Beat Poetry

This is the poetry of the San Francisco Renaissance of the 50s, reconsidered as literature: Lawrence Ferlinghetti€s lyrical cityscapes, Jack Kerouac€s blues and haikus, Allen Ginsberg€s saxophone prophecies, Gregory Corso€s obsessive odes, John Wieners€ true confessions, Michael McClure€s physical hymns, Philip Lamantia€s surreal passions, Gary Snyder€s work songs, Philip Whalen€s loose sutras, Lew Welch€s hermit visions, David Meltzer€s improvisations and discoveries, and Bob Kaufman€s jazz meditations.

Scholarship dances with poetic intuition and insight. Skip the footnotes, or not. Larry Beckett generates where it's at, cats. €"Dan Barth, poet and Beat scholar, author of Fast Women Beautiful: Zen, Beat, Baseball Poems

I was genuinely knocked-out by [this] book. A generous & insightful work on poets writ w/ a poet's mindful heart. Because of its timeline, I assume (& hope) there will be more. It would seem immodest for me to blast a blurb, but my enthusiasm is genuine & immediate. €"David Meltzer

Larry Beckett's vivid, highly readable testament to the Beats provides a useful introduction to this wild-side school-out-of-school of American poetry, identifying the movement's twentieth century "oral scripture" (to quote his essay on Philip Whalen) as enduring Gospel for the Millennium. €" Tom Clark poet, author of Jack Kerouac: A Biography

Oh sure, it's all these poems by poets whose names sing in our blood as the heart pumps; but it took Larry Beckett to marry ink to paper in such a way that it appears the words are written on wedding sheets. €" Robin Rule poet, publisher of Beckett's Songs and Sonnets

"4.5 out of 5 stars... an intriguing exploration of the history of Beats and their poetry." - Portland Book Review