Read Whitman:

I.   "The Poetry of The Future" - 1876
II.  Poetics of the New American Poetry pgs 6-7
III. I Sing The Body Electric (section)

A Whitman-intoxicated physician who delivered 2 to 3,000 babies, William Carlos Williams came from a mixed English/Puerto Rican background and spent his entire life in Rutherford, New Jersey. He preferred the phrase OPEN VERSE over free verse, saying that no verse is free, but has lines shaped by the poet's inner rhythms. - THE VARIABLE FOOT - was a clunky term for what he was trying to communicate about form. He did NOT abandon America for Europe as two contemporaries, Ezra Pound and T.S Eliot did. He celebrated the sense of place, seeing beauthy in everything and wanted to: give a voice to his essentially inarticulate townspeople. He urged use of the American vernacular: noble has been changed to No Bull, or as Allen Ginsberg, a direct poetic descendant of both Whitman and Williams said: "Gimme a for instance."

Read William Carlos Williams:

I.   Handout 1 from Six American Poets (Red Wheelbarrow)
II.  Pastoral, page 17 Selected Poems
III. Paterson, page 65

Left his career as a bureaucrat in the FDR administration to become a poet. Was a Melville scholar and his first major work was entitled: "Call Me Ishmael,"a treatise on Melville which begins with the line: I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America…

The person who is credited with coining the term POST-MODERN, he was part of the very influential, experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina, whose faculty included: Robert Rauschenberg; Merce Cunningham; Franz Kline; Robert Duncan; Robert Creeley and John Cage.

In 1950 he published the single most influential essay on poetics in the 20th century, entitled: "Projective Verse." A difficult and rich work inspired by Gestalt psychology, abstract expressionist painting and Alfred North Whitehead, its implications are HUGE for the future of a vigorous, relevant poetry.

Read Charles Olson

I.nbsp;  Projective Verse (selection)
II.  Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 2, pg 5
III. Songs of Maximus, song 1, pg 12-13
IV. Songs of Maximus, pages 16, 22

The Beat Generation: Members of the generation that came of age after World War II as a result of disillusionment stemming from the Cold War, espousing forms of mysticism and the relaxation of social and sexual inhibitions. Or as A.G. put it: "America when will you be angelic? When will you take off your clothes? When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites? America why are your libraries full of tears?" Beat, as in I'm beat. Sick of this paradigm of consumption, competition and domination. Beat as in Beatitude. Michael McClure says the Beats will be known as the literary wing of the environmental movement.

Of French-Canadian descent, Kerouac was born and raised in the former mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, and attended Columbia University on a football scholarship. At Columbia he met Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Known for his novels, including "On The Road," he wrote in a style he called: Bop Spontaneous Prosody. Now we get into the very direct influence of Bebop on American poetry. After all, it was 1946 when Kerouac met Ginsberg and Burroughs in New York, exactly when Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Christian, Bud Powell, Kenny Clarke and other jazzmen were inventing bebop at a club called Minton's Playhouse, with Kerouac regularly in the audience.

In his short essay: "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" Kerouac wrote: "Not "selectivity" of expression but following free derivation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thoughts, swimming in sea of English with no discipline other than rhythms of rhetorical exhalation and expostulated statement…Never afterthink to "improve" or defray impressions…the best writing is always the most painful personal wrung-out tossed from cradle-warm protective mind…

Read Jack Kerouac, from Mexico City Blues

I.   Intro II.   Pages 1, 178, 239, 240, 241, 242

A direct poetic descendant of Blake, Whitman and Williams and the most famous poet of the 20th century, Allen was a tireless crusader for peace, justice and equal rights for, working people, homosexuals & all people. An out queer decades before that was even possible, he believed, like Blake: "First Thought is best in Art, second in other matters." Meeting and interviewing him is why I am a poet.

Read Allen Ginsberg:

I.   Howl, pg 131 Post-Modern American Poetry (small excerpt because of time limitations.)

Now we get into the living and the female, which is important for a talk on OPEN form, as OPEN form is essentially a RECEPTIVE or feminine process. Diane was born in Brooklyn and left Swarthmore College. She corresponded with Ezra Pound and Kenneth Patchen at age 19. Seeing the poem Howl changed her life and meeting Kerouac and Ginsberg changed her conception of poetry. In 1968 she moved to San Francisco and studied Zen. In 1971 she began an epic poem about the sacred feminine as seen as the wolf archetype after a dream of being followed by a wolf. The poem is called: "Loba."

Read Diane di Prima:

I.   Loba, pages 3-6

Born in Marysville, Kansas, raised in Seattle and Wichita, but moved to San Francisco as a young man. He was at the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco when Ginsberg debuted Howl,. He was part of what was called the San Francisco Renaissance and studied with Robert Duncan. I believe his work will be seen as the highest achievement of the Beat writers and will come to be known as the most important American male poet of the 2nd half of the 20th Century.

Read McClure: