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chapter 4 Beat Acoustics, Presence, and Resistance The poetry which has been making itself heard here of late is what should be called street poetry. For it amounts to getting the poet out of the inner esthetic sanctum where he has too long been contemplating his complicated navel. It amounts to getting poetry back into the street where it once was, out of the classroom, out of the speech department, and—in fact—off the printed page. —lawrence ferlinghetti For me, reading aloud brings the words off the page. My voice is the key instrument in this act. The voice is the character or characters—all the personae and deities. —anne waldman The poets of the beat generation had their ears to the ground, too, keenly aware of the history of public performance poetry unrolling toward them, a history in both black and white. In an early draft of his poem “America” (the same title as the poem of Whitman’s on wax cylinder ), Ginsberg unabashedly announces his paternity: “I Allen Ginsberg Bard out of New Jersey take up the laurel tree cudgel from Whitman.”1 Other poets have invoked Whitman as ancestor as well, perhaps most famously Ezra Pound, who in “A Pact” hails him as his “pigheaded father,” but whereas Pound imagines his resistance to Whitman, and ultimate accommodation , in terms of the free verse line, Ginsberg frames Whitman as an oral public poet (“Bard”) and reads him as part of a counterpublic sphere (with his “gay gang” at Pfaff’s beer hall in New York’s Bowery district ) that ties into his own sexual politics. Ginsberg ‹nds especially prescient Whitman’s lyric “Poets To Come,” what he calls “a little poem or song to his fellow poets that would be born after him, that, like myself, will sit in a recording studio reading his words aloud to be heard by ears through some kind of movie/television/theater.”2 With the mediatiza124 tion of the spoken word, Ginsberg is able to disseminate Whitman’s poems to mass audiences about which Whitman could only dream. Like Ginsberg, for whom Whitman is “so enormous-voiced,” beat poet Gary Snyder understood Whitman principally as a social agent, ‹nding his audibility to be a bonding agent in intimate live settings: “I love to read ’em [Whitman’s poems] aloud, to a small audience. He’s a good communal poet in that way.”3 Ginsberg also traces his poetics of performance through Lindsay. In “Improvisation in Beijing,” he recounts that from early childhood Lindsay was in the air: “I write poetry, because my father reciting Shelley English poet & Vachel Lindsay American poet out loud gave example—big wind inspiration breath.”4 In 1958, fellow poet Gregory Corso gave Ginsberg a copy of Lindsay’s Collected Poems to cheer him up after he found out that another friend, Neal Cassady, was headed to jail.5 In a footnote to his taperecorded poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” Ginsberg glosses his own gloss of Bryan (“William Jennings Bryan sang / Thou shalt not crucify mankind upon a cross of Gold”) with a passage from Lindsay’s chant-poem “Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan” (CP, 397, 776). Ginsberg also notes the achievement of “The Congo,” which, though “corny” as anthropology, he judges to be “one of the most interesting poems written in America,” a poem that is “completely on rhythmically,” citing Lindsay as “an early Allen Ginsberg of American poetry,” an artist who made “attempts at a social poetry.”6 Years after Lindsay’s death, Ginsberg paid his respects in an elegy (“To Lindsay”) that recognizes the struggle as a public poet he underwent: In the poem “the radio blares its jazz” to a “heartbroken” man in the act of killing himself, already reduced to a “shade” as he does so (CP, 183). In his 1949 essay “On Spoken Poetry,” the San Francisco poet Jack Spicer, a contemporary of Ginsberg, also re›ects on the lesson of Lindsay, noting that “Thirty years ago Vachel Lindsay saw that poetry must connect itself to vaudeville if it was to regain its voice. (Shakespeare, Webster, and Marlowe had discovered this three centuries before him.) Our problem today is to make this connection, to regain our voices. . . . We must become singers, become entertainers.”7 In the populist manifestos (1981), Lawrence Ferlinghetti harks back to the spoken word artists who paved the way to the beats, focusing on the distance between the “pure” voice (i.e., the perceived truth-bearing quality of the un...

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