Focus: Beat Literature — July/August 2000

Beat Literature

Volume 21 Number 5
July-August, 2000

FOCUS: Beat Literature

Introduction: The Beat Goes On
John Tytell

Go Home Kerouac
John Rocco reviews Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1957-1969 edited by Ann Charters and Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings by Jack Kerouac

The Ginsberg Century: Everything Zen
John Lardas reviews Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952-1995 by Allen Ginsberg and Poems for the Nation: A Collection of Contemporary Political Poems edited by Allen Ginsberg with Andy Clausen and Eliot Katz

Move Over, Herodotus
M.L. Liebler reviews America: A History in Verse, Volume I, 1900-1939 by Edward Sanders

A Little Pea Soup
Ben Schafer reviews Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958 by Jack Kerouac and Joyce Johnson

Beat Legacy
Richard Tillinghast reviews The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and American Culture edited by Holly George-Warren

Dead Fingers Talking
John Tytell reviews Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs edited by James Grauerholz

Missing the Beat
Marjorie Perloff reviews The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry edited by Alan Kaufman

Pathography
Regina Weinreich reviews Use My Name: Jack Kerouac’s Forgotten Families and Jack Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend: The Mythic Form of an Autobiographical Fiction by James T. Jones

FEATURE: Realpolitik

The Road to Excess
Matthew Kopka reviews The Origin of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood

Prince of Peace
Philip Green reviews Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII by John Cornwell

Book Reviews

Shock Art
Charles Krafft reviews Brus Muehl Nitsch Schwarkogler Writings of the Vienna Actionists edited and translated by Malcolm Green

Man of the World
John Frazier reviews Jazz from the Haiku King by James Emanuel

Hype, Buzz, Glitz, and Dumbing Down
Leslie Schenk reviews Encarta World English Dictionary edited by Anne H. Soukhanov

Poems that Melt in the Mouth
Jaclyn Piudik reviews Rocks on a Platter: Notes on Literature by Barbara Guest

Beating Up the Language
LindaAnn Loschiavo reviews Interior with Sudden Joy by Brenda Shaughnessy

The Waltz of the Minotaur
Allan M. Jalon reviews Memoirs of a Minotaur: From Merrill Lynch to Patty Hearst to Poetry by Robin Magowan

The Phantom of Venice
Diana George reviews Against Venice by Régis Debray

The Woods’ Edge
Louis McKee reviews The Mother on the Other Side of the World by James Baker Hall

Over Reaching
Tom McInerney reviews Gods Go Begging by Alfredo Véa

Unspoken Premises
Robert C. Jones reviews Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry by Alice Fulton, A Poet’s Guide to Poetry by Mark Kinzie, and All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing by Timothy Steele

Wisdom Poetry
Corinne Robins reviews The Tablets and Selected Shorter Poems by Armand Schwerner

Tame and Fleecy
Jeff Hamilton reviews Over West: Selected Writings of Frederick Eckman, with Commentaries and Appreciations by Frederick Eckman

The Poet and the President
Michael Hemmingson reviews NixonCarver by Mark Maxwell

Terminal Blandness
Curt M. Seubert reviews The Psycho of Happiness by Scott Campbell

Art and Entertainment
Daniel Garrett reviews Headlong by Michael Frayn

From the Backlist

Brilliant White Shadow
Paul Oppenheimer reviews Songbook: Selected Poems and History and Chronicle of the Songbook by Umberto Saba

Departments

Rants and Raves
Letters to the Editor

Picketing the Zeitgeist
A Dissenting Opinion by Carol Bergé