Correspondence #54: Ryan Mathews

Black poets, Beat poets?

A longer missive from Michigan-based essayist Ryan Mathews, a frequent contributor to that excellent journal Beatdom, responding to some of the issues raised in our recent review of Steven Belletto’s Ted Joans biography Black Surrealist…

Email, June 9th, 2025

Dear R&BG,

In his recent review of Black Surrealist, Steven Belletto’s new biography of Ted Joans, Jonah Raskin asks a critical question writing, ‘How many Black Beat poets have there been over the past seven or so decades? And who are they?’

His answer veers toward the traditional interpretation of ‘Beat’, concluding ‘North Beach’s Bob Kaufman for sure and also New York’s LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), before he became a Black nationalist …’

But wait.

Can’t Black poets be more than one thing at a time? Couldn’t Amiri Baraka be both a Beat and a Black Nationalist? If that’s not the case, should Bob Kaufman then be removed from the Beat rolls and instead be enshrined in all future literary annals as a Surrealist?

And, if the pre-Baraka LeRoi Jones was a Beat, what about, say, A. B. Spellman who hung out at Jones’ Yugen salons talking jazz, poetry, and art with Kerouac and other mainstream Beats?

At this point I should say I agreed in large part with Raskin’s review and have great respect for his own work. Nothing I say here should be taken as a criticism of him. It is rather an observation of how the Beat narrative has been formed – expanded to include everyone from Henry Miller to Charles Bukowski, various members of the Black Mountain school, etc., etc. as long as they are, at least in the main, male – and, sadly more critically, white.

Does anyone seriously believe that the Beat movement attracted only two or three Black artists? How would that be possible?

The answer of course is that it wasn’t, and it isn’t.

There were figures like Alene Lee and Aishah Rahman for example – the former dismissed as a Beat love goddess and the latter as a member of the Black Arts Movement.

And what about Joffre Stewart, the most – to my mind at least – inexplicable omission from the Beat canon?

Don’t know who he is? Well, you aren’t alone. But Allen Ginsberg knew him and mentions him in ‘Howl’ as the man ‘… with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing/out incomprehensible leaflets …’

If a mention in ‘Howl’ is enough to usher Carl Solomon into the Beat pantheon, where so many place him, how come it’s not good enough for Stewart?

Even more baffling is the case of two poets, one white the other Black, one universally recognized as a Beat and the other categorised in any number of ways as a ‘Black’, ‘Lesbian’ and/or ‘Feminist’ poet … but never a Beat.

I’m of course referring to Diane di Prima and Audre Lorde, two extraordinary writers who couldn’t have been much closer.

Both poets were born in 1934. Inseparable friends from the age of 15, both attended Manhattan’s Hunter College High School where they wrote poetry together and participated in a small group of young poets who labeled themselves ‘the Branded’.

On Christmas Eve 1967 when Di Prima – whose Poet’s Press was in the process of releasing Lorde’s debut poetry collection The First Cities – went into labor with her second child, she summoned her friend to her Greenwich Village apartment where Lorde delivered the baby.

The two friends continued to read together into the 1970s. But for all that shared sensibility and experience, one is considered a Beat and the other is not.

Do we say that Philip Whalen stopped being Beat when he became a Buddhist monk? Or that Gary Snyder ceased being Beat when he became an ecopoet? And what about all the ‘Beats’ who disavowed the label like Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William S. Burroughs, and the so-called ‘Father of the Beats’, Keneth Rexroth? Again, what do those writers all have in common? Oh, yes, they are all white men.

Raskin writes that, ‘Joans certainly knew how to recognise and read the Zeitgeist and how to ride it for his own benefit.’ Totally true, but equally true of Allen Ginsberg who not only rode the Zeitgeist from Beat to hippie and beyond, but served as a favorite uncle, if not self-appointed paterfamilias, of every countercultural movement he could find.

He also seems to question if Joans can be considered a real ‘Beat’ since he ‘… didn’t actually meet the Beats until the 1950s, when they were already a literary circle …’ Drawing a parallel between the Beat credentials of Joans and Norman Mailer, who had been a 'hipster’ in the late 1940s, Raskin notes, ‘By those standards, Norman Mailer, the author the essay “The White Negro” might be considered a Beat.

‘Mailer frequented Greenwich Village cafes, thought Black people were “cool” and briefly regarded himself as a hipster. In fact, neither Mailer nor Joans were present on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the 1940s when Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs first rendezvous’d, nor were they present in San Francisco in the 1950s when the Beat Generation was busy being born after the Six Gallery reading.’

All true, but neither were a lot of people who later were swept up under the 'Beat’/‘Baby Beat'/ “'Second Generation San Francisco Renaissance”’/etc., including AnneWaldman and Kathy Acker who is occasionally listed as a ‘Beat influenced writer.

Ah … but, once again, they are white.

As I said I have nothing but the highest respect for Jonah Raskin and his outstanding scholarship and, again, I largely agree with his review. But the question he raises (and, in all fairness, he is not trying to address in any formal sense in his review) still haunts me.

Is it possible that a movement as apparently long, inclusive and fluid as the Beats, which now ‘includes’ writers (at least in their own minds) who weren’t even born before most of the founding Beats were dead, only attracted a half-dozen or fewer Black participants?

I, for one, refuse to believe it.

Many years ago a wise man told me that prejudice was the belief a person was different because of the color of their skin and racism was the desire to believe people were different because of their skin color.

If that’s true a lot of Beat scholarship is, by definition, racist since so many of the Beats and Beat scholars wanted, and still want, to believe Blacks are different – hipper, cooler, more authentic incarnations of ‘the Other’ – a sort of separate but superior literary Jim Crowism that has kept who can guess how many Black Beats in the shadows?

It’s past time to turn on the lights and give a forgotten generation of poets their voices back.

Sincerely,

Ryan Mathews

See also: ‘Book review #50: Black Surrealist by Steven Belletto’, June 7th, 2025