Re: PPB: A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island / Frank O'Hara

Will Dockery wrote:
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Michael Pendragon wrote:

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Will Dockery wrote:
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No, Frank O'Hara was not part of the Beat Generation.

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He was an anti-establishment (read "homosexual") youth living in NYC in
1951.

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He sure fits Kerouac's definition:

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Not exactly.

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For starters, here's an actual quote from Jack Kerouac on the Beat
Generation:

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https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/149812-the-beat-generation-that-was-a-vision-that-we-had

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“The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes
and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of
a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming
America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific,
beautiful in an ugly graceful new way--a vision gleaned from the way we
had heard the word 'beat' spoken on streetcorners on Times Square and in
the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar
America--beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction--We'd
even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that
way, with a melancholy sneer--It never meant juvenile delinquents, it
meant characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were
solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our
civilization--the subterraneans heroes who'd finally turned from the
'freedom' machine of the West and were taking drugs, digging bop, having
flashes of insight, experiencing the 'derangement of the senses,'
talking strange, being poor and glad, prophesying a new style for
American culture, a new style (we thought), a new incantation--The same
thing was almost going on in the postwar France of Sartre and Genet and
what's more we knew about it--But as to the actual existence of a Beat
Generation, chances are it was really just an idea in our minds--We'd
stay up 24 hours drinking cup after cup of black coffee, playing record
after record of Wardell Gray, Lester Young, Dexter Gordon, Willie
Jackson, Lennie Tristano and all the rest, talking madly about that holy
new feeling out there in the streets- -We'd write stories about some
strange beatific Negro hepcat saint with goatee hitchhiking across Iowa
with taped up horn bringing the secret message of blowing to other
coasts, other cities, like a veritable Walter the Penniless leading an
invisible First Crusade- -We had our mystic heroes and wrote, nay sung
novels about them, erected long poems celebrating the new 'angels' of
the American underground--In actuality there was only a handful of real
hip swinging cats and what there was vanished mightily swiftly during
the Korean War when (and after) a sinister new kind of efficiency
appeared in America, maybe it was the result of the universalization of
Television and nothing else (the Polite Total Police Control of
Dragnet's 'peace' officers) but the beat characters after 1950 vanished
into jails and madhouses, or were shamed into silent conformity, the
generation itself was shortlived and small in number.” -Jack Kerouac

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