Critical work on writers of the Beat Generation, a field known to practitioners as “Beat Studies,” has struggled to free itself from a historical emphasis on its predominantly white male foundation. While the “triumvirate” formed by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs propelled the Beats to wide public recognition and continues to drive a good deal of the scholarship, the field has gone through several “turns” meant to offer a revisionist account of the movement. This began with Nancy Grace and Ronna Johnson’s edited volume Girls Who Wore Black (2002), which broadened the Beat canon to include women writers who were integral to the Beat Generation but who were often overlooked as “minor characters,” as Beat writer and editor Joyce Johnson put it in her 1983 memoir of that title. More recently, Hassan Melehy and Jean-Christophe Cloutier have made compelling arguments for rethinking Kerouac through appeals to his French-Canadian background, and Erik Mortenson and Tony Trigilio have argued for a more sociological approach, examining how the Beats engaged institutions such as the academy. This panel continues that important trend by exploring Los Angeles–based writers Joan Didion, Jim Brodey, Wanda Coleman, and Harold Norse, who tend to remain outside the Beat canon but nevertheless open new possibilities for the field. These Beat-adjacent writers were in dialogue with the Beats, their writing, and their ideas, but in ways that often challenged or reimagined what it meant to be “Beat.” An examination of how these writers fit into various Los Angeles “scenes” (including Beat ones) helps to expand accounts of literary geographies while raising ecological, gender, gay liberation, and class concerns that not only help us rethink “Beat” but shed new light on how countercultures are formed, how they evolve, and their efficacy for social change more broadly.

Tyler T. Schmidt begins with a paper considering the value of reading celebrated African American poet Wanda Coleman as “Beat-adjacent”: Schmidt positions her as a cultural critic informed by a Beat tradition of embracing social and cultural outsider status and as a poet composing an idiosyncratic literary ancestry. Centering on Coleman’s “Footnote to an Unfinished Poem (3)” Schmidt presents Coleman as offering a powerful statement on the Beat influences she acknowledges while aesthetically and geographically expanding conceptions of Beat literature through engagement with the Los Angeles she was intimately familiar with. Schmidt discusses how the poets cited in Coleman’s poem (Weldon Kees, Bob Kaufman, d.a. levy, and William Everson, among others) shape this regional poetic tradition that is grounded in both ecological awareness and working-class commitments. Next on the panel, Daniel Wartham examines Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) with a focus on the chapter entitled “Los Angeles Notebook” as a means of exploring the dark underbelly of the countercultural hippie movement in California as Beat ideals devolved into more disheartening countercultural realities in the aftermath of increased policing, infighting, and disillusionment. Wartham will explore the motif of the Santa Ana winds that runs through Didion’s book. She treats the winds as metaphor of the displacement and madness of Southern California, an identification of conditions that, Wartham argues, follows the work of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Rexroth, and others. Katharine Streip will then return the discussion to a writer directly connected to the Beat Generation, poet Harold Norse, who during fifteen years in Europe wrote some of his work in collaboration with William Burroughs. In 1968, Norse relocated to Venice Beach. Streip shows how this storied LA neighborhood, a space at the crossroads of the then-dying counterculture and the emerging environmental and gay liberation movements, was a crucible that transformed Norse’s poetics. While engaging with bodybuilding culture, pollution and environmental destruction, homophobia and government lawlessness, Norse produced work that deserves recognition as a significant chapter in the literary geography of Los Angeles. Finally, Nick Sturm, editor of LA-based poet Jim Brodey’s forthcoming collection Freak Wonder, explores how Brodey’s corpus combines a flared-out musicality with visionary poetics and open field grit. Sturm will present Brodey as a poet immersed in Los Angeles life, with experiences that remain the stuff of countercultural legend. Sturm argues that Brodey’s integration of spontaneous compositional techniques with the energy of rock music, a mix of procedures that he borrowed from artists ranging from Kerouac to Janis Joplin, made him an avant-garde emissary of Beat aesthetics until his death from complications related to AIDS in 1993.

After each presenter speaks for thirteen minutes, the presider will open the session to questions from the audience.