ABSTRACT

The title of this chapter is drawn from a poem by Allen Ginsberg, “Journal Night Thoughts,” from his key 1960s collection Planet News, a personal diary of a decade’s turbulence and change. The poem is a fractured kaleidoscope of experiences relived, setting down memories in 1964, while under the influence of drugs, of taking hallucinogens a few years earlier-a slight but crucial shift in time, back to an era when the pot and LSD that were about to become recreational panaceas for the many were still the exotic pursuit of the few, these few being the Beats, or whatever term we use to group the ungroupable individualists Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Harry Smith. Degrees of awkwardness hang around all the customary nouns used to group writers and artists of the post-1945 era, and the Beats are no exception. “School” wears connotations of earnest assiduity and following-myleader inimical to their dissidence. Too purposeful in their interventions to be seen as simply Bohemian, far too Bohemian to square with the theoretical rigors of the term “avant-garde,” too diverse and influential to be confined by the term “côterie,” yet too habituated to including each other as figures in their individual oeuvres for it to be wholly inappropriate, their network (perhaps a better word) still eludes critical categorization over half a century after the first publication of Howl, The Naked Lunch and On the Road.1