Beat Poets [Hardcover]

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.Foreword

RAY BREMSER (1934–98)
FromPoems of Madness (“City Madness”)

GREGORY CORSO (1930–2001)
Hello
FromOde to Coit Tower
FromTransformation & 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 lCĪ