Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes in American Poetry

Matt Theado is a professor of American Culture at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies. He teaches courses on poetry, popular music, gender studies, textual studies, and television. His research focuses on the Beat Generation writers. Recently he has written about obscenity and the Beats, particularly in regard to teaching in today’s classrooms; about Jack Kerouac and country music; and about Kerouac’s interactions with Hollywood movie makers in the 1950s. He is currently preparing a scholarly edition of Kerouac’s On the Road.

• Introduction1. “Robert Creeley, Bebop, and the Aesthetics of Alienation”Fiona Paton (SUNY New Paltz)2. “The Typewriter is Wholey: Typing, Time, and the Body in Beat and Black Mountain Poetics”George Hart (California State University, Long Beach)3. “Denise Levertov’s ‘Organic form’, or ‘the inscape of an experience’”John Wrighton (Brighton University)4. “At the Window: Jack Kerouac’s San Francisco Blues”Larry Beckett (independent scholar who published on Kerouac’s haiku in Warner and Sampas’s Kerouac on Record, 2018)5. “Breathing in Ginsberg, Breathing in Black Mountain”Luke Walker (University of Sussex)6. “The Medium is the Message Method: Personism, Spontaneous Prose, & Projective Verse”Tim Hunt (Illinois State University)7. “Literary and Artistic Interactions in the Beat Circle and at Black Mountain College: from Inspiration to Collaboration”Barbara Montefalcone (Paris Art College)8. “‘Imaginatively, Go Trans-Ves’: John Wieners’s Queering of Projective Verse for the New American Poetry’s Second Generation” Eric Keenaghan (SUNY Albany)9. “The Pedagogy of the New American Poetry: The Visionary Educational Practices of Olson, Waldman, and Ginsberg”Eric Mortenson (Lake Michigan College) 10. “Fielding Dawson” Joseph Bathanti (Appalachian State University) 11. “The Janus-Faced American Outlaw: Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger”Kurt Hemmer (Harper College) 12. Buckminster Fuller, Allen Ginsberg, and Technology. Todd Tietchen (University of Massachusetts at Lowell)13. “Two Roads Converged: Kerouac & Creeley, A Literary Friendship”Jonah Raskin (Sonoma State University) 14. “There is a kind of revival you would dig taking place”: William Carlos Williams and a Convergence of Beat and Black Mountain PoetryPaul Cappucci (Georgian Court University) 15. “San Francisco’s The Place, Operated by Stiles and Krikorian, BMC Graduates: Interview and Analysis” Mary Emma Harris (UNC Asheville, Black Mountain College Legacy Research Fellow) 16. “Anthology Landmark: Beat, Black Mountain, The New American Poetry”A. Robert Lee (Nihon University, Tokyo) 17. “Little Magazines and Anthologies of the 1950s: An Overview”Steven Belletto (Lafayette College)

'Grace’s collection contains a range of insightful close readings, astute contextualizing, and inventive lateral pedagogical thinking, charting the transformation of the Beat scene from its free-wheeling, self-help, heady revolutionary 1960’s days to its contemporary position as an increasingly respectable component of the curriculum. [...] The Beats: A Teaching Companion is successful on a number of levels; it is a noteworthy contribution to the ever-expanding field of Beat studies and, more broadly, cultural studies; and it is a collection that at its best gives hope that in referring to its ideas the inspired teacher may still be able to enlarge the lives of his/her students.' John Shapcott, European Beats Studies Network