The Beat Generating

Saturday night, Torontonians felt the pulse of Beat in their city. Inspired by Beat poetry, three artists pulled the essence of the movement from the 1950s into the present. A present desperate and thirsty for connection, to feel human and thrashing from an academic class convergence on wit and craft devoid of emotion.

It could be said that Beat poetry is the metre and rhyme of the proletariat. Born in the 1940s, and evolving through the 1950s, the Beat generation, as John Clellon Holmes described it in an article in the New York Times magazine, November 16, 1952, developed out of the youth growing up through WWII. They were disenchanted from the romanticizing of war and experiencing a profound divergence from public institutions. They had a blunt realization that liberty, democracy, justice, self-determination, that had been fought for, were hardly for everyone. How much liberty? Whose definition of democracy? Self-determination for whom? There was no way-bill for a refund on brothers, fathers, limbs. In the same article Holmes attempts to clarify the Beat as a generation: “more than mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw...Brought up during the collective bad circumstances of a dreary depression, weaned during the collective uprooting of a global war, they distrust collectively.” Beat poetry emerged as a direct product of this organism.

This postwar generation was therefore more open to exploration of the human condition, to eccentricity, to a drastic reconstruction of the old pieced-together heap of social constructs about appropriateness. The poetry of this generation was not comprised of blazons of women’s fleshy bits, but of the reality of their lives.

In 1955 the Beat movement attained national prominence. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, having published Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, was charged with printing and selling an obscene book.

Saturday night, in a small theatre on Walnut Street, Torontonians felt the pulse of Beat in their city. A power governments cannot suppress.