalities of social control requires a radical rethinking of narrative form. He recognizes that the traditional novel tends to stabilize a linear, progressive view of history that reifies time through narrative formulas. Cutting up a text and rearranging its parts undermines the communicative function and brings other, hidden narratives into view. As he says, “when you cut word lines the future leaks out” (qtd. in Murphy 105). There’s a prophetic element to Burroughs thinking about cut ups—that breaking into habitual reading practices liberates a more libidinal, responsive reader. Or in terms that I will develop in the next section, an alternative reading of futurity.
23His collaborations with Brion Gysin in the 1960s inaugurated a process of cutting and splicing passages from his previous writings, newspapers, books, letters, and audio recordings and later utilizing film, photography, and other media. Unlike similar techniques by Dada or Surrealist practitioners who created poems by pulling words at random from a hat (Tristan Tzara) or by effacing the previous line in exquisite corpse procedures, Burroughs’ cut ups and fold ins were directed at systems of knowledge production and containment. One section from The Nova Express entitled “remember I was carbon dioxide” directly confronts a dominant modernist account of time lost. Burroughs splices passages from T.S Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land serving as both an homage to an earlier textual collagist while undercutting his elegy for cultural loss:
All right young countryman so we took Time...Human voices take over my job now...Show you around alien darkroom...their Gods fading...departed file...Mrs. Murphy’s rooming house left no address...You remember the ‘third stair’ it was called You wrote last flight ... seals on North Beach ... (123)
....
Through all the streets no relief—I will show you fear on walls and windows people and sky—Wo weilest du?—Hurry up please its accounts—Empty is the third who walks beside you ... (123)
- 13 Gérard Georges Lemaire describes Burroughs’ use of scissors as ritual dismemberment, the “analytica (...)
24Eliot’s despair over the decline of redemptive cultural ideals and sacramental time is satirized through Burroughs’ intervention. “Hurry up please, it’s time,” Eliot’s reference to the pub’s closing time and a carpe diem worry about time passing defines, for Burroughs, the economic structure of the corporation: “Hurry up please its accounts.” Prufrock’s social and sexual impotence is expressed as an image of watery oblivion, “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown” This continues Burroughs corporate motif: “Human voices take over my job now.” The appearance of Christ to his two disciples on the road to Eumaeus (“Who is the third who walks always beside you?”) becomes “Empty is the third who walks beside you.” These disruptions of the Eliotic elegiac—what Todd Tietchen sees as a form of culture-jamming—impose a contemporary materialist reading of time, one delivered, not incidentally, by the scion of the Burroughs Adding Machine Company (107-129). Scissors may not seem like technologies of presence such as the typewriter or tape recorder, but by cutting up one text they bring another into life.13
If you cut into the present, the future leaks out
(Burroughs)
25Burroughs’ remark about the future “leaking out” of meanings created by the cut up text leads me to my final observation about Beat time. Emphasis on the present moment may suggest that there is little interest among Beat writers in the future or in forms of utopia. At one level this assumption is belied by the phenomenon of Beat culture itself, its continuation into mass media, social movements, and lifestyle practices that shifted social attitudes beyond its inaugural moment. Beat sociality was largely individualistic, a sodality of a few friends rather than a social movement defined by manifesto or mass spectacle. But the sodality of a “few friends” offered an alternative to the joiner mentality of the period. Ray Smith, Kerouac’s narrator in Dharma Bums, celebrates the “rucksack revolution” that he identifies with Japhy Ryder (Gary Snyder): “Think what a great world revolution will take place when East meets West finally, and it’ll be guys like us that can start the thing. Think of millions of guys all over the world with rucksacks on their backs tramping around the back country and hitch-hiking and bring the word down to everybody” (160). Kerouac’s vision of a homosocial revolution was a utopia of guys, a future in which women are not participants. But Kerouac rightly saw Snyder as a harbinger of things to come—an ecological imperative, a turn to non-western, Zen Buddhist practices, the backpacking revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, a syncretic, global consciousness.
- 14 A revised version of this talk was printed in The Poetics of the New American Poetry, edited by Don (...)
26Reference to Snyder reminds me that propositions of futurity and utopia in Beat writing often have a retrospective quality, a future based on “the old ways” of tribal, indigenous cultures and non-western religious practices. Snyder’s talk at the Berkeley Poetry Conference of 1965, “Poetry and the Primitive,” describes how a new poetics could be built on the shards of archaic cultures.14 Such propositions of futurity do not promise a utopia on the model of Transcendentalist communities or even the 1960s commune movement. Rather, Beat utopia is based on potentialities. Speaking of a Frank O’Hara’s poem, José Esteban Muñoz describes,
a certain mode of nonbeing that is eminent [imminent?], a thing that is present but not actually existing in the present tense. Looking at a poem (‘Having a Coke with You’) written in the 1960s I see a certain potentiality, which at that point had not been fully manifested, a relational field where men could love each other outside of the institutions of heterosexuality and share a world through the act of drinking a beverage with each other. (9)
27We can see this retrospective aspect of queer futurity in Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California” with its fantasy of encountering Walt Whitman in a neon-lit supermarket.” In his “hungry fatigue and shopping for images,” Ginsberg spies the good gray poet “childless, lonely old grubber poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys” (136). The two poets, 19th century bard and 20th century Jeremiah, leave the market together, “never passing the cashier.” Ginsberg asks “Where are we going. Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?” (136) For a queer poet in 1955 America, where homosexuality was criminalized and regarded as a mental illness, Ginsberg sees his predecessor as a “courage-teacher” against some idealized “lost America of love,” an imagined community discovered through a prior poet and refashioned in the spaces of American consumerism.
- 15 Earlier I invoked Lee Edelman’s No Future and its critique of a homonormative epistemology based on (...)
28We might say that Ginsberg’s poem describes a form of, invoking Muñoz’s title, “cruising utopia,” a structure of feeling about identities yet to be imagined. As Muñoz says, “Queerness is not here yet.” It is an ideality “that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future” (1).15 In this way we might read Beat writing as blueprints for future social and sexual relations. Something of this immanence of utopia can be seen in many of John Wieners’ poems that celebrate, to adapt Jack Halberstam’s terms, queer times and spaces. In one poem, “With Meaning,” Wieners remembers “shining martyrs” that have inspired him or who have been sacrificed to psychiatric and political oppression. The martyrs are queer poets and friends—Jack Spicer and Steven Jonas are mentioned—but more likely given the date of the poem’s publication in Nerves (1970) participants in the Stonewall uprising of June 1969. Such figures, “cut down in fire / and darkness,” give form to the poet’s present purgatory, a migration “between earth and heaven”:
Rise shining martyrs
over the multitudes
for the season of migration
between earth and heaven.
Rise shining martyrs
cut down in fire
and darkness,
speeding past light
straight through imagination’s park.
In the smart lofts on West Newton St.
or the warehouse district of S.F., come,
let us go back
to bequeathed memory. (126)
29In this oxymoronic figure, “bequeathed memory,” Wieners captures the way that past meetings produce the conditions for subsequent imaginings. He invokes cities and public spaces, cruising sites, and “imagination’s park,” in which queer life occurs. Whether remembering past sexual encounters or the Stonewall event, Wieners recognizes that such occasions create their own temporal spectrum: “Each street / contains its own time of / other decades, recollected / after the festival...” (126-7). Adopting an oracular mode, Wieners celebrates ghosts of the past who “salvage our century”:
Yes rise shining martyrs
out of your graves, tell us
what to do, read your poems
under springtime moonlight.
Rise and salvage our century. (127)
30In Muñoz’s terms, Wieners’ poem, like those of Frank O’Hara whom he discusses, defines a form of queer utopian feeling, located within a historically specific nexus of cultural production. The streets that mark a given decade for the poet now contain the potential for a redeemed century, a retrospective future as I’ve suggested (the word “savage” is hidden in Wiener’s “salvage”). Ginsberg’s invocation of Whitman in a contemporary supermarket rearticulates the earlier poet’s celebration of American potential, revisited among the “peaches and penumbras” of contemporary abundance. Two poems that bridge cold war America and Stonewall late 1960s “salvage” a utopian possibility of Queer nation.
31Let me end on a personal note that pertains to our topic. Some years ago I participated on a panel at a Queer Beat conference at the San Francisco Art Institute. As I was giving a paper on Allen Ginsberg, the poet entered the room at the back of the auditorium and took a seat, unseen by the audience. He was not on the program, but it was typical of him to appear at significant events and demonstrations, both nationally and globally. During the Q&A someone asked me a question about a poem of Ginsberg’s that hadn’t been part of the talk, so I was in the enviable position of being able to ask the living poet if he’d be willing to respond—which he did, generously. This incident reminds me of another aspect of Beat temporality: the public presence of writers at demonstrations, readings, political discussions, marches, and classrooms. And not just Beat-themed events. Gary Snyder and Michael McClure participated actively in forums on the environment and sustainability; Philip Whalen was head Roshi of the SF Zen Center for many years; Kerouac and Ginsberg often appeared on television talk programs. Diane di Prima was an activist in anti-poverty and environmental politics. Wieners was involved in the anti-psychiatry movement and gay liberation activism in Boston. And of course, the phenomenon of the public poetry reading brought into prominence by the Beats was perhaps the most enduring legacy of the movement.
32All of which is to say that postwar poetry, inspired by the Beat movement, came off the page and into the world, in Ginsberg’s terms, “confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head” (“Howl” 131). Early cultural critics on the right and left bemoaned the fact that Beat writers embraced contemporary mass cultural forms that were not part of the college curriculum: Krazy Kat cartoons, Laurel and Hardy routines, radio dramas and of course the jazz that so troubled Theodor Adorno. While Kerouac and company embraced aspects of mass culture, refusing to separate themselves from it, they developed a critique within those modes. For Beat writers Being in Time is more than a philosophical ontology, as in Heidegger; it means being in history, testifying to what is happening in this moment. If it was loud, hectoring, at times bombastic, unsettling, all the better to break into the “urbane and cultivated” quality that John Ciardi saw as the salient quality of mid-century writing (xxix).
33In my opening I invoked disability studies’ focus on crip time as a way of rethinking temporality around the different bodymind. When you don’t “fit” into a prescribed environment, classroom, office, bathroom, museum, you learn what bodies are supposed to resemble—and how yours doesn’t. Beat writers similarly looked at the world through the bodymind, its ardors and repressions, its madnesses and addictions. Not being on time, being late or, in the case of Kerouac, being ahead-of-time, are variations on crip time in which the Beats fail to punch the time clock, finish grading papers or mourn the loss of time. But the body creates its own measure that is always in time. The Beats were, as Bob Kaufman says in “Bagel Shop Jazz,” “lost in a dream world/ Where time is told with a beat” (107).