Frank Beacham's Journal

William Butler Yeats was born 157 years ago today

William Butler Yeats, 1903

Photo by Alice Boughton

William Butler Yeats was born 157 years ago today.

An Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature, Yeats was a pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms.

Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and, along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others, founded the Abbey Theatre, where he served as its chief during its early years.

In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Irishman so honored for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation."

Born in Sandymount, Ireland on this day in 1865, Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize. Such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929). Yeats was a close friend of Ezra Pound, the American expatriate poet and Bollingen Prize laureate.

Yeats wrote the introduction for Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali, which was published by the India Society.

From 1900, Yeats's poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.

Allen Ginsberg was born 96 years ago today

Allen Ginsberg in concert, New York City, 1995

Photo by Frank Beacham

Allen Ginsberg was born 96 years ago today.

A poet and one of the leading figures of both the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the counterculture that soon would follow, Ginsberg vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism and sexual repression.

Ginsberg is best known for his epic poem, "Howl," in which he denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. In 1957, "Howl" attracted widespread publicity when it became the subject of an obscenity trial, as it depicted heterosexual and homosexual sex at a time when sodomy laws made homosexual acts a crime in every U.S. state.

"Howl" reflected Ginsberg's own homosexuality and his relationships with a number of men, including Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong partner.

Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that "Howl" was not obscene, adding, "Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?"

Ginsberg was a practicing Buddhist who studied Eastern religious disciplines extensively. He lived modestly, buying his clothing in second-hand stores and residing in downscale apartments in New York’s East Village. One of his most influential teachers was the Tibetan Buddhist, the Venerable Chögyam Trungpa, founder of the Naropa Institute, now Naropa University at Boulder, Colorado.

At Trungpa's urging, Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, the poet, started The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics there in 1974.

Ginsberg took part in decades of non-violent political protest against everything from the Vietnam War to the War on Drugs. His poem, "September on Jessore Road," calling attention to the plight of Bangladeshi refugees, exemplifies what the literary critic Helen Vendler described as Ginsberg's tireless persistence in protesting against "imperial politics and persecution of the powerless."

His collection, The Fall of America, shared the annual U.S. National Book Award for Poetry in 1974. In 1979, he received the National Arts Club gold medal and was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

In 1986, Ginsberg was awarded the Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings in Struga, Macedonia. Ginsberg was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1995 for his book Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986–1992.

Ginsberg died April 5, 1997, surrounded by family and friends in his East Village loft in New York City, succumbing to liver cancer via complications of hepatitis. He was 70 years old.

Here, Allen Ginsberg reads the first part of his poem, Howl

Allen Ginsberg with Frank Beacham, 1975

Leonard Cohen meets Allen Ginsberg after his concert at the Wiltern Theatre, Los Angeles, 1988

Photo by Frank Beacham

Walt Whitman was born 203 years ago today

Walt Whitman was born 203 years ago today.

A poet, essayist and journalist, Whitman was also a humanist — a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. He is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse.

His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection, "Leaves of Grass," which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality.

Born on Long Island, Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, a government clerk and — in addition to publishing his poetry — was a volunteer nurse during the American Civil War. Early in his career, he also produced a temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842).

Whitman's major work, Leaves of Grass, was first published in 1855 with his own money. The work was an attempt at reaching out to the common person with an American epic. He continued expanding and revising it until his death in 1892. After a stroke towards the end of his life, he moved to Camden, New Jersey, where his health further declined.

He died at age 72 and his funeral became a public spectacle.

Whitman was concerned with politics throughout his life. He supported the Wilmot Proviso and opposed the extension of slavery generally. His poetry presented an egalitarian view of the races, and at one point he called for the abolition of slavery, but later he saw the abolitionist movement as a threat to democracy.

Moondog was born 106 years ago today

Moondog, 1964

Photo by Richard Dumas

Louis Thomas Hardin, better known as Moondog, was born 106 years ago today.

A composer, musician, poet and inventor of several musical instruments, Hardin was blind from the age of 16. In New York City from the late 1940s until he left in 1972, he could often be found on 6th Avenue between 52nd and 55th Street wearing a cloak and Viking-style helmet — sometimes busking or selling music — but often just standing silent and still.

He was widely recognized as "the Viking of 6th Avenue" by thousands of passersby and residents who had no idea that this seemingly homeless eccentric standing on "Moondog's corner" was a respected and recorded composer and musician.

Born to an Episcopalian family in Marysville, Kansas, Hardin started playing a set of drums that he made from a cardboard box at the age of five. His family relocated to Wyoming and his father opened a trading post at Fort Bridger.

Hardin attended school in a couple of small towns. At one point, his father took him to an Arapaho Sun Dance where he sat on the lap of Chief Yellow Calf and played a tom-tom made from buffalo skin.

Hardin played drums for the high school band in Hurley, Missouri before losing his sight in a farm accident involving a dynamite cap at the age of 16. After learning the principles of music in several schools for blind young men across middle America, he taught himself the skills of ear training and composition. He studied with Burnet Tuthill and at the Iowa School for the Blind.

Hardin moved to Batesville, Arkansas where he lived until 1942, when he got a scholarship to study in Memphis. Although the majority of his musical training was self-taught by ear, he learned some music theory from books in braille there.

Hardin moved to New York in 1943, where he met noted classical music luminaries such as Leonard Bernstein and Arturo Toscanini, as well as legendary jazz performer-composers such as Charlie Parker and Benny Goodman, whose upbeat tempos and often humorous compositions would influence Hardin's later work.

From the late 1940s until 1972, Moondog lived as a street musician and poet in New York City, busking in midtown Manhattan, eventually settling on the corner of 53rd or 54th Street and 6th Avenue in Manhattan. He was not homeless however, or at least not often. He maintained an apartment in upper Manhattan and had a country retreat in Candor, NY, to which he moved in 1972.

He partially supported himself by selling copies of his poetry and his musical philosophy. In addition to his music and poetry, he was also known for the distinctive fanciful "Viking" cloak that he wore.

Already bearded and long-haired, he added a Viking-style horned helmet to avoid the occasional comparisons of his appearance with that of Christ or a monk, as he had rejected Christianity in his late teens. He developed a lifelong interest in Nordic mythology, and maintained an altar to Thor in his country home in Candor.

In 1947, Hardin had adopted the pen name, "Moondog," in honor of a dog "who used to howl at the moon more than any dog I knew of." In 1949, he traveled to a Blackfoot Sun Dance in Idaho, where he performed on percussion and flute, returning to the Native American music he first came in contact with as a child.

It was this Native music, along with contemporary jazz and classical, mixed with the ambient sounds from his environment (city traffic, ocean waves, babies crying, etc.) that created the foundation of Moondog's music.

In 1954, he won a case in the New York State Supreme Court against disc jockey Alan Freed, who had branded his radio show, "The Moondog Rock and Roll Matinee," around the name "Moondog" using "Moondog's Symphony" (the first record that Moondog ever cut) as his "calling card."

Moondog believed he would not have won the case had it not been for the help of musicians such as Benny Goodman and Arturo Toscanini, who testified that he was a serious composer. Freed had to apologize and stop using the nickname "Moondog" on air, on the basis that Hardin was known by the name long before Freed began using it.

Moondog's music took inspiration from street sounds, such as the subway or a foghorn. It was characterized by what he called "snaketime" and described as "a slithery rhythm, in times that are not ordinary [...] I'm not gonna die in 4/4 time.“ Many of his works were highly contrapuntal, and he worked hard on perfecting his counterpoint, criticizing Bach for his many "mistakes."

Moondog's work was early championed by Artur Rodziński, the conductor of New York Philharmonic in the 1940s. He released a number of 78"s, 45"s and EPs of his music in the 1950s, as well as several LPs on a number of notable jazz labels, including an unusual record of stories and songs for children with Julie Andrews and Martyn Green, in 1957, called Songs of Sense and Nonsense - Tell it Again.

The music of Moondog of the 1940s and 50s is said to have been a strong influence on many early minimalist composers. Philip Glass has written that he and Steve Reich took Moondog's work "very seriously and understood and appreciated it much more than what we were exposed to at Juilliard."'

A documentary about Moondog’s life, "The Viking of Sixth Avenue," is in production.

Moondog died on Sept. 8, 1999 at the age of 83.

Here’s the trailer to “The Viking of Sixth Avenue”

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born 219 years ago today

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born 219 years ago today.

Emerson was an essayist, lecturer and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society.

Emerson disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States. He gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature.

Following this ground-breaking work, he gave a speech — "The American Scholar" — in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. considered to be America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence.” Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first, then revised them for print.

His first two collections of essays – Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series, published respectively in 1841 and 1844 – represent the core of his thinking. They include such well-known essays as Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet and Experience.

Together with Nature, these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period. He wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for humankind to realize almost anything and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world.

Emerson's "nature" was more philosophical than naturalistic: "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul." His essays remain among the linchpins of American thinking, and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that have followed him.

When asked to sum up his work, he said his central doctrine was "the infinitude of the private man."

Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of fellow Transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau.

Here, is a short video on Emerson in Concord, Massachusetts

Raymond Carver was born 84 years ago today

Raymond Carver was born 84 years ago today.

Carver was an American short story writer and poet, and contributed to the revitalization of the American short story in literature during the 1980s.

Born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a mill town on the Columbia River, Carver grew up in Yakima, Washington, the son of Elta Beatrice (Casey) and Clevie Raymond Carver. His father, a skilled sawmill worker from Arkansas, was a fisherman and heavy drinker. Carver's mother worked on and off as a waitress and a retail clerk. He had one brother.

Carver was educated at local schools in Yakima, Washington. In his spare time, he read mostly novels by Mickey Spillane or publications such as Sports Afield and Outdoor Life, and hunted and fished with friends and family.

After graduating from Yakima High School in 1956, Carver worked with his father at a sawmill in California. In June, 1957, at age 19, he married 16-year-old Maryann Burk, who had just graduated from a private Episcopal school for girls. Their daughter, Christine La Rae, was born in December, 1957. Their second child, a boy named Vance Lindsay, was born the next year when Carver was 20.

He supported his family by working as a delivery man, janitor, library assistant and sawmill laborer. During their marriage, Maryann also supported the family by working as an administrative assistant and a high school English teacher, salesperson and waitress.

Carver became interested in writing in California, where he had moved with his family because his mother-in-law had a home in Paradise. He attended a creative writing course taught by the novelist, John Gardner, who became a mentor and had a major influence on Carver's life and career.

His first published story, The Furious Seasons, appeared in 1961. More florid than his later work, the story strongly bore the influence of William Faulkner. Furious Seasons was later used as a title for a collection of stories published by Capra Press, and can now be found in the recent collections, No Heroics, Please and Call If You Need Me.

Carver’s first short story collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, was published in 1976. The collection itself was shortlisted for the National Book Award, though it sold fewer than 5,000 copies that year. During his years of working different jobs, rearing children and trying to write, Carver started to drink heavily.

By his own admission, eventually he more or less gave up writing and took to full-time drinking. In the fall semester of 1973, Carver was a visiting lecturer in the Iowa Writers' Workshop with John Cheever, but Carver stated that they did less teaching than drinking and almost no writing.

The next year, after leaving Iowa City, Carver went to a treatment center to attempt to overcome his alcoholism. However, he continued drinking for three years. After being hospitalized three times (between June, 1976 and February or March, 1977), Carver began his "second life" and stopped drinking on June 2, 1977, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Carver — who continued to smoke marijuana and experimented with cocaine at the behest of Jay McInerney during a 1980 visit to New York City — believed he would have died of alcoholism at the age of 40 if he hadn't found a way to stop drinking.

On August 2, 1988, Carver died from lung cancer at the age of 50.

Above, Carver in 1984

Photo by Bob Adelman

Robert Creeley, poet, was born 97 years ago

Robert Creeley, poet, was born 97 years ago.

Creeley wrote more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn.

Creeley served as the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities at State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1991, he joined colleagues Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Raymond Federman, Robert Bertholf and Dennis Tedlock in founding the Poetics Program at Buffalo.

Creeley lived in Waldoboro, Maine; Buffalo, New York; and Providence, Rhode Island, where he taught at Brown University. He was a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.

Creeley died at sunrise on March 30, 2005 in Odessa, Texas of complications from pneumonia.

Above, Creeley in 1972

Photo by Elsa Dorfman

On this day in 1897 — 125 years ago — writer Oscar Wilde was released from jail after two years of hard labor. His experiences in prison were the basis for his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)

On this day in 1897 — 125 years ago — writer Oscar Wilde was released from jail after two years of hard labor. His experiences in prison were the basis for his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898).

Wilde was born and educated in Ireland. He studied at Oxford, graduated with honors in 1878 and remained in London. He became a popular society figure valued at dinner parties for his witty remarks.

Embracing the late 19th century aesthetic movement, which embraced art for art's sake, Wilde adopted the flamboyant style of a passionate poet and self-published a volume of verse in 1881.

He spent the following year in the United States lecturing on poetry and art. Wilde's dapper wardrobe and excessive devotion to art were parodied in Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta, Patience, in 1882.

After returning to Britain, Wilde married and had two children. In 1888, he published a collection of fairy tales he wrote for his children. Meanwhile, he wrote reviews and became editor of Women's World. In 1891, his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was published.

He wrote his first play, The Duchess of Padua, the same year and wrote five more before his arrest. His most successful comedies, including The Importance of Being Earnest and Lady Windermere's Fan, are still performed today.

In 1891, the Marquess of Queensbury denounced Wilde as a homosexual. Wilde, who was involved with the marquess' son, sued the Marquess for libel but lost the case when evidence supported the marquess' allegations. Because homosexuality was still considered a crime in England, Wilde was arrested. Although his first trial resulted in a hung jury, a second jury sentenced him to two years of hard labor.

After his release, Wilde fled to Paris and began writing again. He died of acute meningitis just three years after his release.

Gary Snyder, San Francisco Renaissance poet, is 92 years old today

Gary Snyder, Gainesville, Florida, 1975, the day he won the Pulitzer Prize for "Turtle Island"

Photo by Frank Beacham

Gary Snyder, San Francisco Renaissance poet, is 92 years old today.

Also an essayist, lecturer and environmental activist (frequently described as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology"), Synder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His work, in his various roles, reflects an immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. Snyder has translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese.

For many years, Snyder served as a faculty member at the University of California, Davis, and he also served for a time on the California Arts Council.

Born in San Francisco to a family of German, Scots-Irish and English ancestry, Synder’s family, impoverished by the Great Depression, moved to King County, Washington, when he was two years old. There they tended dairy cows, kept laying hens, had a small orchard and made cedar-wood shingles, until moving to Portland, Oregon ten years later. At the age of seven, Snyder was laid up for four months by an accident.

"My folks brought me piles of books from the Seattle Public Library," he recalled in interview, "and it was then I really learned to read and from that time on was voracious — I figure that accident changed my life. At the end of four months, I had read more than most kids do by the time they're eighteen. And I didn't stop."

Also during his ten childhood years in Washington, Snyder became aware of the presence of the Coast Salish people and developed an interest in the Native American peoples in general and their traditional relationship with nature. In 1942, following his parents' divorce, Snyder moved to Portland, Oregon with his mother and his younger sister, Anthea.

Their mother, Lois Snyder Hennessy (born Wilkey), worked during this period as a reporter for The Oregonian. One of Gary's boyhood jobs was as a newspaper copy boy, also at the Oregonian. Also, during his teen years, he attended Lincoln High School, worked as a camp counselor and went mountain climbing with the Mazamas youth group. Climbing remained an interest of his, especially during his twenties and thirties.

In 1947, he started attending Reed College on a scholarship. Here he met, and for a time roomed with the education author, Carl Proujan, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. At Reed, Snyder published his first poems in a student journal. He also spent the summer of 1948 working as a seaman. He joined the now defunct Marine Cooks and Stewards union to get this job and would later work as a seaman in the mid-1950s to gain experience of other cultures in port cities.

Snyder married Alison Gass in 1950. They separated after seven months and divorced in 1953. While attending Reed, Snyder did folklore research on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in central Oregon. He graduated with a dual degree in anthropology and literature in 1951. He spent the following few summers working as a timber scaler at Warm Springs, developing relationships with its people that were less rooted in academia.

This experience formed the basis for some of his earliest published poems (including "A Berry Feast"), later collected in his book, The Back Country. He also encountered the basic ideas of Buddhism and, through its arts, some of the Far East's traditional attitudes toward nature.

He went to Indiana University with a graduate fellowship to study anthropology, (Snyder also began practicing self-taught Zen meditation). He left after a single semester to return to San Francisco and to “sink or swim as a poet.”

Snyder worked for two summers in the North Cascades in Washington as a fire lookout, on Crater Mountain in 1952 and Sourdough Mountain (both locations on the upper Skagit River) in 1953. His attempts to get another lookout stint in 1954 (at the peak of McCarthyism), however, failed.

He had been barred from working for the government, due to his above-mentioned association with the Marine Cooks and Stewards. Instead, he went back to Warm Springs to work in logging as a chokersetter (fastening cables to logs). This experience contributed to his Myths and Texts and the essay, Ancient Forests of the Far West.

Back in San Francisco, Snyder lived with Whalen, who shared his growing interest in Zen. Snyder's reading of the writings of D.T. Suzuki had in fact been a factor in his decision not to continue as a graduate student in anthropology. In 1953, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley to study Asian culture and languages.

Snyder studied ink and wash painting under Chiura Obata and Tang Dynasty poetry under Ch'en Shih-hsiang. He continued to spend summers working in the forests, including one summer as a trail-builder in Yosemite. He spent some months in 1955 and 1956 living in a cabin (which he dubbed "Marin-an") outside Mill Valley, California with Jack Kerouac.

It was also at this time that Snyder was an occasional student at the American Academy of Asian Studies, where Saburō Hasegawa and Alan Watts, among others, were teaching. Hasegawa introduced Snyder to the treatment of landscape painting as a meditative practice. This inspired Snyder to attempt something equivalent in poetry, and with Hasegawa's encouragement, he began work on Mountains and Rivers without End, which would be completed and published forty years later.

During these years, Snyder was writing and collecting his own work, as well as embarking on the translation of the "Cold Mountain" poems by the eighth century Chinese recluse, Han Shan. This work appeared in chapbook-form in 1969, under the title, Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems.

Snyder met Allen Ginsberg when the latter sought Snyder out on the recommendation of Kenneth Rexroth. Then, through Ginsberg, Snyder and Kerouac came to know each other. This period provided the materials for Kerouac's novel, The Dharma Bums, and Snyder was the inspiration for the novel's main character, Japhy Ryder, in the same way Neal Cassady had inspired Dean Moriarty in On the Road.

As the large majority of people in the Beat movement had urban backgrounds, writers like Ginsberg and Kerouac found Snyder, with his backcountry and manual-labor experience and interest in things rural, a refreshing and almost exotic individual.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti later referred to Snyder as “the Thoreau of the Beat Generation.”

Snyder read his poem, "A Berry Feast," at the poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco (October 7, 1955) that heralded what was to become known as the San Francisco Renaissance. This also marked Snyder's first involvement with the Beats, although he was not a member of the original New York circle, but rather entered the scene through his association with Kenneth Rexroth.

As recounted in Kerouac's Dharma Bums, even at age 25, Snyder felt he could have a role in the fateful future meeting of West and East. Snyder's first book, Riprap, which drew on his experiences as a forest lookout and on the trail-crew in Yosemite, was published in 1959.

Independently, some of the Beats, including Philip Whalen, had become interested in Zen, but Snyder was one of the more serious scholars of the subject among them, preparing in every way he could think of for eventual study in Japan.

In 1955, the First Zen Institute of America offered him a scholarship for a year of Zen training in Japan, but the State Department refused to issue him a passport, informing him that "it has been alleged you are a Communist."

A subsequent District of Columbia Court of Appeals ruling forced a change in policy, and Snyder got his passport. In the end, his expenses were paid by Ruth Fuller Sasaki, for whom he was supposed to work.

During the period between 1956 and 1969, Snyder went back and forth between California and Japan, studying Zen, working on translations with Sasaki, and finally living for a while with a group of other people on the small, volcanic island of Suwanosejima.

During this time, he published a collection of his poems from the early to mid '50s, Myths & Texts (1960), and Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers Without End (1965). This last was the beginning of a project that he was to continue working on until the late 1990s.

Much of Snyder's poetry expresses experiences, environments and insights involved with the work he has done for a living: logger, fire-lookout, steam-freighter crew, translator, carpenter and itinerant poet.

In the early 1960s, he traveled for six months through India with his wife Joanne, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. Snyder and Joanne Kyger separated soon after a trip to India and divorced in 1965.

In 1966, Snyder joined Allen Ginsberg, Zentatsu Richard Baker, Roshi of the San Francisco Zen Center and Donald Wolters, aka "Swami Kriyananda," to buy 100 acres in the Sierra foothills, north of Nevada City, California. In 1970, this would become his home, with the Snyder family's portion being named Kitkitdizze.

He continued to publish poetry throughout the 1970s, much of it reflecting his re-immersion in life on the American continent and his involvement in the back-to-the-land movement in the Sierra foothills.

His 1974 book, Turtle Island, titled after a Native American name for the North American continent, won a Pulitzer Prize. It also influenced numerous West Coast Generation X writers, including Alex Steffen, Bruce Barcott and Mark Morford.

In 1986, Snyder became a professor in the writing-program at the University of California, Davis. Here he began to influence a new generation of authors interested in writing about the Far East, including Robert Clark Young, whom he mentored. Snyder is now professor emeritus of English. Snyder's life and work was celebrated in John J. Healy's 2010 documentary, The Practice of the Wild.

In a 1974 interview at the University of North Dakota Writers Conference, Snyder said: “I never did know exactly what was meant by the term 'The Beats', but let's say that the original meeting, association, comradeship of Allen [Ginsberg], myself, Michael [McClure], Lawrence [Ferlinghetti], Philip Whalen, who's not here, Lew Welch, who's dead, Gregory [Corso], for me, to a somewhat lesser extent (I never knew Gregory as well as the others) did embody a criticism and a vision which we shared in various ways, and then went our own ways for many years.

“Where we began to come really close together again, in the late '60s, and gradually working toward this point, it seems to me, was when Allen began to take a deep interest in Oriental thought and then in Buddhism which added another dimension to our levels of agreement; and later through Allen's influence, Lawrence began to draw toward that; and from another angle, Michael and I after the lapse of some years of contact, found our heads very much in the same place, and it's very curious and interesting now; and Lawrence went off in a very political direction for awhile, which none of us had any objection with, except that wasn't my main focus.

“It's very interesting that we find ourselves so much on the same ground again, after having explored divergent paths; and find ourselves united on this position of powerful environmental concern, critique of the future of the individual state, and an essentially shared poetics, and only half-stated but in the background very powerfully there, a basic agreement on some Buddhist type psychological views of human nature and human possibilities.”

Snyder added: "The term Beat is better used for a smaller group of writers ... the immediate group around Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, plus Gregory Corso and a few others. Many of us ... belong together in the category of the San Francisco Renaissance. ... Still, beat can also be defined as a particular state of mind ... and I was in that mind for a while.”

Here is the trailer for Snyder’s “The Practice of the Wild”

Rod McKuen, poet, songwriter, composer and singer, was born 89 years ago today

Rod McKuen, poet, songwriter, composer and singer, was born 89 years ago today.

McKuen was one of the best-selling poets in the United States during the late 1960s, though his work was largely panned by critics as being syrupy and second rate. He died January 29, 2015 at age 81.

Pulitzer Prize-winning U.S. Poet Laureate Karl Shapiro said: "It is irrelevant to speak of McKuen as a poet."

That said, as a 13-year-old kid growing up in the small town of Honea Path, South Carolina, I was excited to see this “famous poet” visit our tiny town of less than 3,000 people in 1961. He was promoting his big hit, “Oliver Twist,” at the time.

McKuen was at a car dealership and signed this card (below), which I kept through the years. He was 28 years old at the time.