LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Beat Generation: New York
built 606 days ago
Di Prima, perhaps the best known and certainly among the most talented of the beat generation poets, captures the heady atmosphere of New York's avant-garde community in the 1950s and 1960s, while rendering her own life with intimacy and grace. Born in Brooklyn in the mid-1930s, she remembers her Italian immigrant grandmother with great affection. But she describes frightening incidents from her earliest childhood: her father, a sullen, brooding, man, once beat her until her nose bled; her relationship with her mother was equally abusive. In elementary school, di Prima was bullied relentlessly; it was not until she entered Hunter High School for gifted students that she found a circle of friends; there, reading the great poets, she resolved to become a poet herself. Leaving Swarthmore College after what she perceived as unproductive years, di Prima returned to New York City, and embarked on an independent life as a writer. She describes her bohemian lifestyle love affairs with men and women, experiments with drugs with honesty and wit.
Source:
Eight months later, Kerouac explained his meaning of "Beat" at a Brandeis Forum, "Is There A Beat Generation?", held November 8, 1958, at New York's Hunter College Playhouse. Panelists for the seminar were Kerouac, James A. Wechsler, Princeton anthropologist Ashley Montagu and author Kingsley Amis. Wechsler, Montague and Amis all wore suits, while Kerouac was clad in black jeans, ankle boots and a checkered shirt. Reading from a prepared text, Kerouac reflected on his Beat beginnings:
Source:
Beat Generation was more-or-less centered in New York and San Francisco, where it was rooted in Greenwich Village, North Beach, and fringes of university neighborhoods across the country. Among so much else, the Beat learned from the Outsider how to create changes in lonely country places as well as foul cold-water flats in cities, which were heated in the winter by filling sinks with hot water - if a sink didn’t leak. In long or short runs the Beat learned it was better to follow yellow brick alleys in New York or San Francisco, because of the otherness in those two places. Walking to the San Remo, the Cedar Bar or the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, it was possible to feel the rumble of the Atlantic, while - in North Beach - between The Place, City Lights or the Jazz Cellar, there was a whiff of Asian air coming off the Pacific. Since change was just a matter of getting up and going somewhere, it was decisive as long as someone somewhere knew where you were.
Source:
Learn about Diane Di Prima, the poet, writer, and teacher from Brooklyn, New York who was one of the most active of women poets associated with the Beat Generation. Sites feature biographical notes, photographs, as well as her letters and poems.
Source:
Student protest movements of the 1960s heralded a new generation that soon replaced the Beats and their issues. Though tied to the Beats in their rejection of the establishment and enjoyment of marijuana, the youth movement of the 1960s generally favored rock music over jazz and film over literature. The mass media lost interest in the Beats as a new bohemian figure emerged: the hippie.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
New York