“They Wouldn’t Know Poetry if it Came up and Buggered them in Broad Daylight”: A Review of The Beats and the Academy: A Renegotiation

“They Wouldn’t Know Poetry if it Came up and Buggered them in Broad Daylight” – Review of Erik Mortenson and Tony Trigilio (eds), The Beats and the Academy: A Renegotiation, (Clemson University Press, 2023, ebook/hardback £76),

By Benjamin J. Heal

The Beats and the Academy: A Renegotiation, as part of the excellent Clemson University Press Beat Studies Series, arrives in the wake of the EBSN’s 2021 COVID-affected virtual conference The Future of Beat Studies, and hot on the heels of The Beats: A Teaching Companion(Clemson University Press, 2021), a welcome resource book for teachers that went beyond that remit to consider and reframe the teaching of the works of the Beats in the context of the modern academy. It also arrives10 years after Michelle Martin’s extended review essay “The Burden of Legend: Beat Studies in the Twenty-First Century” highlighted the instability of Beat Studies alongside the enduring popularity of the works of the Beat writers among the general public. In the course of her reviews, Martin highlights a key point in the evolution of both Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac’s literary relationship and the nascent consideration of Beat Studies, noting that “[a]s their careers progress, we see Ginsberg’s controlled attitude towards issues of public taste slacken and Kerouac’s openness to aesthetic criticism turn hostile and devolve into anti-intellectualism.” (161). It is this tension, between issues of public decency and popularity, between the classroom and auto-didacticism, and between establishment intellectual acceptance and anti-intellectualism that forms at least part of the impetus behind Mortenson and Trigilio’s collection, perhaps best captured by Ginsberg’s contentious statement in his Notes for Howl and Other Poems:

A word on Academies: Poetry has been attacked by an ignorant & frightened bunch of bores who don’t understand how it’s made, and the trouble with these creeps is that they wouldn’t know Poetry if it came up and buggered them in broad daylight. (415)

This impetus is tempered by a parallel attempt to resituate Beat Studies as a “formative poetics of the mid-to-late twentieth and twenty-first centuries” with connections to Postmodernism, and as a constructive history of Beat Studies as a nascent element of the ever-expanding discipline of Creative Writing in Western academia. With this in mind, the book is divided into three distinct sections: “The Early Development of Beat Studies as an Academic Discipline”, “Beat Alternatives to the Academic Mainstream”, and “Beats as Teachers: Six Case Studies”. Each section could have been expanded to a book-length study on its own, but splitting the study in three does present a wider aegis of the book’s broader context of intellectualism vs. anti-intellectualism, and allows for a wider contextualization. Indeed, the book is full of valuable insight and important historical detail, particularly given the lack of scholarship on this most perplexing of issues. The big question that scholars of the Beats consistently have to face is, “Why is the academy so resistant to the Beats?” From personal experience, I can recall being discouraged from exploring the works of Jack Kerouac during my PhD research due to the Beats being “inappropriate” for that level of scholarship. Ironically it was receiving Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums as a gift from a teacher that led me down the path to literary scholarship in the first place.

Sections and Chapters:

The book stands, then, as a possible template for future research into, firstly, defining and delimiting what constitutes “the academy” in this context (is the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in or out?), defining and delimiting Beat, and only then considering more broadly the way the academy both absorbs and delimits literary movements, and how movements negotiate their position in relation to academia. Starting with Steven Belleto’s astute “A (Surprising) History of Early Academic Responses to the Beats”, which orients and negotiates a more nuanced relationship between literary scholars and the Beats, framed effectively by a 1958 Brandeis University Club of New York symposium, which invited Jack Kerouac, English “Angry Young Men” author Kingsley Amis and, among others, a Dr. Ashley Montague who looked “just the way the Ladies League thinks a professor should look.” (23). Such fascinating historical notes are matched by some accurate insight, Belleto rightly concluding that “broadstroke accounts of “academia” as monolithically dismissive of Beat writing are inaccurate, and miss the ways the two constituencies interacted and drew from each other” (43).

A. Robert Lee considers the international reception of the Beats and takes the approach of considering the import of Beat writing into the classrooms of the UK and Japan, noting the similar guardedness in the approaches of both nations. Noting the clear fact that despite protestations of “first-thought best-thought” anti-intellectualism the Beat writers themselves were almost universally in thrall to classical learning and most had studied to some level in the university system. Highlights of the early reception of the Beats in UK academia include Marcus Cunliffe’s 1961 dismissal of Beat poetry as “garrulous and inarticulate”, contrasted by Malcolm Bradbury and Howard Temperley’s reassessment of Beat as a “major cultural statement” (50-51). In an erudite manner, Lee marks out the names of Eric Mottram and Jeff Nuttall for special consideration as highly creative members of the academy who made a substantial impact not just by establishing the reputation of the Beats in literary-intellectual circles, but by making serious attempts to disseminate and study Beat works in both literary and academic settings in the UK.

As for the Japanese academic reception of the Beats, Lee makes an important point, that English literature teaching is often treated as an adjunct to English language learning, reductively presented through more traditional biographical readings in a lecture-heavy top-down manner, with active discussion discouraged. For Lee, “in the Japanese context the Beats are presented as something foreign to be mastered.” (56). Noted is a mixed reception to the Beats in academic circles in Japan, although it becomes apparent that the international reception of the Beats is often filtered through academic contexts via translation and a fascination with what Lee refers to enticingly as “allied dissidence” (57). Mixing personal history with well-researched history, Lee’s prose cuts through, and his insight makes up for the slight brevity, noting that in Japan there persists, “a twin fascination with Beat and allied dissidence: counterculture in its own right albeit in a distant land and as a contrast with the country’s patterns of conformism.” (57).

Section Two reverses the stream of consideration from East to West by opening with Reed Bye’s consideration of the aforementioned Jack Kerouac School at Naropa, effectively offering an excursus on the innovative teaching methods employed at the school. A curious institution is described, launched in 1974 by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist. Beat writers were invited in its first summer of existence because they shared a “strong interest in consciousness investigation” (61). The faculty is defined as being outside literary academia – despite “attending to course syllabi, class rosters, and other administrative tasks” (61), in what sounds ironically like a fairly regular academic routine.

Barrett Watten’s offering, “Holism, Antagonism, Proto-Poetics, and Pedagogy Among the Beats”, focuses on several of Michael McClure’s poems to argue that Beat anti-intellectualism and “holism” (that is their insistence on being relevant universally) makes their work of vital importance to the university system today. The problem of how to teach the Beats seems resolved, for Watten, by considering the notion of “open form”, while also effectively relating Beats and Beat works to contemporary issues such as “Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo.” (78). Watten’s chapter does make relevant points about problems in the contemporary US University literary studies classroom, but the specific relevance to the Beats (and extrapolating from the example of McClure), except as difficult, or potentially triggering material seems somewhat obscured. The chapter, and the section’s, concluding remark is that “[w]e need to construct a pedagogy – where reflexivity leads the way – that promotes difference as outcome.” (100). Who “we” are, be it members of the academy or otherwise, in this context, remains enigmatic.

In Section Three, the reader is presented with six “case studies”, accounts of Beat writers working as teachers. Franca Bellarsi’s consideration of Ginsberg repeats many often-quoted considerations of his pedagogic sensibility, including the Blake “hallucination” of 1948, but the close reading of his extensive lecture archive held by the Ginsberg Project and Naropa Library provides a compelling insight into Ginsberg’s particular pedagogic interests. Particularly interesting is the reference to Bent Sørensen’s 2017 paper on Ginsberg’s curricula that questions the Beat writer’s preparedness and academic rigor in teaching (it is a pity Sørensen’s work in this area was not included in the volume). While avoiding any consideration of Ginsberg’s controversial views on pederasty, Bellarsi comes to a similar conclusion as other writers in this collection, by pointing to the relevance of Ginsberg’s “Wordsworth-inflected, elegiac teaching mode” that is resistant to the tendency in contemporary academia to reduce the opportunity for reflective contemplation (126).

Polina Mackay’s insightful assessment of Anne Waldman points to the many identities modern educators must inhabit, with Waldman acting as a fascinating example that directly connects the Beats to academia in a way few other Beats are able to. As Mackay notes, “Waldman’s different identities – as teacher, administrator, or poet – present particular obstacles […] they also illustrate the value of working within the academy” (145).

With another effective case history, Timothy Gray looks at the Beat writer most decorated and accepted by the academy, Gary Snyder. Snyder is framed, alongside his West-Coast contemporaries Lew Welch and Philip Whalen, as primarily and formatively a scholar. An interesting point raised here is a sense of irritation, apparently felt by Snyder, towards those who “think themselves superior to scholarship” (148). Gray makes the observation that when it came to Snyder’s more practical, environmental sensibility, the combination of real-world experience – in this instance his work as a logger on Sierra Nevada trails – with his translation work were mutually beneficial (154). An enlightening quotation from one of Snyder’s students raises another issue regarding the Beats in the academy – that such famed writers had by the 1980s become a draw to many students hoping to learn from countercultural icons such as Japhy Ryder from The Dharma Bums: “The man has a following, but he certainly doesn’t cultivate it […] And I like the way he uses quiet directive questions to skewer nonthinkers busy trying to kiss ass.” (165).

Snyder and the academy, and UC Davis in particular, make strange bedfellows (especially considering the University of California receives funding from the fossil fuel industry), yet the attraction of tenure is made clear by Gray who states that ‘the job provided health insurance, retirement benefits, and the chance to escape his status as “public figure” and “get serious” about writing.’ The implication Gray makes seems clear, that for Snyder the steady income and benefits of the academy trumped not selling out, and that his view is that all work produced outside of academia is in some way “less serious”, and therefore of less value.

The refreshingly nostalgic and personal account of Amiri Baraka’s time at George Washington University presented by Aldon Lynn Nielsen, includes a fascinating encounter with C. L. R. James. Baraka is the only black writer examined in the collection, and his appointment to a university position is presented as doubly problematic, given his status as an anti-establishment Beat-affiliated writer with radical Marxist views. Noting that the position taken was as effectively a writer in residence, as Jennie McKean Moore Writer (1978-79), ironically Baraka would only be on campus Tuesday through Thursday, sleeping in a dormitory room. More a consideration of Baraka as a post-Beat black radical than of Beat academic “renegotiation”, Nielsen highlights Baraka’s radicalism of that time, noting that the department had likely expected a different, more bohemian, cultural nationalist Baraka than the one they got. This sense of the academy blindly going about throwing money at “name” writers and aggressively acquiring archives is something the collection only hints at on occasion, and the suggestion is that the haphazard way universities go about their work of raising profile at the expense of any holistic pedagogic philosophy is at the core of all that is wrong about the contemporary academy.

The final chapter, “Investigating the Pedagogy and Legacy of Ed Sanders’s Investigative Poetry”, co-authored by Nancy M. Grace and Rocko Foltz, focuses on another fringe Beat figure, the hippy counterculture-affiliated poet Ed Sanders, whose pedagogical method “Investigative Poetry” is explained as focusing on the long poem as a form of historical inquiry, requiring exhaustive research. Grace and Foltz deserve credit for conceiving the most radical approach in the book with a chapter that is “a hybridization of the scientific journal style, literary criticism, and non-fiction reportage” (185), which also includes an “investigative” poem by Foltz. As part of their investigation, the authors sent an email to Sanders containing a list of questions about his teaching methods, to which he replied simply with his poem “Losing It” (sadly not included in the chapter), which sets out why after giving up his deep study of the Manson Family he felt that losing that knowledge was a welcome thing. It is amusing to consider that Sanders may be to some extent trolling the researchers here by implying that they are hopelessly lost in their own pursuit of him. More lucid evidence provided from video and audio recordings of Sanders’s 1990s lectures at Naropa unexpectedly shows him as rather a traditional lecturer, albeit with his own style. Further material includes fascinating testimonies and reminisces from former students who either liked or disliked this style.

Conclusions

The collection might have been expected to include consideration about what could or should occur in terms of the future of Beat studies and academic freedoms in general in contexts beyond an American-centric matrix, along with a study on the academic institutions that acquire and manage the archives of Beat writers. There is also a sense of the book being somewhat rushed, with two of the essays, Carla Harryman’s “Why I No Longer Teach Kathy Acker: A Preface” and David Trinidad’s “That Was Allen”, although enlightening and largely relevant, had been previously published. Acker, although somewhat tangentially, has been considered post-Beat, and the issues Harryman focuses on in her refreshingly personal account are highly pertinent to the trigger warning and obscenity debates embroiling Western institutions over the last few years. However, a more direct consideration of the classroom teaching implications, for example, of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch may have provided a more cogent example. The opening of Timothy Murphy’s 2000 essay ‘Intersection Points: Teaching William Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch”’ highlights a problematic point about The Beats and the Academy, in noting that Burroughs’ works, and “Naked Lunch, are rarely taught to students of any level, for two related reasons: their relentless scatology and their nonlinear structure.” (84). This highlights the chasm of difference between the form and content of different “Beat” writers while finding that the content of Naked Lunch is a paradigm case of why the Beats have a problematic role in the academy; their potential to both cause offense and to perplex intellectually – they are works that were controversial on first publication, and often require trigger warnings now.

This collection ultimately brings to light several highly relevant and contemporary issues facing academia across the world right now, as the Chinese state tightens its grip on curricula and US right-wing forces, in thrall to the likely next president Donald Trump, amplify “culture war” attacks on educational institutions, most recently resulting in the resignation of Harvard’s first black president, Claudine Gay, in moves reminiscent of the atmosphere of the Joseph McCarthy era. Have no doubts, this important book shows that the study of the Beats has never been more relevant to the machinations of the contemporary era; the battles for rights were never won outright, they must be defended, with extreme care and vigilance, constantly. The Beats and the Academy is a vital new starting point in such debates, and Trigilio and Mortenson must be applauded for putting this collection together in what must have been trying circumstances during the COVID crisis, although much more work needs to be done in this area.

References:

Accountable Allies: The Undue Influence of Fossil Fuel Money in Academia. https://www.dataforprogress.org/memos/accountable-allies-the-undue-influence-of-fossil-fuel-money-in-academia.

Grace, Nancy M. (ed.), The Beats: A Teaching Companion (Clemson University Press, 2021)

Martin, Michelle. “The Burden of Legend: Beat Studies in the Twenty-First Century” Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Summer 2013), pp. 161-172

Murphy Timothy S. ‘Intersection Points: Teaching William Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch”’ College Literature, Winter, 2000, Vol. 27, No. 1, “Teaching Beat Literature” pp. 84-102

Temple, Emily. “The Night W.S. Merwin Was Stripped Naked by a Charismatic Buddhist Leader” Literary Hub, 30 Sept. 2020, https://lithub.com/the-night-w-s-merwin-was-stripped-naked-by-a-charismatic-buddhist-leader/.

“Is There a Beat Generation? | WNYC | New York Public Radio, Podcasts, Live Streaming Radio, News”. WNYC, 6 Nov. 1958, https://www.wnyc.org/story/is-there-a-beat-generation/.\

Published January, 2024