Though Ginsberg is dead and Snyder is 70, the Beat movement still has a charisma and a living energy. Its writers professed the ecstatic moment and the revolt of the imagination against the chafing strictures of Eisenhower's America. We'll read Jack Kerouac's On the Road, but otherwise stay with the remarkable poetry of several key writers—Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Greg Corso. Our focus will be the poetry itself—its techniques and themes of liberation and transcendence—and its relationship to American culture of the 50's. The course will include the class production of a performance of the famous Six Gallery Reading in which Ginsberg, Snyder, McClure, and others participated.
