And The Beats Go On

- April 11, 2014

The Poets

http://www.citylights.com/ - Ferlinghetti outside City Lights Book Store & Publishing

And The Beats Go On...

Spent last summer and fall with Kerouac and friends, and what a wild trip it was from gritty New York to Denver (where Cassady's Dad is on the bum) to San Francisco (Ferlinghetti's City Lights open all hours), with stops in Chicago for jazz and New Orleans for some low down blues. Across the Rio Grande a time or two and lost in Mexico. Headed up PCH 1 for a rest in Big Sur and moved up to Salinas to sleep among the migrants and the stars, on a western beach under a cliff. Later, in a surreal haze, a journey to Tangiers, with Burroughs, the mad genius, in search of the holy grail of opiates. Then a flight of fancy back to Coney's boardwalk, where my father played as a boy. I sat among drifters, hobos and wild men. I saw my country through the eyes of a generation of children who watched their fathers go from board room to soup kitchen from corner office to war and never home again. These children whose youth was depression and war and victory and the bomb. Why wouldn't they want to push every boundary of the physical and psychic reality. They became seekers from California mountain tops to empty freight cars, finding beauty and sorrow in every place they went. They sat for days and weeks in meditative silence and then they sang out their poetry to the next generation who devoured each stanza, each line, each word. They were the heirs to Whitman, poets of the people. They are spoken of as a marker in time; the mid-century, but they are not fixed in time, they speak to every new generation. As I reached my mid-century, it was time (and high time) to go back out on the road with Jack and Co. and feel the poetic breeze on my face and take a deep breath of freedom and remember that freedom is everything.