< Previous page

The rise of the counterculture is a familiar story, detailed in countless histories, memoirs and literary works.

"The Beats and Beyond" breathes fresh life into this saga by exploring it through books, magazines and other materials created by and connected to the period's leading poets.

"We want to help people experience these groundbreaking works like their first readers did," McNamara said. "These objects have an immediacy that transports you back in time, that illuminates subtle facts and connections."

Start with a gem of the collection, one of the few remaining blue-ink copies of "Howl" that Ginsberg mimeographed for friends before the landmark poem was published in 1956.

"Today people publish their own stuff online; back then they had the mimeograph," McNamara said. "They had a real do-it-yourself ethic. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, for example, would type out a poem, go to a photocopy shop, put down 25 cents and leave the copies out by the register for sale."

While stressing that Beat and avant-garde writers did not speak with a single voice -- they wrote in various styles, had a variety of concerns -- McNamara said they formed a loose circle.

"They often published in the same magazines," he said, "went to the same parties, stayed at each other's homes, stole each other's lovers."

Especially in the 1950s, this social network was small enough to seem intimate yet broad enough so that the poets could sense that they were part of a wave. This camaraderie is reflected by the issue of "Jargon" on display.

Published by North Carolina poet Jonathan Williams, it includes works by disparate and far-flung poets including Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Gilbert Sorrentino and Louis Zukofsky.

Fass, the exhibit's curator, said the poets' friendships were not just limited to writers.

"There was tremendous cross-pollenization," she noted, "among artists, musicians, dancers, writers."

She pointed to the library's rare volume (only 20 copies were printed) of Frank O'Hara's first book of poems, "A City Winter," which was published by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York and includes an original drawing by Larry Rivers.

These connections could often produce comic results, McNamara said. One night, for example, O'Hara was reading at New York's Living Theater.

"The poet Gregory Corso starts heckling him," McNamara said. "Then Corso gets on stage and [artist] Willem de Kooning heckles him. Corso starts bragging about sleeping with Jack Kerouac's girlfriend. Kerouac, who was drunk and lying on the floor, gets mad and winds up on the stage reading from [his novel] 'The Dharma Bums.' "

Remove the alcoholic ruckus, McNamara said, and that story illustrates another core belief of many Beats and avant-garde writers: their commitment to the public performance of their work.

"They saw their work as a force for change," McNamara said. "They tried to write it in plain language that people could understand, to recite it when they could in front of audiences."

And so, one of the exhibit's cases features posters advertising public readings.

A public trove

Those are just a few of the materials on display at "The Beats and Beyond."

Other treasures include Robert Duncan's hand-colored copy of one of his books that he gave to painter R.B. Kitaj; a copy of Ferlinghetti's most famous book of poems, "A Coney Island of the Mind," that he inscribed to Ginsberg; the private notebooks of Corso, Creeley, di Prima and Ted Berrigan filled with manuscript poems and jottings and a series of short poems Brautigan published on seed packets.

Although the materials featured in "The Beats and Beyond" are within glass cases, Fass noted that they, and the other 10,000-plus items that form the Wilson Library's collection of Beat and avant-garde, are available for public use.

"One of the goals of the exhibit is to let scholars and other people know about all that we have here," she said.

It is only through people seeing, reading and thinking about these works that the beat goes on.

< Previous page