The San Francisco Beat Poets

Once dismissed as cultural ephemera, the San Francisco Beat Poets now speak to a country whose entire democratic structure is threatened. America is becoming the exaggerated self-parody which the beat poets used as a rhetorical device—an enormous sick joke. Noam Chomsky, not given to hyperbole, calls the Republican Party the most dangerous organization in human history. Tory Britain, eager to become a vassal of America’s Joker-in-Chief, is racing in its footsteps. It was this sense of an ominous and escalating deja-vu that sent me back to the beat poets and to the talk that I gave at English and Scottish art colleges half a century ago.