Clarissa T's List: Beat Poetry

• Like the French Impressionist artists of Paris, the Beat writers were a small group of close friends first, and a movement later. The term "Beat Generation" gradually came to represent an entire period in time, but the entire original Beat Generation in literature was small enough to have fit into a couple of cars (at times this nearly happened).
• The phrase "Beat Generation" was invented by Jack Kerouac in 1948

• earned a doctoral degree in poetry at the Sorbonne in Paris with a dissertation entitled 'The City as Symbol in Modern Poetry: In Search of a Metropolitan Tradition'.
• Ferlinghetti's own poems are simple and speak plainly, and they remain popular with a wide range of readers
• Ferlinghetti was one of the more politically-minded of the Beats, and has been continually active on behalf of liberal causes. He attributes his pacifist consciousness partly to his wartime experiences: he had been sent to Nagasaki, Japan six weeks after the city was destroyed by the world's second atomic bomb.

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• City Lights Books was founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin, editor of City Lights magazine, in 1953. It's located at 261 Columbus Avenue in San Francisco. The original pie-shaped store has been expanded to four times its original size over the years, first moving into the basement (originally used as a prayer meeting room) and then expanded on the ground level.
• This eccentric, slope-floored store was supposedly America's first all-paperback bookstore. From the start it was a meeting ground for artists and writers and featured books of literature, politics and popular culture.
• it was the fourth book, Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl and Other Poems,' published in 1957, that brought the store true notoriety.

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