Beat Soundtrack #4: Marc Zegans
In which prominent Beat figures, writers and critics, historians and academics, fans and followers, talk about the relationship between that literary community and music
Marc Zegans is a California poet. His recent collections include The Snow Dead (Cervena Barva Press, 2020) and Swizzle Felt’s First Folio from the Typewriter Underground (Pelekinesis, 2019). Marc regularly contributes verse to immersive theatre productions, is the author of many short films and was a happy contributor to Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack (Bloomsbury, 2018).
What attracted you to the Beats? When did you first encounter them? Do you have a favourite text, novel or poetry?
I was innately drawn to countercultures, and to the energy, autonomy, and freedom the Beats represented. This was of particular importance to me during part of my childhood when I was living in a rather socially constrained Connecticut town that I called ‘Hemmed In’. I’d also moved around a lot as a kid. It was difficult for me, and the Beat’s glamorisation of constant movement gave me a cool way to reconcile my experience.
My first encounter with the Beats was at a low shelf on a badly broken bookcase in my father’s study. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor looking for books I wasn’t supposed to read when a cheap paperback copy of The Subterraneans with an introduction by Henry Miller, fell off the shelf – a perfect Jungian synchronicity. Its crudely rendered cover emblazoned with a bright yellow teaser quote from the San Francisco Examiner was immensely seductive.
Shelved next to the slot from which The Subterraneans had fallen was a copy of The Dharma Bums. That one had a gaudy cover hailing Kerouac as the author of On the Road. I pulled that out too (A poem I wrote called ‘Whitneyville’ speaks to this encounter). Next to The Dharma Bums was an anthology called The Beats edited by Seymour Krim, I loved the overheated book description on the cover: ‘Raw penetrating, stories, poems, and social criticism by Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and many others.’
As I learned later, including Mailer in the mix was more than a reach. It signalled also how few were the actual Beats. While William Burroughs was grouped with them because he was part of their social circle, his work, to my mind wasn’t Beat.
I encountered the Beats in a fuller, more structured way during an independent study in high school with a kind and brilliant teacher, Fran Bennett. Under her tutelage, I spent a term comparing the histories, motives, method and writing of the Beats with their Lost Generation predecessors. Candidly, I much preferred the Beats. While I appreciated Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and truly loved The Old Man and the Sea, they didn’t speak to me directly in the way that the Beats did. It was during this study that I read A Coney Island of the Mind and Kaddish and Other Poems, as well as On the Road.
This was the first time I read poetry from a place of genuine interest. I loved Ferlinghetti’s broken lines and the musicality of his verse. As someone who, as a small child, had spent time on the rides, on the boardwalk, on the sand and in the water at Coney Island, I felt a visceral connection to Ferlinghetti’s poetry. ‘Kaddish’, written as Ginsberg’s mourning prayer for his mother Naomi, a woman who had suffered severe mental illness, was a challenge for me, but a welcome one. I appreciated his appropriation of the name of a ritual prayer vital to the passing of loved ones in the Jewish tradition.
The informality, range, and jumbled imagery of the first section of Ginsberg’s poem contrasts so sharply with the Hebrew mourner’s prayer, which sets forth a series of petitions to God in sonically repetitive, rhythmic verse whose vocal expression entrains mourners in the self-soothing rocking of the devout davener – ‘Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba…’ The blessings in Ginsberg’s ‘Kaddish’ come later, a unfolding desperate ranting litany that, like its source prayer, seeks solace in repetition,
Blessed be you Naomi in tears! Blessed by you Naomi in fears! Blessed Blessed Blessed in Sickness!
Blessed be you in Hospitals! Blessed be you Naomi in solitude! Blest be your triumph! Blest
be your bars! Blest be your last years’ lonliness!
Blest be your failure! Blest be your stroke! Blest be the close of your eyes! Blest be the gaunt of your
cheek! Blest be your withered thighs.
And ends with the crow’s craw ‘…in the white sun over gravestones in Long Island.’
I don’t think that Ginsberg’s will to self-invention is ever more powerfully expressed than in ‘Kaddish’ because this poem, far more so than ‘Howl’, is born of incalculable urgency: ‘Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day, some of my Time, now given to Nothing – to praise Thee – But Death’. The overwhelming flood in ‘Kaddish’ spoke to me. I knew the Long Island gravestones beneath which my ancestors, and my recently deceased grandmother were buried, and I knew that he had made his grief his own, assimilated tradition to him, rather than dissolving into it, and that to me, though I didn’t know why, seemed vital.
What is the relationship between the Beat writers and music? How do you think that literary scene and musical sound connect(ed)?
I tried to speak to this a bit in the brief essay preceding my poems in Kerouac on Record, and in the poems themselves.
While it’s a vast oversimplification, I like to think about the connection unfolding in three phases, or in the language of music: three movements.
In the early days, bebop was a primary influence, a signifier, a beacon, and the foundation of Kerouac’s project to form a ‘Beat Prosody’. In the next phase, Beat poetry, literature, the Beats themselves and their countercultural stance became a source of inspiration for scores of rockers, singers and songwriters who followed in their wake. For me, the shift to the third movement begins with Ginsberg’s assimilation into Dylan’s ‘Rolling Thunder Revue’, where he appeared as a kind of benevolent father figure to the ragged ensemble, offering, in that mode, a rabbinic benediction at the conclusion of the tour.
From that point forward, I see music taking on a different role vis-à-vis the Beats. It becomes, particularly for Ginsberg, a source of new inspiration, a source of sustenance, a means, through affiliation, of remaining relevant, and a transmission line of countercultural energy, perhaps most tellingly under the wing of transitional figures like Patti Smith, and in the guise of punk rock.
As a writer or poet have you been shaped or influenced by Beat experiences?
Yes, in the ways that I’ve mentioned. Reading the Beats opened a sense of possibility and personal freedom that I very much needed, as well as a dream of the West, which is where I ended up.
At a certain point in my life, as a poet, I gave a great deal of attention to ‘Howl’. I was interested in what it did, how it was made, and its arrival shortly past the peak of modernism. In important respects ‘Howl’ reads as a manifesto. It comes, if not from an avant-garde, from a contrasting position in dialectic opposition to the conformity, and to the confinement it resists. And that is inherently the product of both a modern mindset and the tradition of bohemian shedding of social constraint, of which the Beats were only the latest expression. Implicit in the poem’s cry was the premise that there was something better than the numbing conformity that defined secular American culture, that, in Ginsberg’s view, all the world, in all its pain, was Holy.
During the period in which I was coming of age, youth literature was cribbing Elvis Costello – witness Brett Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero – and the bleeding edge of rock’n’roll was never better expressed than in the postmodern, exhausted nihilism of Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ ‘Blank Generation’ and the Sex Pistols’ paean to being ‘out to lunch’, ‘Pretty Vacant’, and their unhappy claim to ‘no future’. In this context, I felt that while the deep impulse of ‘Howl’ was valid, and that its power as a poem was enduring, the latent assumptions it embodied no longer held – that we could no longer write from an historically grounded countercultural position.
Rather, a poem strong as ‘Howl’ today would have to depart from a non-foundational postmodern position, not in deconstructionist sense, but in a build-it-from-scratch kind of punk rock pragmatism. So, I wrote an answer poem to ‘Howl’ called ‘P(un)k Poets: Too Fucked to Drink’ and debuted it at the Minna Gallery in San Francisco as part of the ‘40th Anniversary of Punk Rock Renaissance’, put on by the good folks of San Francisco’s Punk Rock Sewing Circle in 2015.
Which musical artists from whichever era appear to make links with the Beat Generation – and how?
Given the foregoing, a link I think particularly worthy of mention is the Clash’s collaboration with Allen Ginsberg on ‘Ghetto Defendant’. It’s one of the rare tracks, outside the context of hip hop, that effectively blends spoken word with contemporary music. The track’s also notable for its deep reggae influence, Ginsberg’s use of ‘slam dance cosmopolis’ and the way he travels about in the mix.
Who are your own favourite singers, musicians, and bands? Do they represent Beat ideas or attitudes in their lives and art?
Lots of folks who I listened to in my early years were influenced by the Beats. The list isn’t particularly surprising: Dylan, the Dead, the Doors, Springsteen, Joni, and a host of others. For me the strongest continuity was between Dylan and the Beats. He wasn’t one of them, but in an important sense, he and his music lived among them.
My most enduring musical connection is to the blues; it’s the rootstock of American music, and my pathway into both jazz and rock’n’roll, and Kerouac had good reason when he said in a note to Mexico City Blues:
I want to be considered a jazz poet
Blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam…