By European Beat Studies Network
The podcast currently has 9 episodes available.
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The 9th annual conference of the EBSN took place virtually 29-31 October 2021. This is one of a series of recordings from that event. More info, including participant bios, is on the website: https://ebsn.eu/ebsn-2021/
This panel, chaired by Peggy Pacini and moderated by Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo, is titled "Art and the Beat Generation"
Panelists/papers:
Beatriz Cordero: “Abstract Expressionists and the Beat Generation”
Daria Baryshnikova: “Art Language Radically Revised”
Tanguy Harma: “Counterculture, Counterpower? Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation”
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The 10th annual conference of the EBSN took place virtually 29-31 October 2021. This is the first part of a series of recordings from that event. More info is on the website: https://ebsn.eu/ebsn-2021/
Conference organizers Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo, Benjamin J. Heal, and Chad Weidner introduce the event, with a short speech from EBSN president Oliver Harris. The panel titled "Spiralling Back to the Beats’ Spiritual
Roots, Spiralling Forth to the Beats’ Neo-Shamanic Potential" is chaired by Franca Bellarsi.
Panelists/papers:
Sarah Biratate: “A Wordsworthian
Reading on Diane di Prima’s Quest for
Interfusion”
Anikó Juhász: “‘The Skeleton of My
Poetry’: The Beat Generation’s Influence
on Ferenc Juhász”
Jeremy Wastiaux: “The Ecopoetics of
Jack Kerouac: Dissipative Structures in
Visions of Cody and Mexico City Blues”
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Interview with Austria-based Beat Scholar, poet, filmmaker and musician Thomas Antonic. Discussion includes updates on the upcoming EBSN virtual conference EBSN2021, new content on the EBSN website, before focusing on the connections between the Beats and Austria, ruth weiss (including Thomas’s upcoming co-edited volume ruth weiss Beat Poetry, Jazz, Art , and film ruth weiss: One More Step West Is the Sea), and his recent Moloko Press book on William Burroughs’ time in Austria.
Ralf Friel's Moloko Records compilation featuring tracks utilizing cut-up techniques, including a track by Thomas: http://www.molokoplusrecords.de/finder.php?folder=Label&content=89
The re-issue of the 50 track William S. Burroughs Hurts album mentioned in the podcast was also released by moloko in 2019: http://www.molokoplusrecords.de/finder.php?folder=Label&content=77
A new William S. Burroughs Hurts single will come out later this year. Bandcamp page: https://wsbh.bandcamp.com/
The Fenn O'Berg track played is on this MEGO compilation: https://bleep.com/release/20813-fenn-oberg-magic-return
A cd featuring a ruth weiss performance Thomas recorded in oakland in 2017 came out on absurdia records in 2018, mastered by kramer: https://absurdia.bandcamp.com/releases
Benjamin J. Heal's third album under the name Coaxial came out this year on Cruel Nature Records: https://cruelnaturerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/neo-ism
His other albums (including a cut-up inspired by Burroughs expert Jim Pennington) can be found here: https://coaxial.bandcamp.com/
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Benjamin J. Heal and Erik Mortenson present an EBSN panel titled "Beat Internationalism" for the American Comparative Literature Association annual conference, April 2021. The recording of day 1, featuring Sonya Isaak and Esther Marinho Santana was unfortunately lost.
Abstract:
The Beat Generation as literary movement is usually regarded as quintessentially American, rooted in the great American tropes of free expression, border crossing and anti-materialism. Often overlooked in favor of other literary movements, this seminar proposes to look beyond the familiar figures of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs to investigate the relations between their works, aesthetics and techniques and those of Beat voices from across the globe. The shock waves of Howl's radical poetics, publicized via the anti-obscenity court case, and the success of On the Road, reverberated globally, and can be seen to form a foundation for experimental, politically radical works published around the world. Building on the developing and widening formulations of ‘Beat’ by scholars such as Jimmy Fazzino, this seminar will work towards a definition of ‘Beat Internationalism’ as applied to the works examined, and consider areas of convergence. More theoretical questions pertaining to the transnational turn in American literary studies, and the para-textual nature of Beat literature are also welcome. The Beat legacy continues to be felt across popular culture; with retrospectives and exhibitions featuring work by the Beats continuing to be a success. What do the Beats mean to contemporary audiences, and how are their techniques and styles employed in the works of contemporary writers and artists? How has the radicalism of the Beats manifested internationally?
Presenter
Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo
Polytechnic University of Cartagena (Spain)
Abstract Info
While the Beat Generation foundational texts were published in the mid to late 1950s – Howl (1956); On the Road (1957); and Naked Lunch (1959) – one had to wait over a decade for the first serious translations of Beat poetry to crack through a Spain still under Franco’s dictatorship. As if slipping through the fissures of the “apertura” (opening), the so-called diplomatic and economic new phase of Franco’s regime, Beat poetry started to slowly but steadily infiltrate the Spanish poetic sphere.
Nowadays, six decades after the first hints and murmurs about Beat poetry in Spain, a Beat ethos reverberates ever so strongly in different generations of Spanish poets. Beatitud: Beat Generation Visions (2011) and Hey Jack Kerouac: Beat Footprints in Spanish-speaking Poetry (2017), two recent anthologies which collect Spanish and Latin American poets directly influenced by the Beat Generation, attest to the still growing relevance of the Beat Generation across international waters. As the more than sixty poets included in their pages show, and as collections such as A. Robert Lee’s The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature (2018) or Erik Mortenson’s Translating the Counterculture (2018) also demonstrated, the Beat movement, more than quintessentially American, translates well internationally.
This presentation maps the influence and assimilation of the Beat Generation in Spanish poetry. After a brief contextualization of the Spanish literary scene when the first Beat encounters took place, this presentation focuses on the different ways in which contemporary poets such as Uberto Stabile (1959), Ángel Petisme (1961), Antonio de Egipto (1975), or Mónica Caldeiro (1984), transpose Beat aesthetics, themes, and sensibilities into their poetry. Through varied and heterogeneous strategies, these and other Spanish poets revisit and revive the Beat poem to fit their own artistic vision.
Speaker Bio
Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo, currently a lecturer at the Polytechnic University of Cartagena (Spain), specializes in gender and feminist discourses in postwar and avant-garde American poetry. Her research focuses on the poetry and art of poets like Anne Waldman, ruth weiss, Joanne Kyger, and Diane di Prima. Recent publications include “Shifting the Mythic Discourse: Ambiguity and Destabilization in Joanne Kyger’s The Tapestry and the Web” (Amaltea, 2020), “Intertextuality in Diane di Prima’s Loba: Religious Discourse and Feminism” (Humanities, 2018), “Beat Affinities in Spanish Poetry” (The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Poetry, 2018) and “Femmes: la Beat Generation (re)revisitée” (Beat Generation, 2018). She’s also coeditor of ruth weiss: Beat Poetry, Jazz, and Art (De Gruyter, to be published in 2021).
Digging the Digital: The Beats and Video Games
Presenter
Tomasz Sawczuk
University of Bialystok (Poland)
Abstract Info
Ever since setting their foot on the social and cultural landscapes of the post-war world, the Beats have been both the subject of and subject to pop-cultural representations and appropriations. While figurations of Beat sensibility in film, television, press and popular music have been well recognized and analyzed, just to mention the scholarly work of David Sterritt and Simon Warner, a field which remains uninvestigated for Beat influences, perhaps due to its relatively short pop-cultural presence, is the one of visual games. Recent years, which mark the release of titles like Fallout 4 (2015) and Life is Strange (2015), attest to a certain amount of interest invested in Beat mythos by the biggest game studios in the world and thereby open a new chapter in representing the Beats in visual media. By, on the one hand, setting the modes of Beats’ presence in the aforementioned video games against the backdrop of existing models of (mis)appropriating Beats in visual culture and, on the other, employing Derridean hauntology and Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of retrotopia, the paper will seek to map out how and why video games designers venture into the Beat world.
Speaker Bio
Tomasz Sawczuk is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Philology, the University of Bialystok (Poland). He is the author of On the Road to Lost Fathers: Jack Kerouac in a Lacanian Perspective (2019), he has also co-edited Visuality and Vision in American Literature (2014). His most recent research interests revolve around concrete poetry, intermedia and experimental literature.
The Lessons of Cultural Translation: The Beats in Turkey
Presenter
Erik Mortenson
Lake Michigan College
Abstract Info
If countercultural literature is meant to “counter” a culture, what happens when another culture borrows that critique? This essay addresses that question by examining the cultural translation of the Beat Generation in Turkey. The transnational turn has produced a multitude of important studies that examine the role of the international in the writing and lives of the Beats. It is surprising, however, how few of these studies address the question of either literary or cultural translation, especially given that the Beats enjoy an increasingly global circulation. Although Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky were the only Beat writers to actually visit Turkey, since the 1990s publishers, editors, critics, readers, and others dissatisfied with what they feel to be a more conservative trend in the country have turned to the Beats and other countercultural forebears for alternatives. This unexpected return of Beat nonconformity and protest into new cultural and temporal conditions offers a unique opportunity to rethink both the cultural logics that made the Beats possible in the first place, as well as the possibilities they might still hold for social critique in our highly-globalized 21st century. Drawing on concrete examples from the translation history of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, the discussion of the concept of the “hobo” in Jack Kerouac’s classic On the Road, and on the recent censorship trial of William S. Burroughs’s Soft Machine, this paper argues that Beat concepts such as personal freedom, spatial mobility, and the importance of the individual that may seem self-evident in a Western context become rearticulated when deployed in the Turkey, allowing us to better understand how we have arrived at our present understanding of the Beats and how we have chosen to frame their social and literary relevance.
Speaker Bio
Erik Mortenson is a literary scholar, translator, writer, and writing center consultant at Lake Michigan College in Benton Harbor, Michigan. After earning a PhD from Wayne State University in Detroit, Mortenson spent a year as a Fulbright Lecturer in Germany before journeying to Koç University in Istanbul to help found the English and Comparative Literature Department. Mortenson has published numerous journal articles and book chapters, as well as three books, including Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence (2011), Ambiguous Borderlands: Shadow Imagery in Cold War American Culture (2016), and Translating the Counterculture: The Reception of the Beats in Turkey (2018). Mortenson is also an avid translator whose work has appeared in journals such as Asymptote, Talisman, and Two Lines, and he is currently translating the work of Necmi Zekâ for a book-length project.
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Benjamin J. Heal and Erik Mortenson present an EBSN panel titled "Beat Internationalism" for the American Comparative Literature Association annual conference, April 2021. The recording of day 1, featuring Sonya Isaak and Esther Marinho Santana was unfortunately lost.
Abstract:
The Beat Generation as literary movement is usually regarded as quintessentially American, rooted in the great American tropes of free expression, border crossing and anti-materialism. Often overlooked in favor of other literary movements, this seminar proposes to look beyond the familiar figures of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs to investigate the relations between their works, aesthetics and techniques and those of Beat voices from across the globe. The shock waves of Howl's radical poetics, publicized via the anti-obscenity court case, and the success of On the Road, reverberated globally, and can be seen to form a foundation for experimental, politically radical works published around the world. Building on the developing and widening formulations of ‘Beat’ by scholars such as Jimmy Fazzino, this seminar will work towards a definition of ‘Beat Internationalism’ as applied to the works examined, and consider areas of convergence. More theoretical questions pertaining to the transnational turn in American literary studies, and the para-textual nature of Beat literature are also welcome. The Beat legacy continues to be felt across popular culture; with retrospectives and exhibitions featuring work by the Beats continuing to be a success. What do the Beats mean to contemporary audiences, and how are their techniques and styles employed in the works of contemporary writers and artists? How has the radicalism of the Beats manifested internationally?
Presenter
Ya Chu Fu
Independent Scholar
Abstract Info
The article discusses how the Chinese artist Li Yuan-chia’s life philosophy and experiences as well as his art style resonates with the Beat Generation, in terms of the historical context of the Post-World War 2 period and their similar experimentalism and transnationalism. Li was born in China, and he later moved to Taiwan, Italy, and finally settled in the UK. The reason he kept moving has a lot to do with historical context in Taiwan, for instance, the 2nd KMT-CPC civil war（1945-1950), and the ‘White Terror’ (1947-1987). At the same time the writers, and often overlooked artists, of the Beat Generation- were experiencing similar political events, the Cold War between the US and Russia, and McCarthyism, in the US. Li Yuan-chia’s art utilizes the simplicity and minimalism of East-Asian visual art and Japanese Haiku and combines with Western Avant-guard styles, such as abstract expressionism. He often paints with calligraphic symbols with ink backgrounds and abstract blocks of colors. Interestingly, one of the artists associated with the Beat Generation, Brion Gysin, also experimented with abstract ink roller poems. If we put their works together, we can see a lot of similarities between them. This paper will explore Li Yuan-chia’s Beat connections and make comparisons between his life and work and that of Beat artists and writers, for example, Brion Gysin's paintings and permutation poems, and Bernice Bing and Jay DeFeo's abstract and minimalistic artworks and Beat sensibility.
Speaker Bio
Fu Ya Chu, graduated in 2019 from National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan, with a first-class honors degree in Psychology and Philosophy. She has an ongoing interest in visual art, literature, and translation, having translated letters of Taiwanese Modernist novelist Qi Deng Sheng and Professor A Robert Lee's poetry. She plans to study for a master's degree in comparative literature in the UK, and continue her research on Li Yuan-chia and Hong Kong writer Eileen Chung.
Hsia Yu: Translingual Cut-ups
Presenter
Benjamin Heal -
National Chung Cheng University
Abstract Info
Taiwanese poet Hsia Yu has developed an iconic presence in her native country. Her sinophone works appear with a transnational flavor, inflected with French sensibilities and Western “Beat Generation” derived stylistics, incorporating a visual aesthetic best demonstrated by her most well known work, the self-published Pink Noise (2007), printed as a trilingual text on transparent acetate. Pink Noise utilizes the semantic problems with bi- and trilingual translation with texts composed in English auto-translated into Mandarin, allowing the breakdown of meaning that results from the over-literal auto-translation to become part of the poetry. This paper explores the poet’s experimentation with translingualism, from these experiments with the liminal spaces presented by machine translation to the broader pursuit of Beat experimentation that marks her work. As J.B. Rollins states, Hsia Yu’s ‘refusal to be cowed by cultural essentialism and her sense of the limitless possibilities of her native Mandarin’ highlights Hsia Yu’s importance in resisting the rigid formalism of Chinese poetry and her existence on the boundaries of specificity by embracing translingualism and experimentation.
Stephen Kellman’s The Translingual Imagination (2000) inaugurated the debate on ‘translingualism’, albeit unsatisfactorily, about texts and authors that incorporate different languages in their works. In noting the prevalence of multi- and translingual authors and texts suggests that social migration and exile, both core features of the Beat aesthetic, are great stimuli on creative literary production, and in the context of Taiwan’s troubled history is a particularly apt hypothesis. Language as a function of nationality and ‘language-loyalty’ can be seen as particularly problematic as native languages, Mandarin, Japanese, and English, are all part of Taiwanese culture. Hsia Yu’s work from the 1995 collection Friction, indescribable that rearranged text cut from her 1991 collection Ventriloquy, to Salsa (1999), which forced readers to cut the book’s deckle edges before they could read it, seen particularly in the context of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s cut-up experiments present a challenging poetics that engage with the evolving function of words and language while deconstructing institutions of knowledge formation. Her work also demonstrates the ongoing international legacy of the Beats, across language and media.
Speaker Bio
Benjamin J. Heal is Assistant Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan. Currently working on his monograph “Transatlantic Crosscurrents” which explores the European connections in the works of Paul Bowles and William S. Burroughs”. He is a board member of the European Beat Studies Network, managing the website and membership. He has published several articles on the Beats, and has wider research interests that include Chinese literature and translation, and the works of James Leo Herlihy and Mohammed Mrabet.
Presenter
peggy pacini
CY Cergy Paris Université
Abstract Info
In a chapter dedicated to Contemporary French Beat Writing, I had tried to raise the question as to whether there was such a thing as contemporary French beat writers. Perusal of anthologies of contemporary French literature and poetry confirms that there is no French beat writers stricto sensu. However, lineage and convergences are to be found between the Beat Generation and contemporary French writers and poets in time. This paper will develop in more depth how the drive, the radicalism and the experimental turn Beat writers embodied reverberated onto their French fellow poets and writers to these days. But perhaps more spefically, it will try to anchor these convergences in time and see whether such lineage and/or convergences are still visible among the younger generation of contemporary French writers and poets. Among the issue to be examined, this paper will first address the divergences that caused certain early French beat affiliated writers to disaffiliate or push further their experimental poetics. Second, the question of whose Beat filiation are we talking about when we consider the impact of the Beat Generation poetics in France and in time. If Ginsberg and Kerouac had been considered as models in the late 1960s, early 1970s, Burroughs’s legacy seems to endure a firm grip on contemporary French writers, in part due to his cut-up method. However, one should not in the process and in history of the contemporary French beat writing forget the invaluable impact of Claude Pélieu’s work on a whole generation of poets and writers, which this paper would also like to consider and examine. Eventually, the Polyphonix experience also seems to shed light onto the very idea of an international community of experimental writers and poets that extends beyond any categorization, if so then how valid can the existence a French Beat Generation nebula be ?
Speaker Bio
Peggy Pacini is Associate Professor at CY Cergy Paris University where she teaches translation and American literature. Her interests in scholarship include Beat studies, cultural production and communal identity, public reading and performance.
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Estíbaliz Encarnación Pinedo presents a panel titled “Beat generation goddess ruth weiss (re)considered” for the British Association of American Studies digital conference, April 8, 2021, in support of the book ruth weiss Beat Poetry, Jazz, Art (De Gruyter 2021).
European Beat Studies Network
BAAS
Chad Weidner Reaching Towards the Light: Transitory Spaces and the Negated Material Body in Selected Texts by ruth weiss
Ben Heal ruth weiss: Transnationalism and Resistance
Polina Mackay ruth weiss and the Poetics of the Desert
Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo Gender and identity in ruth weiss
Stefanie Pointl Place, Movement, and Identity in ruth weiss’s Poetry
Peggy Pacini ruth weiss: a poetics grounded in intermediality and performance
Frida Forsgren ruth weiss and painted haikus
Thomas Antonic The ruth weiss Papers
Abstract: This session brings together a selection of European Beat Studies Network members to
redress, and in some cases introduce, the work produced by Beat-associated poet ruth weiss (1928-
2020). Conceived as flash presentations (limited to 10 minutes followed by workshop-like discussions)
the aim is to offer a wide selection of critical and aesthetic points of entrance into weiss’s work.
Chair: Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo
ruth weiss: Transnationalism and Resistance
Benjamin J. Heal resituates and recovers the work of weiss through a transnational context of poetic
experimentalism, outlining the many liminalities in her life, art and writing, with a particular focus on her ongoing attack on the conventions of authorship and constructions of the singular literary genius
through the use of contradiction, collaboration and various forms of multimedia expression.
ruth weiss and the Poetics of the Desert
Polina Mackay explores ruth weiss’ depiction of the desert as a multifaceted symbol of contrasting
values. She compares weiss’s images of the desert as a local of both light and shadow or life and death to the socio political poems of poets like Sandra Osborne which write against America’s wars beyond its border (e.g., invasion of Iraq). The aim is to encourage discussion on ruth weiss’s relevance to current concerns in American poetry.
Gender and identity in ruth weiss
Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo explores ruth weiss’s complication and blurring of established
categorizations through which she documents both the struggle and the balance, the exclusion and the dissolution of the (de)gendered selves that inhabit her work. To study the ways in which weiss’s
resolves these tensions, she analyzes the thematic traits as well as the stylistic choices that allow weiss to write beyond gender in collections such as Steps (1958), Desert Journal (1977) or Single Out (1978).
The ruth weiss Papers
Thomas Antonic delivers an overview and evaluation of the ruth weiss papers. The aim of it is to
provide scholars with information about the content and extent of published and unpublished written
and audiovisual material, as well as other documents such as photographs and correspondence. It is
intended, for future analyses, to make scholarship aware of the vast amount of works ruth weiss has
created over the past seven decades which go far beyond the scope of her published poetry collections that were the only subject of studies to date.
Place, Movement, and Identity in ruth weiss’s Poetry
Stefanie Pointl examines the representation of movement in ruth weiss’s autobiographical poetry,
arguing that weiss, as an Austrian American Beat writer and Holocaust survivor, provides an alternative perspective on the recurrent Beat theme of mobility. In her writing, she constructs a transnational identity founded on border-crossing movements and the resulting interpersonal connections. Through depictions of both physical and metaphorical journeys, weiss’s poetry portrays movement as a unifying link between people from different cultural backgrounds that replaces national origins as a source of identification.
ruth weiss: a poetics grounded in intermediality and performance
Peggy Pacini focuses on weiss's performance at the Summer of Love 2007 to examine how this sheds
light on the essence of her poetry composing and performing practice. A series of micro-analysis of “the audiotext" and of contextual factors will contribute to comprehend how this performance releases
what weiss herself defined as the “free flowing force moving outward from the unconscious towards
self and other” (Grace 2004:58) that not only defines her poetic language, but a poetics grounded in
intermediality and performance.
Reaching Towards the Light: Transitory Spaces and the Negated Material Body in Selected Texts by
ruth weiss
Chad Weidner focuses on what an environmental understanding can bring to many Beat-affiliated
writers like ruth weiss. weiss contributed to the international flourishing of Beat poetics, but questions
remain: To what extent can green criticism benefit by engaging unfamiliar and experimental
transnational texts written by women? Can Beat studies be enhanced by environmental readings of unfamiliar texts by historically neglected writers affiliated with the Beats? This presentation outlines
ways selected texts by ruth weiss' explore transitory spaces and the material body.
ruth weiss and painted haikus
Frida Forsgren looks into ruth weiss’s body of work to show how it is a characteristic example of a
Beat oeuvre consisting of film, poetry, painting and music. Her decision to also paint her written, spoken and recorded haiku poems shows a willingness to experiment and to enhance the text’s aesthetic possibilities. In this presentation, she looks into weiss’s painted haiku series A Fool’s Journey and Banzai! to show that the concise way she paints “the thing” from her haikus mirrors Japanese zen aesthetics.
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Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo interviews esteemed Beat scholar Nancy M. Grace, Virginia Myers Professor and Chair of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at the College of Wooster, US. She is a founding member of the Beat Studies Association and the editor of The Journal of Beat Studies. The discussion includes the future direction of Beat Studies, Women of the Beat Generation, transnationalism in Beat Studies, and the legacy of the Beat Generation.
Selected publications by Nancy M. Grace:
Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Beat Women Writers, with Ronna C. Johnson. University Press of Mississippi, 2004.
The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Mellen, 1995.
Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation, with Ronna C. Johnson. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002.
Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
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The podcast currently has 9 episodes available.