To the Beat of Her Own Drum: Ladies of the Beat Generation
It's been 62 years since the release of Jack Kerouac’s most notable work, On the Road. His autobiographical novel, inspired by two cross-country roadtrips he had taken, kickstarted an entire literary movement from a group known as the Beat Generation. The essence of the movement rejected conventional society, and favored modern jazz, Zen Buddhism, and the New York City nightlife.
By now, you probably know where to start when reading the Beat Generation's work—try Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and William S. Burroughs’s Junkie, but Kerouac’s influence extends far beyond the original Beats. If you had to name any Beatnik, the core male group may first come to mind: Herbert Huncke, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Lucien Carr, in addition to Kerouac. Recognition of female Beatniks is hard to come by, so we compiled a list of titles by writers that some would call the unsung heroes of the Beat Generation. (Descriptions adapted from the publisher.)
Poetry from Women of the Beat Generation
Loba by Diane di Prima
This visionary epic quest for the reintegration of the femimine was hailed by many as the great female counterpart to Allen Ginsberg's Howl when the first half appeared in 1978. Now published for the first time in its completed form with new material, Loba, "she-wolf" in Spanish, explores the wilderness at the heart of experience, through the archetype of the wolf goddess, elemental symbol of complete self-acceptance.
The Poetry Deal by Diane Di Prima
The Poetry Deal is the first full-length collection of individual poems in decades from legendary feminist Beat poet, Diane di Prima. Framed by two passionate and critical prose statements assessing her adopted home city, The Poetry Deal is a collection of poems that provide a personal and political look at 40 years of Bay Area culture.
Often elegiac in tone, the book captures the poet's sense of loss as she chronicles the deaths of friends from the AIDS epidemic as well as the passing of illustrious countercultural colleagues like Philip Whalen, Pigpen from the Grateful Dead, and Kirby Doyle. She also recalls and mourns out-of-town inspirations like Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Audre Lorde, and Ezra Pound. Yet even as she laments the state of her city today, she finds triumph and solace in her own relationships, the marriages of her friends, the endurance of City Lights, and other symbols of San Francisco's heritage.
All Told by Hettie Jones
All Told adds to the achievement of Drive, Hettie Jones's prize-winning first collection. "Her gift is to paint with vivid words and to cloak her wit with images in such a way that they liner in the mind long after the reading." -Midwest Book Review
Trickster Feminism by Anne Waldman
From celebrated poet and performer Anne Waldman—an edgy, visionary collection that meditates on gender, existence, passion, and activism. Mythopoetics, shape shifting, quantum entanglement, Anthropocene blues, litany, and chance operation play inside the field of these intertwined poems, which coalesced out of months of protests with some texts penned in the streets.
Anne Waldman looks to the imagination of mercurial possibility, to the spirits of the doorway and of crossroads, and to language that jolts the status quo of how one troubles gender and outwits patriarchy. She summons Tarot’s Force Arcana, the passion of the suffragettes, and various messengers and heroines of historical, hermetic, and heretical stance, creating an intersectionality of lived experience: class, sexuality, race, politics all enter the din. These are experiments of survival.
Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet to be Born by Anne Waldman
Coming in the wake of Anne Waldman's vast and magnificent epic,The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment, this volume brings her work into the more intimate, paradoxical folds of poetic (and prophetic) knowledge. This should not suggest that Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born is a book of small things; it is anything but. Juxtaposing lyric arcana, journalism, critical fragments, visions of mythic and mystic beings, narrative, polemics, and even ekphrasis, Waldman has created a work that is simultaneously jeremiad and psalm. It is, then, both fearful and celebratory, an epic of a "time before birth."
Biography and Correspondence
How I Became Hettie Jones by Hettie Jones
Greenwich Village in the 1950s was a haven to which young poets, painters, and jazz musicians flocked. Among them was Hettie Cohen, who'd been born into a middle-class Jewish family in Queens and who'd chosen to cross racial barriers to marry the controversial black poet, LeRoi Jones. Theirs was a bohemian life in the awakening East Village of underground publishing and jazz lofts, through which drifted such icons of the generation as Allen Ginsberg, Thelonious Monk, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara, Billie Holiday, James Baldwin, and Franz Kline.
Missing Men: A Memoir by Joyce Johnson
Joyce Johnson’s classic memoir of growing up female in the 1950s, Minor Characters, was one of the initiators of an important new genre: the personal story of a minor player on history’s stage. In Missing Men, a memoir that tells her mother’s story as well as her own, Johnson constructs an equally unique self-portrait as she examines, from a woman’s perspective, the far-reaching reverberations of fatherlessness. Telling a story that has "shaped itself around absences," Missing Men presents us with the arc and flavor of a unique New York life—from the author’s adventures as a Broadway stage child to her fateful encounters with the two fatherless artists she marries. Joyce Johnson’s voice has never been more compelling.
Can't Stop the Beat: The Life and Words of a Beat Poet by Ruth Weiss; introduction by Horst Spandler
Take a journey into the heart and passion of one of the most brilliant voices of the American Counterculture Movement. While men took the spotlight, women like Ruth Weiss would breathe feminine spirit into the fight for equality between the sexes, the races, and the classes. Celebrated in Europe and under-acknowledged in the U.S., during the course of her life, Ruth Weiss innovated poetry with jazz in the San Francisco North Beach scene of the 1950s with contemporaries Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bob Kaufman, and others.
Denise Levertov: A Poet's Life by Dana Greene
In this illuminating biography, Dana Greene examines Levertov's interviews, essays, and self-revelatory poetry to discern the conflict and torment she both endured and created in her attempts to deal with her own psyche; her relationships with family, friends, lovers, colleagues; and the times in which she lived. This is the first complete biography of Levertov, a woman who claimed she did not want a biography, insisting it was her work that she hoped would endure. And yet she confessed that her poetry in its various forms—lyric, political, natural, and religious—derived from her life experience. Although a substantial body of criticism has established Levertov as a major poet of the later 20th century, this volume represents the first attempt to set her poetry within the framework of her often tumultuous life.
Love, H: The Letters of Helene Dorn and Hettie Jones by Hettie Jones
"It works, we're in business, yeah Babe!" So begins this remarkable selection from a 40-year correspondence between two artists who survived their time as wives in the Beat bohemia of the 1960s and went on to successful artistic careers of their own.
From their first meeting in 1960, writer Hettie Jones—then married to LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka)—and painter and sculptor Helene Dorn (1927–2004), wife of poet Ed Dorn, found in each other more than friendship. They were each other's confidant, emotional support, and unflagging partner through difficulties, defeats, and victories, from surviving divorce and struggling as single mothers, to finding artistic success in their own right.