Beat Writers at Work (Modern Library) [Paperback]

Paris Review (Author), George Plimpton (Editor), Richard Moody (Introduction), Rick Moody (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 16, 1999 | ISBN-10: 0375752153 | ISBN-13: 978-0375752155 | Edition: Modern Library pbk. ed

Collected here are interviews with the great Beat and Black Mountain writers from the pages of "The Paris Review". In this new compendium, the writers describe their art and lives, creating a unique and fascinating record of their inspirations.

Editorial Reviews

Review

From the pages of The Paris Review and
edited by George Plimpton, the "Writers at Work" interviews, with the great figures of the Beat
and Black Mountain movements

"        Mr. Plimpton and his able cohorts at The Paris Review have cannily chosen this historical moment for the retrieval of this archive, viz., the fortieth anniversary of Kerouac's masterpiece, and also the recent departures of Ginsberg and Burroughs to celestial addresses, and thus we have a real warts-and-all retrospective, ex post facto, Kerouac in the late sixties, Ginsberg (in one of two pieces here) in the late seventies, Bowles in the eighties, Snyder in the nineties, so that the high period of Beat style is well past at the time of these conversations; Plimpton's wisdom here amounts to permitting the language and form of these interviews to persist over the years and thereby accrue historical context, in which we are enabled to see how the Beat praxis (or Black Mountain praxis) is reactive when faced with such forces as Vietnam, hippie culture, eighties consumerism, neglect by literary history, and so forth."
--from the Introduction by Rick MoodyIntroduction by Rick Moody  ¸  William Burroughs (1965)

Allen Ginsberg (1966)  ¸  Robert Creely (1968)  ¸  Jack Kerouac (1968)
Charles Olson (1970)  ¸  Voznesensky, Ginsberg, Orlovsky (1980)
Paul Bowles (1981)  ¸  Ken Kesey (1994)
A Semester with Allen Ginsberg (1995)  ¸  Gary Snyder (1996)
Barney Rosset (1997)  ¸  Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1998)

Read Women Writers at Work in the same series

From the Back Cover

From the pages of The Paris Review and
edited by George Plimpton, the "Writers at Work" interviews, with the great figures of the Beat
and Black Mountain movements

"        Mr. Plimpton and his able cohorts at The Paris Review have cannily chosen this historical moment for the retrieval of this archive, viz., the fortieth anniversary of Kerouac's masterpiece, and also the recent departures of Ginsberg and Burroughs to celestial addresses, and thus we have a real warts-and-all retrospective, ex post facto, Kerouac in the late sixties, Ginsberg (in one of two pieces here) in the late seventies, Bowles in the eighties, Snyder in the nineties, so that the high period of Beat style is well past at the time of these conversations; Plimpton's wisdom here amounts to permitting the language and form of these interviews to persist over the years and thereby accrue historical context, in which we are enabled to see how the Beat praxis (or Black Mountain praxis) is reactive when faced with such forces as Vietnam, hippie culture, eighties consumerism, neglect by literary history, and so forth."
--from the Introduction by Rick MoodyIntroduction by Rick Moody  ¸  William Burroughs (1965)

Allen Ginsberg (1966)  ¸  Robert Creely (1968)  ¸  Jack Kerouac (1968)
Charles Olson (1970)  ¸  Voznesensky, Ginsberg, Orlovsky (1980)
Paul Bowles (1981)  ¸  Ken Kesey (1994)
A Semester with Allen Ginsberg (1995)  ¸  Gary Snyder (1996)
Barney Rosset (1997)  ¸  Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1998)

Read Women Writers at Work in the same series

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Modern Library; Modern Library pbk. ed edition (February 16, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375752153
• ISBN-13: 978-0375752155
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,610,444 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I was born in NYC and raised in the CT suburbs. One of my grandfathers was a newspaper publisher and the other a small-town GM dealer. I figure this is a good lineage for a writer. I went to school in Rhode Island, where I worked with some really interesting people, like Angela Carter and John Hawkes. And then I got my MFA from Columbia University in NYC. After school I worked in book publishing in New York, during some lean times. My first novel came out in 1992. Since then, I've been writing mostly. I teach now and then. I got married in 2003, to my girlfriend of many years, Amy. She's working on her MA in decorative arts history. We split our time between Brooklyn and a little island off the coast of CT.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Required Reading for Anyone Interested in the Beats, August 14, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Beat Writers at Work (Modern Library) (Paperback)

"Beat Writers at Work" is a fascinating and informative collection of interviews with writers and publishers of the so-called "Beat Generation". I consciously use the term "Beat Generation", rather than "Beat Movement", because the collection incorporates a diverse group of poets and writers who, while largely contemporaries, are each so idiosyncratic in their own right that it is inaccurate to lump them together in a single "movement". All of the interviews originally appeared in "The Paris Review" between 1965 and 1998. Each interview is preceded by a short biographical introduction and a description of the circumstances in which the interview occurred.

If there is any unifying characteristic among these writers, it is their rejection of literary formalism and their reliance upon sponaneity. As Lawrence Ferlinghetti observerves in his 1998 interview, one of the best in this collection, "I would call it the 'graph of consciousness' school of poetry because the poetry, as conceived and as defined in this manner, is exactly what goes through your consciousness at any given moment."

Consistent with Ferlinghetti's view of the Beat poets, Allen Ginsberg thus proclaims in his 1996 interview, that "there should be no distinction between what we write down and what we really know." Attacking literary formalism, the owlish iconoclastic "Howl" author notes: "the hypocrisy of literature has been-you know like there's supposed to be formal literature, which is supposed to be different from . . . in subject, in diction and even in organization, from our quotidian inspired lives."

Not surprisingly, Ginsberg's poetics echo the 1968 interview with Jack Kerouac, the breathless unpunctuated Beat proponent of unrevised prose, the very inventor of the term "Beat". In Kerouac's words, "by not revising what you've already written you simply give the reader the actual workings of your thoughts about events in your unchangeable way."

Charles Olson, whose virtually unintelligible 1970 interview appears here, follows this same poetic line. Olson (more appropriately identified with the "Black Mountain School") advocated so-called "open-field composition", described by George Plimpton in his introduction to the Olson interview as "poetry whose appearance and internal logic are governed by the spontaneity of the writing process."

Thus, in some respects, Beat poetics seems to resemble the spontaneity, the anti-formalism of Surrealist automatic writing (something which Ferlinghetti suggests in his interview). But this resemblance is attenuated by the Beat experience of America and of the Beats turn to the East (specifically, Buddhism) and to the influence of consciousness-expanding drugs. Furthermore, while there may be unifying strands running through Beat poetics, this collection of interviews also demonstrates the remarkable diversity of these authors, a diversity which makes it difficult to collate their writings under any unified theory. After reading the interviews with William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, a reader is enthralled and exasperated at the eclection of thought among them.

"Beat Writers at Work" contains exceptional interviews with Ferlinghetti, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder, Paul Bowles, and Ken Kesey. These interviews make this collection required reading for anyone interested in the Beats. The interviews with Ferlinghetti and Barney Rosset also provide an insightful look at the role of City Lights Books and Grove Press in publishing the Beats in their early days, a time when censorship made such publication a financially parlous venture for small presses. Finally, Elissa Schappell, a contributing editor of "The Paris Review", provides a fascinating memoir of a graduate class taught by Ginsberg in 1995. The only weak pieces in this collection are the 1980 "conversation" among Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Russian poet Andrei Vosnesensky and the largely unintelligible wordplay of Charles Olson's 1970 interview. There is also one notable author missing: Gregory Corso, who is, in Ferlinghetti's words, "the most important Beat poet after Ginsberg."

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Required Reading for Anyone Interested in The Beats, April 23, 2002

By 

"botatoe" (Albany, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beat Writers at Work (Modern Library) (Paperback)

"Beat Writers at Work" is a fascinating and informative collection of interviews with writers and publishers of the so-called "Beat Generation". I consciously use the term "Beat Generation", rather than "Beat Movement", because the collection incorporates a diverse group of poets and writers who, while largely contemporaries, are each so idiosyncratic in their own right that it is inaccurate to lump them together in a single "movement". All of the interviews originally appeared in "The Paris Review" between 1965 and 1998. Each interview is preceded by a short biographical introduction and a description of the circumstances in which the interview occurred.

If there is any unifying characteristic among these writers, it is their rejection of literary formalism and their reliance upon sponaneity. As Lawrence Ferlinghetti observerves in his 1998 interview, one of the best in this collection, "I would call it the 'graph of consciousness' school of poetry because the poetry, as conceived and as defined in this manner, is exactly what goes through your consciousness at any given moment."

Consistent with Ferlinghetti's view of the Beat poets, Allen Ginsberg thus proclaims in his 1996 interview, that "there should be no distinction between what we write down and what we really know." Attacking literary formalism, the owlish iconoclastic "Howl" author notes: "the hypocrisy of literature has been-you know like there's supposed to be formal literature, which is supposed to be different from . . . in subject, in diction and even in organization, from our quotidian inspired lives."

Not surprisingly, Ginsberg's poetics echo the 1968 interview with Jack Kerouac, the breathless unpunctuated Beat proponent of unrevised prose, the very inventor of the term "Beat". In Kerouac's words, "by not revising what you've already written you simply give the reader the actual workings of your thoughts about events in your unchangeable way."

Charles Olson, whose virtually unintelligible 1970 interview appears here, follows this same poetic line. Olson (more appropriately identified with the "Black Mountain School") advocated so-called "open-field composition", described by George Plimpton in his introduction to the Olson interview as "poetry whose appearance and internal logic are governed by the spontaneity of the writing process."

Thus, in some respects, Beat poetics seems to resemble the spontaneity, the anti-formalism of Surrealist automatic writing (something which Ferlinghetti suggests in his interview). But this resemblance is attenuated by the Beat experience of America and of the Beats turn to the East (specifically, Buddhism) and to the influence of consciousness-expanding drugs. Furthermore, while there may be unifying strands running through Beat poetics, this collection of interviews also demonstrates the remarkable diversity of these authors, a diversity which makes it difficult to collate their writings under any unified theory. After reading the interviews with William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, a reader is enthralled and exasperated at the eclection of thought among them.

"Beat Writers at Work" contains exceptional interviews with Ferlinghetti, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder, Paul Bowles, and Ken Kesey. These interviews make this collection required reading for anyone interested in the Beats. The interviews with Ferlinghetti and Barney Rosset also provide an insightful look at the role of City Lights Books and Grove Press in publishing the Beats in their early days, a time when censorship made such publication a financially parlous venture for small presses. Finally, Elissa Schappell, a contributing editor of "The Paris Review", provides a fascinating memoir of a graduate class taught by Ginsberg in 1995. The only weak pieces in this collection are the 1980 "conversation" among Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Russian poet Andrei Vosnesensky and the largely unintelligible wordplay of Charles Olson's 1970 interview. There is also one notable author missing: Gregory Corso, who is, in Ferlinghetti's words, "the most important Beat poet after Ginsberg."

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Totally Worth It!!, June 26, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Beat Writers at Work (Modern Library) (Paperback)

The Paris Reviw interviews of the beats are famouse for their openness about the writers craft, and the insight into their work and lives. If you want to truly understand the beats, this is the place to go! Totally worth it!