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Avant-Garde Poetry as Subcultural Practice: Mailer and Di Prima’s Hipsters
- New Literary History
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 41, Number 4, Autumn 2010
- pp. 775-794
- 10.1353/nlh.2010.0028
- Article
- Additional Information
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This essay returns us to the moment when white hipsterism was first being named as a subculture and structure of feeling and was beginning to shape the poetry and prose of writers like Diane di Prima and Norman Mailer. I examine the differences between hipsterism in Mailer and di Prima, hoping to expand overwhelmingly masculine histories of “cool.” I also underscore the influence that new vernacular practices like hipness and camp exerted on American poetry—and U.S. culture more broadly—in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Subcultural practices, I argue, in fact constitute the quintessential avant-garde gesture of the mid to late-twentieth century.