Writing Advice from the Beats

Some quotes from Beat writers about how to produce great poetry and prose.

Defining the Beat Generation is extremely difficult and although I have attempted to do it here, my basic statement is that there are different ways of defining this socio-literary group but that none of them are entirely satisfactory. This in no small part comes down to the fact that the Beats were all very different writers even if they sometimes shared a theme, goal, or stylistic quirk.

Even so, I will attempt in this article to provide some advice on writing Beat poetry and prose. Rather than give my opinions, I have collected a great many words of advice from the Beat writers themselves. I did this organically over a period of about two years, simply noting useful passages when I found them in the course of other research projects. I tried to write down ideas that were central to a particular writer’s style or approach and also ones that were somewhat unifying in that they might apply to several Beat writers. Still, this is not a hugely complete guide because it mostly relates to the writers that interest me and the passages from their work that struck me as important. In that sense, it is very subjective. Sorry in advance if your favourite writer or an important idea is not included. Feel free to make this a conversation by commenting below.

I will start with Allen Ginsberg, partly because he largely created the Beat Generation through his social and professional efforts, and he was the first of them to really break through to the public consciousness with his astoundingly brave and creative work.

Allen Ginsberg

The most individual, uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited expression of self is the true expression and the true art. – The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice, p.80

This is something that Allen Ginsberg wrote as a very young man but it was a concept that stuck with him throughout his life, and I also think it was something that connected many other Beat writers although few of them went to the extremes of poetic nakedness that Ginsberg did.

Tight formal poetry seems to me result of basic lack of technical understanding and not subtlety, mastery control etc., which academic poets like to think of themselves as “exhibiting.” – Qtd in The French Genealogy of the Beat Generation, p.144

Here is another key explanation for Ginsberg’s poetry and one that captures a lot of Beat writing. These writers tended to move away from the strictures of earlier poetic modes and allowed their voices—following jazz and blues in certain ways—to become freer.

My own method is that I keep a journal and anything that goes into the journal is anything that goes into the journal. Then a couple months or years later I’ll go through it and pick out the things that look like poems. Things that have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and are in separate lines rather than paragraphs, and seem to have some kind of poem theme. Those I’ll separate out and type up and sometimes present them without any change. Sometimes I don’t realize that they are poems until they are typed up. – The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, p.409

This is very important and it’s something that really helped Ginsberg find ideas and language for his poetry. It’s why his journals are so fascinating. One looks at them—these messy, strange, silly collections of random notes and dreams and doodles—and finds in them the origins of great poems.

[get] rid of all syntactical fat – Various sources, including here

Ginsberg liked to trim away many little words of grammar (prepositions, auxiliaries, articles) when he found them unnecessary, leaving those that were “muscular or boney.” He once explained: “the nouns & verbs have a single weight, the adjectives usually less unless strong words or long ones." Again, this goes some way towards explaining his approach to poetry (although not throughout his whole career necessarily).

I follow the aesthetics of one of my mentors, William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), who said you should write close to the nose. “‘Clamp your mind down on objects – No ideas but in things.’ So there is a certain naturalistic style, kind of (Émile) Zola put into poetry, condensed. Everyday occurrences. And the localism is interesting, to build something more general from an individual observation. Also, my problem always has been that I, like most people, have a tendency to go off into abstraction, generalization, motif, so I try to discipline myself to keep my focus on something real that you can understand. – A 1996 interview

This is really important as well. Ginsberg and many of his Beat peers tried to stick to this idea. Other poets of that era did something similar but the Beats were more successful at taking concrete details from daily life and making art of them.

I’m sorry to keep going on with Ginsberg here but honestly it’s hard not to include dozens of these quotes. He really did have some excellent insights. This is the last one, though:

the parts that embarrass you are usually the most interesting poetically, are usually the most naked of all, the rawest and goofiest and strangest and most eccentric – Qtd in Hard to Be a Saint in the City, p.74

He goes on to say that these sorts of embarrassing memories and experiences are the “most representative, most universal.”

William S. Burroughs

Burroughs was a very different writer from Ginsberg and indeed if we try to define a Beat style, he is usually the outlier—the one hardest to incorporate into that flawed category. However, I’ll share some of his writing advice and particularly those ideas shared by his Beat peers:

Most people don’t see what’s going on around them. That’s my principal message to writers: for God’s sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what’s going on around you. – Paris Review interview

Burroughs believed in taking material from the world around him and transforming it into art, a view shared by many other Beat writers. However, he was perhaps more dedicated than they were to an awareness of the people and objects around him. Elsewhere, he expanded on this idea:

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity”... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer. – Naked Lunch, p.297

Let’s look a little further at what he means and how this actually differentiates him from the other Beat writers:

I am not talking mystical “greater awareness.” I mean complete alert awareness at all times of what is in front of you. LOOK OUT NOT IN. No talking to SO CALLED SELF. NO “INTROSPECTION.” Eyes off that navel. LOOK OUT TO SPACE. This means kicking ALL HABITS. Word HABIT. SELF HABIT. BODY HABIT. Kicking junk [a] breeze in comparison. Total awareness = Total pain = CUT. – Rub Out the Words, p.45

Yes, the others recognised the importance of recording the world around them, but they were also interested in the interior space and visions. Burroughs was more intrigued by the exterior and himself as a recording device.

I would say that the function of art or, in fact, of any creative thought is to make people aware of what they know and don’t know. – Conversations with William Burroughs, p.124

He followed with an example. He said people knew the earth was flat but believed it was round and someone had to show them what they knew. Perhaps not the best example, but an interesting point nonetheless.

Earlier this year, we celebrated Burroughs’ 110th birthday with interviews, essays, and more at our website.

Jack Kerouac

The most obvious place to look for Jack Kerouac’s writing advice is his “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.” I could write about this all day, but I suggest just clicking that link and reading it. It’s a short document. However, here is one particularly important quote:

Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image.

Focus on the words “undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret word-ideas.” Grasp this and you can start to see where his wildly original prose came from.

Although Kerouac did revise his work and did help his friends edit theirs, he was generally of the opinion that spontaneous writing was best and that editing moved you away from that original genius. He told Allen Ginsberg, upon seeing the first draft of “Howl” that he didn’t “want it arbitrarily negated by secondary emendations made in time’s reconsidering backstep. I want your lingual spontaneity or nothing.” Kerouac was immensely influential on Ginsberg but this is where they differed and Ginsberg spent many months (sometimes with Kerouac’s help!) rewriting and editing his poem until it was as good as he could make it.

Beyond mere spontaneity, Kerouac once said:

My position in the current American literary scene is simply that I got sick and tired of the conventional English sentence which seemed to me so ironbound in its rules, so inadmissible with references to the actual format of my mind as I had had learned to probe it in the modern spirit of Freud and Jung, that I couldn’t express myself through that form any more. – “The Last Word,” Escapade Magazine

Perhaps more than any Kerouac quote, however, I think his writing process is best explained by Gary Snyder:

Jack’s style, as far as I could make out at that time, was to be out in the world for a few weeks or months experience things; meeting, hanging out with people. Apparently, jotting a few notes down, but not much. Then he would jump on the various trains and cars, and head back to his home place, where his mother was. Get his typewriter out at take a lot of speed and write for three or four days. – Conversations with Gary Snyder, p.210

Gary Snyder

While we’re talking about Gary Snyder, here is one of my favourite pieces of writing advice:

If you speak to the condition of your times with some accuracy and intention, then it may speak to the future, too. – The Real Work, p.163

Doesn’t that just perfectly explain the best writing, regardless of whether it’s Beat or not? And certainly the Beats resonated so well because they captured that post-WWII world and the dissatisfaction felt in a materialistic, sterile culture.

You don't plan to write poetry; if it comes to you, fine, if it doesn't, that's fine too. – Conversations with Gary Snyder, p.210

This idea is one that he explained a little further in a (sadly paywalled) WaPo article in reference to a poem he wrote about the death of his wife, saying “some of our best work is that which we are least prepared for [but] we might say that years of your life went into the preparation.” One cannot help but see parallels here with Kerouac’s concept of spontaneous prose.

to write prose be shameless & not proud, drink & fuck off – GS Archives

This comes from a journal entry in November 1955. I’m not sure whether he continued to believe this advice, but I thought it was an attitude worth noting here.

A real poet has a detached happy love for every thing, not just books or (even) not just people, which is also compassion, which means he also can hate, poetry is about the magnificent interpenetration sameness-and-difference at the same time of everything & every non-thing. – GS Archives

This again comes from an unpublished journal entry from 1955. It reflects his Buddhist studies of the time.

(The above Washington Post article is a really wonderful document. If you cannot find a way to view it, let me know and I’ll see if I can help.)

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Ferlinghetti certainly did not consider himself a Beat poet but his advice, which echoes an idea we’ve already seen, was:

The best writing is what’s right in front of you. – The same paywalled WaPo article

You don’t see many connections between Burroughs and Ferlinghetti, but here they have very similar ideas. Ferlinghetti was also perhaps more famous for what he stood against, with his various anti-censorship campaigns worth investigating (not just the “Howl” obscenity one). Here, he says he is opposed to:

barren, polished poetry and well-mannered verse […] ‘fashionable incoherence’ which has passed for poetry in many of the smaller, avant-garde magazines and little presses. – Casebook on the Beats, p.126

This was of course what the whole Beat and bohemian scene stood against in the fifties, and Ferlinghetti’s Pocket Poets series and his City Lights bookshop were meant to counter a negative trend in literature.

Michael McClure

I did not fear obscurity in my poetry because I had come to believe that the way to the universal was by means of the most intensely personal. – Scratching the Beat Surface, p.26

This harkens back to Ginsberg’s idea of the personal as the universal and again it is something many—though not necessarily all—of the Beat writers believed. I feel that Snyder in particular was more interested in communication than expression even if his work was often quite challenging.

Lenore Kandel

Poetry is never compromise. It is the manifestation/translation of a vision, an illumination, an experience. If you compromise your vision you become a blind prophet. —Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel, p.v-vi

She goes on to say that “Craft is valuable insofar as it serves as a brilliant midwife for clarity, beauty, vision; when it becomes enamored of itself it produces word masturbation.” Indeed. This was precisely where Ginsberg and Robert Duncan differed.

Lew Welch

We do not speak the language of England and our poetry should not have the English form. We talk American, and the poet’s job is to intensify this dialect, sharpen into poetry, keep the words clean and sharp. – He, Leo, p.60

Many writers had attempted this long before the Beats and Welch was inspired by William Carlos Williams in writing these lines (a reverence for Williams being something that united many of the Beats and San Francisco Renaissance poets), but certainly this idea had been present among the Beat writers since the forties and most of them attempted to follow it throughout their careers.

(The next issue of Beatdom is devoted to the San Francisco Renaissance. We are open to submissions, so if you have anything to share about that period of literary history, then read these guidelines.)

Conclusion

Is there really a Beat style of writing? I would say not but there are certainly a few ways we could classify them in a general sense if we were to overlook certain exceptions. For example, many of the Beat writers believed in the idea of making the personal public as a means of connecting to the universal. They also tended to use the modern idiom and to break with earlier forms and expectations, and they believed in freeing themselves from outdated structures and rules.

Honestly, if you want to write like the Beats—or, better yet, just learn from them—the smartest thing to do is go buy their books and soak it all up.