HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Oct 3, 2018
Beat poets performing or marching at political rallies and protest is a familiar snapshot of the ... more Beat poets performing or marching at political rallies and protest is a familiar snapshot of the countercultural 1960s and 1970s. A prelude to the Summer of Love, the San Francisco Golden Gate Park Human Be-In of January 14, 1967, ushered by Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure, might be considered as the prototype for most the 1960s countercultural festivals and celebrations. This paper will approach beat activism and the role of (poetry) performance as partaking in building community and inspiring social changes. Focus will be placed on the various poetic forms these Beat poets performed at the Human Be-In, on how the incorporation of mantra-chanting and poetry reading sought and contributed to address political, ecological and cultural issues while raising the possibility of fostering social bonding and communal power, and on how these poets conceived of the function of the poet and the sense of community. An analysis of the different performative poetics summoning, conveying and building up a sense of (countercultural) community will allow reconsidering the very idea of community through the transformative action of poetry performances, and the vision of the poet as a shamanic figure.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Oct 3, 2018
Beat poets performing or marching at political rallies and protest is a familiar snapshot of the ... more Beat poets performing or marching at political rallies and protest is a familiar snapshot of the countercultural 1960s and 1970s. A prelude to the Summer of Love, the San Francisco Golden Gate Park Human Be-In of January 14, 1967, ushered by Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure, might be considered as the prototype for most the 1960s countercultural festivals and celebrations. This paper will approach beat activism and the role of (poetry) performance as partaking in building community and inspiring social changes. Focus will be placed on the various poetic forms these Beat poets performed at the Human Be-In, on how the incorporation of mantra-chanting and poetry reading sought and contributed to address political, ecological and cultural issues while raising the possibility of fostering social bonding and communal power, and on how these poets conceived of the function of the poet and the sense of community. An analysis of the different performative poetics summoning, conveying and building up a sense of (countercultural) community will allow reconsidering the very idea of community through the transformative action of poetry performances, and the vision of the poet as a shamanic figure.
Beat poets performing or marching at political rallies and protest is a familiar snapshot of the ... more Beat poets performing or marching at political rallies and protest is a familiar snapshot of the countercultural 1960s and 1970s. A prelude to the Summer of Love, the San Francisco Golden Gate Park Human Be-In of January 14, 1967, ushered by Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure, might be considered as the prototype for most the 1960s countercultural festivals and celebrations. This paper will approach beat activism and the role of (poetry) performance as partaking in building community and inspiring social changes. Focus will be placed on the various poetic forms these Beat poets performed at the Human Be-In, on how the incorporation of mantra-chanting and poetry reading sought and contributed to address political, ecological and cultural issues while raising the possibility of fostering social bonding and communal power, and on how these poets conceived of the function of the poet and the sense of community. An analysis of the different performative poetics summoning, conveying and building up a sense of (countercultural) community will allow reconsidering the very idea of community through the transformative action of poetry performances, and the vision of the poet as a shamanic figure.
La présentation revient sur cinq photos immortalisant diverses lectures publiques d'Allen Ginsber... more La présentation revient sur cinq photos immortalisant diverses lectures publiques d'Allen Ginsberg afin d'interroger le rapport de la lecture performance à la construction de la Communauté.
Following in the line of a research in progress about two mourning poems, “Kaddish” by Allen Gins... more Following in the line of a research in progress about two mourning poems, “Kaddish” by Allen Ginsberg and “The Coral Sea” by Patti Smith, and the links between poetry, performance, mourning and identity in these poems, this presentation focuses on the former, “Kaddish.” Firstly, going back to the role of music (Ray Charles Blues, the fugue, Jewish liturgical chant, etc.) in the composition process of the poem -- as source, model, and line base -- to wonder to what extent Ginsberg’s speech-rhythm prosody is a method of notation. Secondly, exploring the oral performance of the poem as the development of “an extreme rhapsodic wail.” Among his poems, “Kaddish” was probably one of the less read or performed, perhaps because of its intimate reference to family matters and an act of mourning the memory of his mad mother, perhaps also because in the poem the poet had publicly exposed himself, his memories, his history, his being. Therefore, this presentation also explores the issue of reading the poem to an audience over time and space to examine how its different readings help dig into its acoustic soundscape to explore the link between rhythm and intonation and their meaning-enhancing effects and between tone and volume as an index of the vocalizer-poet’s state of mind over the different readings. Comparing these readings will also help show how gradually they deal differently with informational and emotional saliency, and reveal how over time they have partaken in a process of voicing out memories, mourning a loss, performing the mourning ritual, memorializing the subject and archiving the poem.
1957 is a turning point in Kerouac’s career. Seven years have gone by since his first novel The T... more 1957 is a turning point in Kerouac’s career. Seven years have gone by since his first novel The Town and the City had been published and twelve more years before his untimely death in 1969 at the age of 49. Most of the Duluoz Legend had already been written when he sailed for Tangiers to join Burroughs and help him on the Naked Lunch manuscript.
There are many key cities in Kerouac’s life and work, but Tangier seems to be of a very different sort. First, unlike many of these cities Kerouac and the Beats have helped popularize, Tangier at least in Kerouac’s case is a city of passage, as Kerouac will only stay there for less than three months’ time to never come back. The Tangiers experience will not be as positive and as fulfilling for Kerouac as for the rest of the Beat group who travelled and stayed there. It can be seen as the beginning of a growing sense of downfall, despair and disillusionment that will gradually be the imprint of Kerouac’s later works.
Tangier can thus be read in absentia as perhaps eventually some kind of catalyzer confronting Kerouac to dark visions and isolating or demarcating him from the rest of the group. Yet, the Tangier experience was definitely a distinctive, fertile and revealing one (no matter what was revealed) as the letters, short stories (“Big Trip to Europe”), novels or interviews show.
I would like then to focus on the above mentioned corpus of texts and paratexts to try to question Kerouac’s visions of Tangier and analyze the experience, collaboration and revelations that Kerouac shared and discovered there to see how the city might perhaps be interpreted as another rite of passage in Kerouac’s Beat Generation experience.
édition et traduction française de la correspondance d’Allen Ginsberg (The Letters of Allen Ginsb... more édition et traduction française de la correspondance d’Allen Ginsberg (The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, Allen Ginsberg and Bill Morgan, Da Capo Press, 2008), Éditions Gallimard, collection Du monde entier
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There are many key cities in Kerouac’s life and work, but Tangier seems to be of a very different sort. First, unlike many of these cities Kerouac and the Beats have helped popularize, Tangier at least in Kerouac’s case is a city of passage, as Kerouac will only stay there for less than three months’ time to never come back. The Tangiers experience will not be as positive and as fulfilling for Kerouac as for the rest of the Beat group who travelled and stayed there. It can be seen as the beginning of a growing sense of downfall, despair and disillusionment that will gradually be the imprint of Kerouac’s later works.
Tangier can thus be read in absentia as perhaps eventually some kind of catalyzer confronting Kerouac to dark visions and isolating or demarcating him from the rest of the group. Yet, the Tangier experience was definitely a distinctive, fertile and revealing one (no matter what was revealed) as the letters, short stories (“Big Trip to Europe”), novels or interviews show.
I would like then to focus on the above mentioned corpus of texts and paratexts to try to question Kerouac’s visions of Tangier and analyze the experience, collaboration and revelations that Kerouac shared and discovered there to see how the city might perhaps be interpreted as another rite of passage in Kerouac’s Beat Generation experience.