Were You a Beatnik?

This afternoon I visited Coffee Messiah’s blog and was thrown back about fifty or so years as I listened to Shel Silverstein’s beat poetry.

I suspect that most of the folks who read this blog were born well after the days of the Beatniks, the Beats, or the Beat generation the media sometimes called them. There heyday was the post World War II days from the late 1940s through the 1950s and a bit into the 1960s. Some folks consider the Beats the predecessors of the hippies; I don’t. There may have been some chronological overlap and some shared beliefs, but I believe the Beat generation was unique.

I was too young to be a Beatnik, but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t impressed and influenced by them. They called themselves “beat” (originally meaning “weary,” but later also connoting a musical sense, a “beatific” spirituality, and other meanings) and were derisively called beatniks, who expressed their alienation from conventional, (square) society by adopting an almost uniform style of seedy dress, manners, and hip vocabulary that they took from jazz musicians. They, unlike the Hippies, were apolitical and indifferent to social problems. The Beats advocated personal release, purification, and illumination through the heightened sensory awareness that might be induced by drugs, jazz, sex, or the disciplines of Zen Buddhism.

Beat poets sought to liberate poetry from stuffiness and bring it “back to the streets.” They read their poetry, sometimes to the accompaniment of progressive jazz, in coffee shops and bookstores. Although I was too young to be one of them, I rather consider myself an heir of the Beats. So I’m giving you—old beatnik or not—the opportunity to listen to the “voice” of the Beats, Jack Kerouac, doing his stream of consciousness thing with a work entitled Bowery Blues. with Steve Allen playing background jazz on the piano.

Enjoy!