ABSTRACT

Beats. The Beat Movement. How best to re-engage with its one and several measures? How to give fresh eye and ear to a postwar repertoire of verse, fi ction and performance that in its time and place stirred headlines as another America? Admirers, then and still, contend not only for a luminous gathering of literary-cultural energies but life-style in kind, the self unfettered, the spirit freed. To the un-persuaded the Beats will for ever smack of the easy shot, antics more than art, not to say a careerist shrewd regard for the market. Either way, and well over a half-century on from the bow fi rst made in the late 1940, continued into the 1950s, and with an apogee in the 1960s, Beat remains un-erased, nothing if not unfi nished business.