Poetry Is In The Streets: Lessons From The Beat Generation
Words by Sophie Norton
If you’re a hardcore fan of the indie-pop band The 1975, you may have seen the slogan ‘la poésie est dans la rue’ or its English translation ‘the poetry is in the streets’ make appearances across their songs and music vidoes. For me, the catchiest line is from their song Love It If We Made It, where they pay homage to the late rapper Lil Peep: ‘Rest in peace Lil Peep, the poetry is in the streets / Jesus save us, modernity has failed us / And I'd love it if we made it’.
The origins of the French saying: ‘la poésie est dans la rue’ are difficult to pinpoint, but I think it's a general nod to the wonder in the intricate and narrow streets of Paris. The city’s narrowest street is considered to be Rue du Chat-qui-Pêche, constructed c.1540 and measuring 1.8m wide against its 29m length. The street was named after a shop sign depicting a fishing cat, supposedly owned by a local Alchemist.
The phrase is somewhat hopeful, seeming to advocate for unity of the masses. It’s communism in literary form, removing the art of poetic writing from the bourgeoisie and bringing it down to earth in a reclaim of expression and form. I am explicitly reminded of the Beat Generation poets and their anti-conformist values. They were a group of writers who rejected convention and advocated against economic materialism in the immediate era following WWII. They used poetry to convey liberal concepts, expressing the human condition in explicit ways that had not been seen before. It was linguistic freedom in response to the horrors and hostility that everyone had been subjected to, a personal ‘hot take’ on America and its values.
The Beat poets
It was pretty much an all-boys club, with Herbert Huncke, Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, Michael McClure, Neal Cassady and William S. Burroughs at its core. They became labelled ‘bohemian hedonists’, and their public reception gave birth to the subsequent Beatnik culture that infiltrated mainstream media, giving rise to the ‘free love’ 60s and 70s. Beat poetry is raw, unfiltered, and full of reeling sentences that mixed the gritty with the mundane. Conventional rhyme scheme and structure were abandoned, and were replaced with actuality. No sugarcoating, no bullshit. A removal of formal structure widens the scope of what may be classed as poetry, in the same way that conceptualism rocked the art world in the 60s. Beat poems are visceral and pleading, begging a response from their audience, whether through action or a change in thought.
The Beat poets
Contestants for Miss Beatnik, Venice, California, 1959
Let’s go back to The 1975’s lyric, ‘modernity has failed us’. A denunciation of contemporary life is very The 1975-esque, but echoes the same sentiment the Beat Generation had some 60 years earlier; dissatisfaction with the way that things currently are. Poetry has become a form of political change, and this is reflected in the popularity of spoken word and SLAM. Think of contemporary musicians and rappers: George the Poet, Jamila Woods, Chance the Rapper - to name off the top of my head.
There were some women on the scene, present but largely sidelined (in typical historical fashion). Their names were Edie Parker, Joyce Johnson, Carolyn Cassady, Hettie Jones, Joanne Kyger, Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, Diane DiPrima and Ruth Weiss, and they were involved in the movement as much as their male counterparts. Relationships between the poets became messy, with Carolyn Cassady (wife to Neal Cassady) documenting her affair with fellow poet Jack Kerouac, whilst Neal had his own romantic affair with Allen Ginsberg. In 1990 Carolyn had her autobiographical novel published Off the Road, a reference to Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Road.
Neal and Carolyn Cassady with their son John
Lucien Carr’s murder of David Krammer in August 13th 1944, where Kerouac and Burroughs were charged as an accessory and a witness, was the messy and dramatic event that pulled the boys even closer together. The events leading up to this have been documented and fictionalised in various mediums, including the 2013 drama Kill Your Darlings starring Daniel Radcliffe as Ginsberg and Dane DeHaan as Carr. Seven years later, Burroughs accidentally killed his wife Joan Vollmer with a shot to the head - another tragedy that only fuelled his writing. There’s lots to comment on in terms of the group’s dynamic, especially in relation to what Ginsberg calls ‘the essential effects’ of the Beat Generation, recorded and published later, in 1982.
A newspaper spread blaming the Beat poets’ influence on Beatnik behaviour
The Beat poets had a massive influence on a LOT of artistic avenues, including rock and pop music (think: Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, John Lennon). The Beatles were particularly inspired, spelling their name with an ‘a’ to reference the Beat group, and placing Burroughs on the cover of their eighth album: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. There are plenty of writers and poets today that pay homage to the group’s influence, if not explicitly then thematically. Post-war America was an exciting time for creativity, and strands of its influence can be seen almost everywhere in contemporary music, art and writing. If creativity comes after chaos, we must consider the question: in the wake of the 2020 global pandemic, what’s next?
Detail of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover, showing William S. Burroughs.
