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From: will.dockery@gmail.com (W.Dockery)
Newsgroups: alt.arts.poetry.comments,rec.arts.poems
Subject: Re: PPB: A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island / Frank O'Hara
Date: Sun, 9 Feb 2025 19:02:19 +0000
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General-Zod wrote:

> Will Dockery wrote:
>
>> Michael Pendragon wrote:
>
>>> Will Dockery wrote:
>>>
>>>> No, Frank O'Hara was not part of the Beat Generation.
>
>>> He was an anti-establishment (read "homosexual") youth living in NYC in
>>> 1951.
>
>>> He sure fits Kerouac's definition:
>
>> Not exactly.
>
>> For starters, here's an actual quote from Jack Kerouac on the Beat
>> Generation:
>
>> https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/149812-the-beat-generation-that-was-a-vision-that-we-had
>
>> “The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes
>> and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of
>> a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming
>> America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific,
>> beautiful in an ugly graceful new way--a vision gleaned from the way we
>> had heard the word 'beat' spoken on streetcorners on Times Square and in
>> the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar
>> America--beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction--We'd
>> even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that
>> way, with a melancholy sneer--It never meant juvenile delinquents, it
>> meant characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were
>> solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our
>> civilization--the subterraneans heroes who'd finally turned from the
>> 'freedom' machine of the West and were taking drugs, digging bop, having
>> flashes of insight, experiencing the 'derangement of the senses,'
>> talking strange, being poor and glad, prophesying a new style for
>> American culture, a new style (we thought), a new incantation--The same
>> thing was almost going on in the postwar France of Sartre and Genet and
>> what's more we knew about it--But as to the actual existence of a Beat
>> Generation, chances are it was really just an idea in our minds--We'd
>> stay up 24 hours drinking cup after cup of black coffee, playing record
>> after record of Wardell Gray, Lester Young, Dexter Gordon, Willie
>> Jackson, Lennie Tristano and all the rest, talking madly about that holy
>> new feeling out there in the streets- -We'd write stories about some
>> strange beatific Negro hepcat saint with goatee hitchhiking across Iowa
>> with taped up horn bringing the secret message of blowing to other
>> coasts, other cities, like a veritable Walter the Penniless leading an
>> invisible First Crusade- -We had our mystic heroes and wrote, nay sung
>> novels about them, erected long poems celebrating the new 'angels' of
>> the American underground--In actuality there was only a handful of real
>> hip swinging cats and what there was vanished mightily swiftly during
>> the Korean War when (and after) a sinister new kind of efficiency
>> appeared in America, maybe it was the result of the universalization of
>> Television and nothing else (the Polite Total Police Control of
>> Dragnet's 'peace' officers) but the beat characters after 1950 vanished
>> into jails and madhouses, or were shamed into silent conformity, the
>> generation itself was shortlived and small in number.” -Jack Kerouac
>
>
> Kool history

Frank O'Hara is always an interesting topic.