Oral interpretation of my poem Wolf 359 (click on link for text).
“Wolf 359 is a red dwarf that is
located in the constellation Leo, near the ecliptic. At a distance of
approximately 7.8 light years from the Earth, it has an apparent magnitude of
13.5 and can only be seen with a large telescope. Wolf 359 is one of the nearest
stars to the Solar System; only the Alpha Centauri system (including Proxima
Centauri), Barnard's Star, Luhman 16, and WISE 0855–0714 are known to be
closer. Its proximity to Earth has led to its mention in several works of
fiction (Wikipedia).”
That is the voice and sound of our time – a
member of the so-called Beat Generation dramatically expressing a negative attitude towards
the Twentieth Century. – “Footloose in Greenwich Village.”
The progenitors of the 1960s
“hippies,” beats embodied many of the same values: artistic exploration, a
disengagement from mainstream society, pacifism, gender and racial equality, and an open
attitude towards sex and recreational drug use. Unlike their younger hippie
cousins, beats were generally an older crowd whose members included war veterans and refugees
from the rat race of Eisenhower-era prosperity. Embracing Eastern philosophy
and Socialist economics, beats represented the antithesis of the conformist
middle-class mentality of the 1950s–
and many Americans regarded them with suspicion.
“Footloose in Greenwich Village” (see below) is a short radio documentary produced in 1960 by WNYC FM that takes a look at
the Beat movement by interviewing the diverse inhabitants of the
countercultural enclave in New York City, including young people, Madison Avenue drop
outs, artists, writers, poets, a Village Voice editor, a minister, and middle class tourists looking
for a change of pace from their bourgeois lifestyle. The portraits are
of earnest individuals trying to work out the meaning of their existence in an
increasingly commercialized and homogenized American society. Most interesting
are the segments of poetry read by ordinary members of the Beat Generation,
rather than more notable contemporaries such as Allen Ginsburg. This provides
the literary historian with a grasp on how the artistic sensibilities of the
literati were translated by the everyday beatnik.
While actual members of the Beat
Generation rarely, if ever, identified themselves as such, the media-invented slang word
“beatnik” perfectly sums up much about the beats. Inspired by the launch of
Sputnik in 1957, the word beatnik, to the burgeoning middle class masses,
accurately identified both the avant-garde artistic interests and the leftist
philosophical leanings of the beats.
“Footloose in Greenwich Village” was
included on volume one of the three-disc set The Beat
Generation released in 1992 by Rhino Records. It
is presented below from my personal archives: