Women Protest for right to vote Aug 1920. Courtesy: Pinterest
Nancy M. Grace
T
he 25-year period in which Beat developed and flourished in the United States and then spread around the globe—roughly the end of World War II to the beginning of the seventies—is complex, but for women, in particular, this quarter century marks major struggles for equality.
Most of the women associated with Beat were born in the 1930s, so they grew up in an era when women could vote, a right they had won in 1920. With this victory, changes moved relatively quickly along personal and professional spectrums—although marked by steps backwards as well, probably the most well-known being the propaganda effort to pressure women to return to the home after working “male” designated jobs during World War II. But it was predominantly white women who were the target of this re-entrenchment: women of color, many of whom had always worked as laborers and domestic servants, continued to fill those posts.
The newsworthiness of many of the changes was dutifully noted in the New York Times, which has long prided itself on being the paper of national record—“all the news that’s fit to print.” The following, a scattergram overview taken from the Times national and international news, society, and sports sections as well as paid-for advertisements, illustrates the range of strides made (or not), creating a context—beginning with the triumph of voting rights–for understanding the gendered world in which women Beats were born and grew up. The excerpts from the New York Times can be found online via New York Times site map.
According to the New York Times
The Aug. 19, 1920, Times announced with the all-caps headline “Tennessee Completes Suffrage Victory” that Tennessee, after a contentious and prolonged debate, became the final state to ratify a woman’s right to vote. Several months later, on Jan. 31, 1921, the Times ran a two-paragraph report of a New York City minister who included in his sermon a denunciation of young women attending boxing matches featuring brutality and “practically naked men.” The Times reported in Nov. 1922 that Rebecca Latimer Felton of Georgia was the first woman to serve in the Senate, although she would serve less than 24 hours before Walter F. George, winner of the special election, was sworn in. Revolt against passport regulations took place in April 1925 when a group of women refused to include their husband’s names on their passports, petitioning President Calvin Coolidge for support. And in October 1929, Canada legally recognized women as “persons,” although indigenous women and those of Asian descent were not included.
On March 13, 1937, aviator Amelia Earhart audaciously declared that she refused to pack any dresses on her first attempt to fly around the globe, taking “only slacks, blouses, and boots.” Female union members met in October 1941 to rally for equal pay for equal work, and in 1942, as the World War II geared up, the Times ran a help-wanted ad for single (not married) women with access to a car to drive to people’s homes and teach housewives how to use gas appliances. Two years later, the Times touted the fact that French women had finally won the right to vote in a nation they had “fought so bravely to liberate.”
The New York state legislature in 1947 announced that “covenants barring Negroes from realty zones violates liberty,” although redlining continued. When Truman officially declared his candidacy for president in July 1948, he noted the potentiality of having Eleanor Roosevelt as a running mate. In 1952, 32 members of the Ku Klux Klan were arrested in North Carolina for the kidnapping of a ten-year-old African American girl. Readers in July 1957 found a story about New York City’s celebration of Althea Gibson, the American tennis star and first woman of color to win the women’s singles title at Wimbledon. Two months later, Sept. 5, 1957, Gilbert Millstein, a substitute reviewer, praised Jack Kerouac’s On the Road as “a major novel” predicted to become what it became—“the testament” of the Beat Generation.
By Sept. 1960, the gender binary remained firmly in place. The Times deemed worthy of print soon-to-be First Lady Jackie Kennedy’s defense of her clothing budget. The caricature was reified in bifurcated Help Wanted ads: Male and Female, with the “Female” jobs primarily for bookkeeping and other secretarial work, with even a few employers specifying they would consider “housewives” as well.
The tumultuous sixties witnessed the FDA’s approval of the first birth control pill in 1960; the Times reviewed Joyce Johnson’s Beat bildungsroman, Come and Join the Dance, in January 1962, never mentioning Beat, while summarizing the book as a tale of “the lostness and wildness” of youth, which “are merely way-stations along the road of change.” Nineteen sixty-four heralded the Congressional passage of the monumental Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. And in 1969, California became the first state to legalize no-fault divorce, although a lengthy Times article attributed the brash move to the “increasing instability of American family life, particularly in the booming and burgeoning states of the restless West.”
By the mid-seventies, women had won the right to secure credit on their own, Roe v. Wade (1973) federally guaranteed reproductive freedom for women, and Title IX legalized gender equality in institutions receiving federal funds.
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As of June 2022, the US Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, leaving millions of women in some 13 states with virtually no control over their reproductive lives, including victims of rape and incest. Kamala Harris, an African American/South Asian, was elected vice president in 2016. The first African American woman, Ketanji Brown Jackson, was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2022, and women routinely serve in the military, although the draft is restricted to males only. Same-sex marriage is now legal in 31of the world’s 195 countries, with the U.S. legalizing it in 2015, but LGBTQ+ rights are under legal attacks in multiple states, their legal standing precariously tied to the shaky legal reasoning upon which Roe v. Wade was structured. “Wokeness,” meaning becoming aware of social injustices, on both the left and the right, is undermining first amendment rights, the battles for which made Beat writers Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs famous.
Women Beat writers, most of whom came of age between the first and second waves of U.S. feminism, are generally not associated with these important equity milestones, or for that matter recognized as social justice activists. In fact, they were barely recognized at all until the early 1980s with the 1983 publication of Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters, her memoir of the Beat period and her relationship with Kerouac, a book that won the National Book Critics Circle Award and radically reshaped Beat history and criticism. But they contributed to the sweeping changes that many in the U.S. and other countries now take for granted, recording these efforts in novels, poetry, paintings, memoirs, plays, and biography, which also served as a relatively safe space for imagining a more just future for women worldwide.
I have had the honor of interviewing some of these artists: Johnson, Hettie Jones, Joanne Kyger, Elise Cowen, ruth weiss, Brenda Frazer, Anne Waldman, Janine Pommy Vega, Ann Charters, and Deborah Remington. Lenore Kandel had already passed away before I began my research on women Beat writers, as had Cowen, who committed suicide in 1962; Diane di Prima, Kyger, weiss, and Pommy Vega have recently passed away as well. Some for various reasons don’t or didn’t easily identify as Beat, some do. But all were steadfast members of Beat bohemian communities in the fifties and sixties, their work as artists strongly influenced by the Beat milieu which they consciously joined, often in opposition to bourgeois family mores and practices. Most probably did not plan to become activists, recalling as did German-born ruth weiss, a pioneer of jazz-accompanied poetry readings, that having escaped Nazi Germany as a young girl with her family in 1938 she eschewed politics altogether. “But it came out anyway,” she reflected, “from seeing a beautiful road covered with huge advertisements to trying to stop the death penalty and racism” (59). The visions they propagated affirm Beat bohemia’s focus on individual rights, while daring to speak second-wave feminism’s recognition of a woman’s right to her subjectivity coupled with her ability and responsibility to support her female compatriots at home and abroad.
Here, then, is a complementary overview of U.S. feminism from the Women Beat standpoint, if such realities had been considered newsworthy and chronicled in the New York Times. It is written as annotated headlines featuring the women Beats’ own artistic materials and their reflections, most of which come from my interviews with them published in Breaking the Rule of Cool (University Press of Mississippi, 2004), which I co-edited and wrote with Ronna C. Johnson. Additional sources are noted parenthetically. Like articles in a newspaper or news magazine, the annotations vary in length. Again, the overview is not comprehensive: like the sui generis nature of human history, lacunae and contradictions abound. But the representation of activities highlights the commitment to what Martin Luther King Jr. so elegantly called the “arc of the moral universe” on which we travel.
Not Many Women Beat Writers as Best We Know
Ginsberg backtracks, “Where there was a strong writer who could hold her own, like Diane Di Prima, we would certainly work with her and recognize her. She was a genius.” (Boulder Daily Camera, July 1989)
If one looks primarily at mainstream news outlet, such as Life magazine, which could be found in many ordinary American homes mid-century, women associated with the Beat movement were either “hostile little females,” “chicks” who were “often middled-aged and fat,” and/or willing to work full time to support their pseudo-Beat male artist (Paul O’Neil, “The Only Rebellion Around,” Life magazine, Nov. 30, 1959, p.129). They weren’t writers of any kind or integrity. Living according to the Beat Rule of Cool, women were meant to be silent, blend in, become invisible, a variant of the Victorian “Angel in the House,” although this time it was a grungy Beat pad which they shared with their Beat husbands or boyfriends rather than a stately townhouse on the Upper West Side.
Of course, there’s some truth to the stereotype, which Beat writer and historian John Clellon Holmes both reified and critiqued in his novel Go (1952), foregrounding fictionalized versions of himself as well as his friends Ginsberg and Kerouac. But women developing their lives and careers as writers and artists in the Beat bohemian world were there.
Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters, which focuses on rejection of her conventional Jewish heritage and two-year romantic relationship with Kerouac during which time On the Road was published, significantly details her experience as a young novelist. But it was nothing like Kerouac’s, which skyrocketed him into national fame. She remembers writing Come and Join the Dance, “with so much uncertainty. . . I was so scared…I was quite aware that I was writing about things that a nice young lady should not write about” (190). Her focus, influenced by Gide’s gratuitous act, was sex outside of marriage simply “to see what [sex] was about” (190). While Kerouac encouraged her writing, Johnson says that most of her Beat and other friends, including Jones, Cowen, and di Prima weren’t in conversation with her about hers or their writing. From her perspective, her novel, influenced by the writing of Henry James, didn’t seem experimental enough for them to be interested in it. And after its publication, it quickly disappeared from public consciousness. “It was very discouraging,” she recalled, “I’d put so much effort into it and then it all sort of evaporated” (200).
In contrast to the male Beats, the absence of a vibrant and informal writing support group marks not only Johnson’s story, but others as well. Jones wrote poetry, like her well-known husband LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), but it was her “own private thing,” while she used her time and talents to raise two daughters and do the manual labor required to produce Yugen, the couple’s seminal journal of avantgarde writing. She added that it was her own voice “that kept her hostage,” although what she wanted to write about, similar to Johnson’s topics, “women didn’t write about” (168). Cowen, a close friend of Ginsberg’s, kept her writing extremely secret, both Johnson and Pommy Vega remember, Pommy Vega adding that she first saw Cowen’s poetry in Brenda Knight’s Women of The Beat Generation (Conari Press, 1996), a biography/anthology of women Beat precursors, muses, writers, and artists. When she finally dared to show her own poetry to Ginsberg, she felt so disempowered that his comments brought her to tears. Di Prima, too, spoke about the fact that when she left Swarthmore College in 1953 and moved to NYC’s Lower East side “there was no [artistic] community”; she had to forge her own way as a poet, eventually publishing a book of poetry —This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards (Aardvark, 1957). Her hybrid genre book, Dinners and Nightmares (Corinth, 1961), came out on the verge of the full-blown second wave women’s movement laid bare the shape and dangers of the Beat Rule of Cool. Di Prima’s female narrator, in a short prose dialogue titled “The Quarrel,” silently tells her lover what she really thinks: “Jesus…you think it’s so easy. There you sit innocence personified. . . I’ve got work to do too sometimes. In fact, I probably have just as fucking much work to do as you.” . . . . But I’ll get bugged and not bother to tell you and after a while everything will be awful and I’ll never say anything because it’s so fucking uncool about it” (73-74). However, both books were produced by very small publishers and quickly fell into obscurity.
Perhaps the most disturbing, and heart-breaking, experience is that of Brenda (Bonnie) Frazer, whose Troia: Mexican Memoirs (Croton Press, 1969), the intentionally Kerouac-esque narrative of her life on the run with her husband the poet Ray Bremser, was written in virtual isolation while Bremser served time in a New Jersey prison. Unable to recall having any female friends at that time, Frazer remembers that she rarely talked, was extremely shy, perhaps autistic she said, and relied on sexual expression to form relationships. “I don’t mean to condemn myself,” she stated, “many, many other women just focused on [the men] in that period” (129). Troia was not intended to be a published narrative but rather short titillating letters that she sent to Bremser in prison to maintain and repair their relationship. Bremser and Michael Perkins took it out of her hands, arranging the letters as a narrative that was published at Bremser’s insistence in 1969. It was the last writing she did until decades later, most of which has gone unpublished.
None of these writers achieved much recognition until the publication of Johnson’s memoir and then Knight’s book.
But a few seem to have fared somewhat better. Kyger, who rejected the notion that a female poet should be concerned mainly with female identity, was mentored by poets Jack
Spicer and Robert Duncan in San Francisco, and Waldman by novelist Bernard Malamud at Bennington College and later; Ginsberg, Burroughs, and others by then known as Beats; and a nexus of women from NYC such as Diane Wakowski, Carol Berge, and even Patti Smith, grandmother of grunge. Not one to follow the Rule of Cool, Waldman is probably best known for her Beat-inspired list poem “Fast Speaking Woman” (1975). Abstract expressionist painter Remington, one of the founders (and only woman) of the 6 Gallery where Ginsberg debuted “Howl” in 1955 reflected on her developmental years as a period grounded in respect for quality of work: “there was never the concept of ‘we have to have our women quota.’ Nobody cared! If they respected you, they treated you like an equal” (“Inside and Around the 6 Gallery with Co-Founder Deborah Remington,” paper presented at The Beat Generation Symposium, Columbia College Chicago, October 11, 2008). Remington, who studied with Clifford Still, has exhibited her work in dozens of solo and group shows across the U.S., and her art is in major museums including the Whitney.
Johnson, despite the circle of silence in which she wrote and the disappointment of her first novel, continued as an editor and writer, editing Kerouac’s posthumously published Visions of Cody ( McGraw Hill, 1972) and writing several novels about women and Beat bohemia.
Overall, however, Ginsberg’s grudging comment about respect for only women of genius, coupled with long-standing cultural prescriptions for women to remain silent servants for “their” men, has fundamentally shifted blame for failure and obscurity to the women themselves: In effect, implying that they should have worked harder, been smarter, had more talent, talked more, held men accountable, wrote about “womanly things,” and rejected family for art.
Criminal Wife of Beat Poet Announces Solidarity with Prostitutes
“I felt righteous about being a prostitute. I felt what I was doing was more honest than free love” (130).
Bonnie Frazer, the daughter of a Dept. of Labor employee, married Beat poet Ray Bremser in 1959, three weeks after meeting him. They spent most of their time circulating in the Village scene, Ray reading his poetry in coffee shops, Bonnie learning about literature by hearing him read, and the couple listening to jazz records hours on end.
By 1961, they had a baby daughter, Rachel, and were fleeing to Mexico to escape New Jersey prison authorities who were seeking Ray for parole violation. Once in Mexico, in order to survive and support drug habits, they gave up their daughter for adoption, and Bonnie began working as a prostitute.
“I thought prostitutes needed a spokesperson,” Frazer stated. “Given that we were righteous about everything….I don’t know if people experienced it as intensely as we did, being criminals, but it was there. It was an awareness” (130).
Frazer’s life as an outlaw sex worker, which she later recorded in Troia: Mexican Memoirs, foregrounds the troubling reality of sexual freedom for women of the Beat movement—and for many women to this day. Control of her body in capitalistic patriarchy emerges as a tragic myth, revealing exploitation, degradation, loneliness, and the impossible task of trying to align what she described as the Beat act of “grooving” with the “frustration of not being a very good mother.”
Frazer eventually gave up heroin, divorced Bremser, moved on to careers as a dairy farmer and then as a soil surveyor for the Dept. of Agriculture, reconnected with her daughter Rachel (adopted name Darla), and began writing again. My True Stories, which reviews her life from 1959 to 1983, is forthcoming 2022 by the British printing press Death of Workers Whilst Building Skyscrapers. Dalkey Press republished Troia in 2007.
Frazer herself was never charged with or convicted of committing a crime.
Females Dare to Assert Sexuality in Pornographic Art
Sexual freedom, as Johnson’s and Frazer’s memoirs make clear, became a persistent trope in much of women Beat writing. For Johnson, the key issue was the abortion movement: “People don’t realize how it used to be. We can go back to that. You can easily go back to that,” she presciently warned (189). Jones and di Prima also write about having abortions at the request (or insistence) of the fetus’ father, LeRoi Jones in both cases, and the psychological toll that that illicit activity took on them. Pommy Vega, in her travel memoir Tracking the Serpent” (City Lights, 1997), includes a passage that ambiguously describes either an abortion or miscarriage that she experienced: “The tiny red figure had come out in waves of pain, and I had cut the umbilical cord. . . It taught me all I needed to know of the physical universe, tooth and claw.” Di Prima put it even more bluntly: she knew that every time she had sex with a man, she “could become pregnant” (143). If she didn’t want the pregnancy, an abortion would be “one of the unsung, unspoken, ways women risked their lives.” Sexual freedom, in other words, meant the imminent possibility of real death. Jones extends the list of freedoms and equality for which women Beats consciously fought, illustrating how reimagining sexuality for women could lead directly to masculinity, ironically obliterating female altogether: “I’m going to love on my own. I’m going to acknowledge that I’m a sexual being, I’m going to have sex, and I’m going to practice birth control. I’m going to be a responsible person comparable to a man—I’m going to live what is generally regarded as a man’s life”. . . And to wear pants! At my college in the fifties, we weren’t allowed to wear pants.” (160). Since she and LeRoi Jones divorced, she has lived her life as a different category altogether: the sole custodial parent of her two children, supporting her family through editing, proofreading, and teaching. The determination to achieve her independence, detailed in her memoir How I Became Hettie Jones (Penguin, 1990), meant that she also had to face the loss of her middle-class Jewish family, which abandoned her after she decided to leave home for New York City, a circumstance not uncommon for young women of any race or religion who wanted to become something other than a second-class stereotype.
Di Prima used her art to push even further the belief in freedom through sexuality. Her first two books hinted at the possibilities, but it was Memoirs of a Beatnik (Penguin, 1988), the misnomer “beatnik” signifying media sensationalizing and demeaning of the movement, that reveals the complex realities which confronted Beat women. Memoirs, the title of which loosely alludes to Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland, was published by Olympia Press in 1969, a not-quite-underground publisher of pornography aimed generally for men. Di Prima took on the job of writing a pot boiler out of financial necessity, in effect, if not intent, exploiting a mainstream belief in Beat artists as sexually obsessed. The female narrator presents standard genres of male-focused pornography: a cisgender couple having sex, a woman and three men having sex, lesbian sex, a man raping a woman who eventually enjoys the experience, and explicit sexual language (cunt, for instance, appears frequently). The rape scene is troubling for readers who understand the history of women as sexual objects, and in no way should di Prima be absolved of promoting female subordination to male power. But she also uses the theme of women enjoying a range of sexual activities to turn upside down the male Beat theme of going on the road. The single female narrator becomes pregnant, signaled not by a medical test but her body itself: a missed menstrual period and enlarged breasts. “I began to put my books in boxes, and pack up the odds and ends of my life,” she states, “for a whole new adventure was starting, and I had no idea where it would land me” (187).
Like early books, Memoirs uses Black/Beat street language, but also her lyrical Keatsian-influenced proclivities, ultimately avoiding the harsh and real degradations of Frazer’s Troia while daring to do what male writers have done but what “good girls” couldn’t and claiming, most adamantly of all the women discussed in this text, a fundamental sexual/reproductive nature as the sacred grounding of womanhood—one of the major themes of second wave feminist discourse.
Di Prima’s poetry, however, fills in to some extent the hopeful openness of Memoirs’ conclusion. None is more revealingly haunting than “Brass Furnace Going Out: Song After an Abortion,” from Pieces of a Song (City Lights, 1990), in which her proclivity for surrealist imagery expresses the knot of emotions a woman may feel for the loss of a fetus. Not overtly “pro-life,” or moralistic, it’s a personal hymn to what might have been, the cruelty of nature itself, and the testimonial power of language as art.
It was Lenore Kandel, however, whose art pushed to—and through—limits of acceptable expression. In The Love Book (Stolen Paper Review, 1966), she dared to describe and embrace the sexual act in non-separable physical/spiritual detail. Her poetry, as she dared other poets to achieve, never became “the soft, small murder of the soul,” compromised through expediency and hypocrisy (xx).
The Love Book was confiscated in a San Francisco police raid on the Psychedelic Shop in Haight Ashbury and City Lights Books. A jury found it to be obscene, but the verdict was overturned on appeal.
Women Beat Writers Are Mothers Too
Diane di Prima had 5 children
Jones, 2
Johnson, 1
Waldman, 1
Frazer, 2.
Charters, 2
Women Beats Pioneer Interracial Relationships
Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967)
The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State.
The Beat movement, as Remington rightly notes, was primarily white and middle class, so one of its most important contributions to greater cultural dynamics, was the embrace of African American culture, especially jazz, and their willingness to cross other racial divides. Kerouac, for example, wrote in his little-known novel Pic, loosely based on Huckleberry Finn, that border lines, national and others, are simply imaginary—merely, but dangerously, a human illusion. He also devoted two of his confessional novels, The Subterraneans and Tristessa, to his experiences in interracial relationships.
Beat women also accepted the challenge of defying racial boundaries, with Hettie Jones (white Jewish) marrying African American LeRoi Jones, di Prima (white Italian American) having a relationship with LeRoi and a child by him outside of marriage. Other interracial couples associated with the movement included Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor and Bob Grosvenor, Garth and Archie Shepp, Bob and Eileen Kaufman, Elvin and Keiko Jones, and Pommy Vega and Fernando Vega, a Peruvian painter. Frazer’s sexual experiences as a prostitute were also interracial.
These relationships, however, were not always easy ones. Frazer remembered the way in which interracial relationships (sexual and others), or a “brotherhood of black and white,” drove her to consider herself Mexican rather than white: “You don’t really know what your make-up is that way, in dealing with differences, until you’ve lived some place where you’re the minority. . . It was almost as though the people in Mexico are so open to their poverty, or so open to the oppression of being downtrodden or something like that. That’s what I was identifying with, that darkness in myself as, okay, now the worst has happened” (124). Jones devotes a good deal of her memoir to the bias against interracial children that she experienced, and, most damaging for her, the bias within the Black community, which led LeRoi Jones to divorce her because she is white (the other and the enemy). These experiences for a long time led her to restrict her literary presentations of race to prose, while gender centers many of her poems. “I need the space that prose offers to tell the stories that race imposes,” she explained. “I don’t know whether it’s Beat or not, although it certainly grew out of a separation from American fiction in general” (165-66). Examples are Big Star Fallin’ Mama: Portraits of Five Black Women in Music (Viking, 1974), a work for juvenile readers featuring Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Mahalia Jackson, Billie Holiday, and Aretha Franklin; and No Woman No Cry: My Life with Bob Marley (Hatchett Books 2005), which Jones cowrote with Rita Marley. For Ann Charters, Jack Kerouac’s first biographer, growing up in a Jewish family in Los Angeles meant that she came to see and understand racism slowly, but once she did, “race prejudice” offended her and led to her write her first book on Bert Williams, a Black entertainer from the early twentieth century.
Beat Women Get Educated
Maybe the Men Should Too (Okay, Some Have)
Joyce Johnson left Barnard College one credit short of graduating.
Joanne Kyger left Santa Barbara College (later University of California, Santa Barbara) one course short of graduation
Diane di Prima attended Swarthmore College for one and a half years.
Bonnie (Bremser) Frazer left Sweet Briar College after only two years.
Elise Cowen graduated from Barnard College.
Hettie Jones graduated from Mary Washington College.
Ann Charters earned her doctorate from Columbia University.
Anne Waldman graduated from Bennington College.
Beat Writers Promote Prison Education for Social Justice
In keeping with a Beat commitment to alternative forms of education, Hettie Jones and Janine Pommy Vega dedicated themselves to providing writing experiences for men and women incarcerated in New York state prisons. Pommy Vega first became involved in 1976 through a friend teaching at Sing Sing Correctional Facility (New York).
“In a society that loves to cast blame but does not like to assume responsibility for conditions we have created or allowed to exist, perhaps we need to ask ourselves the same question.…In the struggle to make this world a place we like to live in, which side are we on? Janine Pommy Vega, Introduction. Voices Under the Harvest Moon: An Anthology of Writing from Eastern Correctional Facility (1999, 7).
She, in turn, encouraged Jones to join her, the two offering decades of writing workshops for men and women at maximum and minimum prisons including Eastern Correctional Facility (New York), Bedford Hills (New York), Folsom Prison (California), and Riker’s Island’s women’s unit (New York).
Many of the participants had their work published in anthologies, such as Voices Under the Harvest Moon (Segue Books, 1999) and Aliens at the Border (Seque Books, 1997), edited by Pommy Vega and Jones, respectively.
“The Workshop is an outlet for feelings, of course, but it doesn’t stop there. Though we recognize and do not exclude a history, this is not a collection of prison writings. We work on this work,” Jones wrote in her introduction to Aliens. “I bring an exercise, examples, an idea—but that’s only the beginning. As a teacher of writing, I focus hard on craft. It takes the pressure off. Making a poem or story better is a challenge. It does indeed take you somewhere,” she concluded (1).
Or, as the initial and anonymously written poem, asks, “Don’t we deserve our dreams / our hard born words / labor of our lives?” (3).
Poet Allen Ginsberg and Two Women Beat Writers Start School in Colorado
In 2024, Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, will celebrate its 50th anniversary. Founded in 1974 by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the institution is named after the 11th-century Buddhist scholar Naropa and is based on Nalanda University, a Mahayana-Buddhist school existing in India from the 5th through 12th centuries.
Today, according to Naropa’s website, students choose from 10 majors and 11 graduate programs, with studies ranging from Buddhism, counseling psychology, religious studies, elementary education, yoga, Sanskrit, to ecopsychology, art therapy, and others. Total enrollment in 2022 was 852 with approximately 70 percent female; tuition and fees is $34,000 per year, but financial aid is available. It has been accredited by the Higher Learning Commission since 1986.
But it’s Naropa’s writing program that has generated the most interest and placed Naropa in the vanguard of American and international poetics.
Named The Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics, the program began as a Summer Institute founded by poets Waldman, di Prima, and Ginsberg as well as composer John Cage. Waldman still directs the summer sessions, known as the Summer Writing Program, which has hosted writers including Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Amiri Baraka, Philip Whalen, Robin Glasser, Ed Sanders, Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnell, John Ashberry, Robert Creeley, and Lynn Hejanian.
In a 2013 interview with John Whalen-Bridge for the Journal of Beat Studies, Waldman explained that the “Disembodied” part of the name was hers: “I threw in the word disembodied because we didn’t have a site, a desk, a building, stationery, a telephone, finances, or the usual accoutrements to be a school. But we did have a vision and a view, and a community of our own experiences to draw on” (45).
That vision included wariness of institutions, deadlines, requirements, and the language of advertising, all balanced by a commitment to finding effective structures to bring neophyte poets into creative conversation with their elders. Waldman, now the only surviving founder of the program and having seen Naropa and the Kerouac School move steadily toward standardization, still strongly believes in its core mission. “Even if it never achieves Ivy League status,” she said, “there is still more need now for a place such as this in a world that has grown darker in myriad ways. . .To act with care, kindness, and compassion. But with intellect and discriminating. …to be innovative, inventive with language, and to honor our predecessors who struggled with form, with genre, with imagination, with a world gone mad with war” (44).
Beat Women Follow in Footsteps of Earlier Women Travelers
Women’s travel narratives have never received the attention and respect that have men’s stories of exploring and conquering the world, but it would be naïve to believe that human females were not traveling long before recorded history. And by the 19th and 20th centuries, as technology made travel more accessible, Western women had been writing and publishing about it. Some, such as Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904), traveled throughout North Africa, converted to Islam, dressed as a man, and sought sexual as well as spiritual adventures, which she recorded in her diaries, published as The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt. Similarly, Travels with Myself and Another by journalist and fiction writer Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) narrates her work covering the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the war in Nicaragua, sometimes alone and sometimes with her husband of ten-years, Ernest Hemingway. Women of mid-twentieth century Beat culture embraced much of this adventuresome spirit, continuing the legacy of women travel writers. Two, especially, the poets Pommy Vega and Kyger, deserve attention.
Pommy Vega, author of Poems to Fernando (1968), her lyrical homage to her deceased husband, went in a different direction with Tracking the Serpent in 1997, in form a conventional travel narrative of her journeys to find female spiritual and temporal power. A habitual hiker, despite living with atrial fibrillation, Pommy Vega devoted two years to creating Tracking to record and reflect on her twelve years of hiking and journal keeping from the Catskills of New York state, to Ireland, Paris, the Amazon, and the mountains of Nepal, a quest that began as a search for what she recalled as “the bohemian life style of readings, museums, parties and intellectual discussions” and was transformed into a shamanic “threading the maze,” or a life-long pilgrimage in search of “the Mother,” or “the source of power [that] resides in the interstices between one world and another” (3, 10).
The narrative focuses on her search to learn, not to conquer, to become a better person with spiritual insights, to employ drugs and sexuality to test one’s human limits. Why was she there? What was her responsibility to the land and its varied peoples, to herself? She accepted advice from locals about the danger of a woman traveling alone, joined local guides, wore skirts if the culture called for it, and challenged herself to accept and learn from natural environments, especially the rivers of the Amazon, that terrified her.
“Flow, don’t push,” the world around her, land and animal, told her, and repeatedly, like a Buddhist practitioner, she realized that “the land … shaped how I learned and what [she] gathered, “The pilgrimage require[ing] effort; the effort serv[ing] to remove the obstruction” (110). Reflective discourse in the narrative can be read as minimal or, as Pommy Vega described it, as “exactly proportionate to what is going on,” the act of writing allowing her to recreate the person she had once been, rather than the one she had become (252).
When Ginsberg and his partner Peter Orlovsky traveled to India in the sixties, they didn’t ask Pommy Vega to go with them. Did she want to go? Absolutely. “Was I invited,” she remembered. “No. They told me …I was going to stay and take of Lafacadio [Orlovksy, Peter’s brother].” Like his retrospective apology in support of women Beat writers in general, Ginsberg later told that her that he “was just being really self-involved,” she recalled (253).
Pommy Vega kept journals, upon which she relied to write Tracking, and so did Kyger, but the latter’s travel art takes distinctly different form, elevating the journal into a legitimate genre of art. Her Japan and India Journals (1981) record her travels with then-husband poet Gary Snyder to Japan and then to India to visit Ginsberg and Orlovksy in the early 1960s. Kyger’s collection, reissued as Strange Big Moon (2000), is not a conventional reflective narrative of travel but rather responses to travels, a daily display of wit and sarcasm to the sentient world. The stories she tells, in small, often dream-like fragments as experimentation and practice with poetic form, reflect struggles with major East-v-West cultural differences as she shapes herself as an artist, a student of Zen Buddhism, and an independent woman. The volume not only claims the quotidian as art but also aligns her with other women Beat practitioners—including Diane di Prima, Deborah Remington, and Anne Waldman—seeking authentic human experience through Asian cultures.
Closer to home, Mexico emerges as the focus of Kyger’s travels, documented in what travel chapbooks that constitute an assemblage of experiences of the moving mind or, interestingly, of the self as motion, fixated on the problem of discovering what benefits travel truly affords. Representative is Pátzcuaro (Blue Millenium, 1999), named for the colonial city and the ancient mountain home of the Purapecha people and a place where for over a decade Kyger and her partner, the writer Donald Guravich, spent months at a time. Material for the book was written during winter1997-98. The entries in the volume are bound by a speaker always aware of her status as a “white gringo,” an outsider attempting to understand the place and people both in and out of time. She tells stories of the city’s birth, its conquest by the Spaniards, the detritus (plastic spoons) of capitalistic culture, the slaughter in Dec. 1997 of 45 indigenous people, the presence of the avatars of the Goddess and Virgin Mary, and the lurking presence of the poet herself, “remembering her heart / back in a room in a book” (16) The traveler, as is typical of such narratives, concludes with a return home, in this case, Bolinas, California, on the western edge of the contiguous 48 states, where the poet finds a “studio / not slurped away by a subpocket / of suction hell,” a material space marked by photographs of her younger self, still there, perhaps the poem mutely suggests, like the ghostly ancestors of the Purapecha themselves.
Beat Sisterhood Outlasts the Men
“Maybe there was an advantage to the fact that we didn’t hang together all the time,” Bonnie Frazer speculated about the positives of not having as “female gang” analogous to the Beat “boy gang.” “Maybe we had the advantage—the isolation that all of us experienced as women. Maybe in some ways it was formative in that we were able to retain some [of our own] characteristics” (119). Perhaps Frazer is on to something, the ways in which isolation can reveal and forge character, can force one to draw upon inner resources that will eventually strengthen, rather than diminish the individual. That too is part of the Beat romantic bohemian mythos, and the reality of the many forms of creativity.
But there’s a wistfulness in Frazer’s thinking on the matter, an almost whispery confession that female friendship might have made a genuine difference in her life. And that acknowledgement of the importance of sisterhood—not the old school band of hazing and black-balling but the second wave emergence of consciousness connecting, of sharing struggles and victories, of claiming a place in the world of women (the personal is the political)—remained central to women Beat artists whose bonds of sisterhood far outlasted those of the “boy gang.”
Sisterhood takes numerous shapes in women Beat writing, ranging from ruth weiss’s 1959 Gallery of Women, a collection of poems in honor of women artists who influenced weiss’s development of a poet, and her 1997 For These Women of The Beat, haiku-esque poems narrating a story about women featured in Knight’s book; to Waldman’s Fast Speaking Woman (City Lights, 1975), her performance chant inspired the Mexican shaman Maria Sabina, to di Prima’s Loba (Wingbow,1978; Penguin 1998), her long poem cycle dedicated to female goddess mythology and its myriad metaphysical and physical manifestations. weiss’s poems function to reveal direct lines of artistic female lineage in her own life, from Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and Billie Holiday to contemporaries such as Elise Cowen (“ some flew the coop with broken wing / and crashed”), Brenda Frazer (“the path is stones / the foot is blood / but oh such blooms along the way”), Pommy Vega (“some flew the coop / into the wild / and did not crash” and Waldman (“some flowed easy into the stream / the influenced becomes the influential / a natural progression”). She even writes her own story (“sound a new view of matter / an ancient one regained”), merging with all the others to create a long unbroken female line (These Women of The Beat, in A Parallel Planet of People and Places, Zirl, 2012; 18, 24, 22, 25, 23, respectively). Waldman and di Prima’s poems both address the perceived reality of this archetypal woman, an unfolding and re-unfolding, as in the retelling of the myth of the she-wolf Loba resurrected from her scattered bones. Loba introduces the goddess as Beat sisters in Greenwich Village and San Francisco, who then morph through female figures from the Bible, Greek mythology, Buddhist and Hindhu traditions, and Gnostic gospels.
In their lives outside the printed page or the performed production, women Beat artists created female friendship that endured far beyond the notoriety of the Beat Generation, despite their lack of writing support, like the friendships and collaboration of Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, and Janine Pommy Vega. Di Prima routinely held women-only writing workshops, and Waldman has consistently supported her Beat friends, integrating Kyger, di Prima, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, and others into the Kerouac School’s Summer Writing Program, providing them opportunities to teach but also airfare and lodging. Her generosity has extended as well to younger female scholars, such as the author of this essay along with her writing partner Ronna C. Johnson, who Waldman hosted twice as guest speakers at the Summer Writing Program.
However, if one truly wants to understand the nature and power of Beat female friendship, it’s the collected letters of Hettie Jones and Helene Dorn, Love, H (2016), that provides the fullest articulation of what sorority and feminism can mean. Their 40-year friendship lasted until 2004, when artist Helene Dorn passed away. During that time, in letters, postcards, and emails, they bolstered each other through abject poverty and illness, writing with humor to counter the realities of aging in America, and always encouraging each other’s art, education, and life with family. Their story, like that of so many ordinary women, ultimately affirms the women Beat mission of rendering through language the lines of ancestry and descent upon which we all exist.
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Nancy M. Grace is the Virginia Myers Professor of English (emerita) from The College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. She has written extensively on Beat authors, particularly the women writers, and is also an authority on the literary works of Jack Kerouac.
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