Which beat poet are you

Poetry for Teens. Lesson Plans. Resources for Teachers. Academy of American Poets. American Poets Magazine. A Brief Guide to the Beat Poets. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.

Academy of American Poets Educator Newsletter. Teach This Poem. Follow Us. Find Poets. Poetry Near You. Jobs for Poets. Read Stanza. Privacy Policy. Press Center. First Book Award. If they acted up, got out of line, or embarrassed their parents, they were punished brutally.

For men, such humiliation resulted in being cut lose, thrown out of the family, forced to take the Beatnik kick on the road. But for the women it meant mental hospitals, electro-shock treatment and being locked up at home and force fed conservative values. Look at the more famous faces, like Carolyn Cassady. The men that were part of the Beat Generation, whether they liked it or not, were talented and brilliant poets and novelists.

They were geniuses unwanted by conventional academia. The women that were part of the Beats were fewer in number and less successful in quality of literary output. Of course, there were some outstanding poems produced by women, and some fantastic ideas espoused, but perhaps their exclusion from this portion of the literary canon has less to do with the sexism of today and more of a reflection of reality.

Arguments for focus of the role of women tend to centre on appreciation of their role as muses to the men that wrote the famous books. But that seems to be flattering to the women. Kerouac began the Beatnik revolution and his muse was the manly Neal Cassady.

Ginsberg was constantly encouraging and being encouraged by his male friends and lovers, and although heavily influenced by his mother, seemed to draw inspiration from the incredible masculine figures around him.

Burroughs only began to write serious after killing his wife, but seemed to take help from the men in his life, particularly in developing his cut-up novels. Like all bitter debates, the fight over the role of women in the Beat Generation seems lost in pettiness and rhetoric. History tells us they stood on the sidelines and cheered their men on, and then presumably settled down into conformity. As usual, the truth lies somewhere in between, and perhaps nowhere at all. One could not, for example, claim that the men were all brilliant writers and equally appreciated by the popular literary community.

Not at all. To seek truth, we must look at a few of the female writers, their lives and works, and analyse them as individuals, before considering judging their collective output and worth. This would suggest that she was not respected by later generations for her own creative output, but instead simply because of who she knew.

She was a brilliant individual and played a role in the literary movement and in the society the movement would document. Although she was raised by a strict and overbearing family that envisioned her as the typical domesticated housewife, they also valued education and Cassady was allowed to learn, unlike many less fortunate women.

However, her interests lay more in the arts and creativity than any of which her parents would approve. They were an English teacher and a biochemist, while she was taking theatre lessons at nine, winning costume design awards at twelve, selling paintings at age fourteen, and head of a make-up department at sixteen.

She continued developing her impressive talents in the arts world, before moving to study at the University of Denver in In , she met Kerouac, Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. Here she began her relationship with Neal Cassady, who was already married to Luanne Henderson, and Carolyn found the two of them in bed with Allen Ginsberg one night, prompting her to end the relationship and leave Denver.

Cassady headed for Los Angeles and a career in Hollywood costume design, but found herself briefly in San Francisco. Neal appeared, having divorced Luanne, and on 31 st March , they were married. Together they had three children, and Carolyn rode out the manic life of a wife to The Holy Goof, who spent their savings on cars and drove back and forth across America with his friends and his ex-wife. Kerouac came to live with the couple for a few months in , when writing Visions of Neal. Carolyn and Kerouac began an affair together that lasted until , and the Cassadys named a child after their constant houseguest.

Throughout her turbulent life with the frequently absent Neal, Cassady continued her painting and work in theatre and the arts. But her commitment to her husband and children, and her appreciation of traditional values, prevented her from being totally ostracised from and punished by society. She never wrote any great Beat Generation texts, but neither did Neal Cassady.

Together they earned their place in Beat legend by their participation in the lives of the authors and poets, as members of an elite circle of literary significance, and as muses to the greats. But whereas Cassady was no great writer, but remembered in popular memory for her memoirs part of which became a terrible Hollywood movie , Johnson was a talented and respected writer in her own right. Joyce Johnson grew up in Manhattan, and like Cassady, she was subject to the will of her controlling parents.

But Johnson was freer than most because she simply rebelled. She went to university at an early age and lived around the corner from Joan Vollmer and William S Burroughs. This was at a time when Ginsberg was experimenting with heterosexuality, and his girlfriend at the time was Cowan. Ginsberg arranged a blind date between Kerouac and Johnson, and the two began dating. The real communication was going on between the men, and the women were there as onlookers… You kept you mouth shut, and if you were intelligent and interested in things you might pick up what you could.

It was a very masculine aesthetic. She dated Kerouac for around two years, but never saw it going further. During this time On the Road was published and Kerouac became depressed, mobbed by unwanted attention, and Johnson witnessed him fall apart.

Door Wide Open is a collection of their correspondence over the same period of time. She was a genius. She wrote from an early age and was soon communicating with Ezra Pound. Her friends and tutors encouraged her poetic aspirations, and her intelligence drove her to excel in education before dropping out in her second year of university. She was born in Brooklyn and spent the 50s and 60s in Manhattan, living in Greenwich Village and participating in the Beat and other literary movements of the time.

Later she moved to San Francisco and became active in the movements there. Like Allen Ginsberg, she actively participated in the shift between Beat and hippy movements, as well as between the different worlds of Eastern and Western America.

Like many Beats, she took an interest in Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies. She met Ginsberg and Kerouac in and wrote about their meeting in her Memoirs of a Beatnik. She published her first poetry collection, This Kind of Bird Flies Backward in , and has since published forty-one books. Di Prima is an example of a prolific female Beat poet, who was important to the movement and flourished in the following decades.

Her genius and rebellious spirit allowed her to participate as actively as many of the men of the Generation, and became a valuable contribution not just to the Beats, but to American literature. While the Beats were more or less defined as a generation by their relationships to one another, and certainly their styles developed on account of these relationships, it is harsh to remember a female poet simply because of her marriage to a famous male counterpart.

It is even more insulting because Jones helped Baraka run Totem press, an important Beat publisher. She is also well known for the same reason as the likes of Cassady and Johnson, for Jones has also released a memoir of her relationship with members of the Beat Generation, including Baraka, Kerouac and Ginsberg.

But Jones also wrote some twenty-three books, been published in prestigious journals, lectured across America on writing, and started the literary magazine, Yugen. Another famous wife and author of an autobiography that staked her best claim for a place in the annals of Beat history is Edie Parker.

Parker lived with Joan Vollmer on th Street in New Yorker, in an apartment that has a special place in Beat legend. When Kerouac was arrested and incarcerated for his role as accessory after the fact in the murder of David Kammerer, he agreed to marry Parker in exchange for her parents paying his bail.

She was set up with Burroughs by Ginsberg, who greatly admired both of them, and later became Joan Vollmer Burroughs. William S Burroughs was her second husband. In the Beat circle, she got heavily into Benzedrine, which she was introduced to by Kerouac. In , she was put in a mental hospital after suffering amphetamine-induced psychotic episodes.

Later, she and her husband travelled extensively to avoid the trouble their phenomenal drug-use caused them. She developed a limp, never slept, and spent all night raking lizards off trees.