Culturally, jazz and Beats are often linked through a variety of similar characteristics, but the influence jazz had on Beat poetry cannot be overstated. Beat poets were overwhelmingly influenced by moves made by jazz musicians in the 1940s and ‘50s. Aspects of jazz are easily identifiable within Beat poetics: the focus on the breath of a line, the spontaneity of the writing, and the educated barbarism. These are all characteristics shared between jazz and the Beats.
Part of the Beats literary style includes a line length based on respiration. Charles Olson believed in the breath of the line, that every line break should reflect a natural respiratory pause. John Osborne notes in “Black Mountain and Projective Verse” that “whenever the poet feels the need for a fresh intake of breath, he or she should signal this fact to the reader by a line-break. Lineation thus becomes a function of respiration” (171). As Kerouac states on method in his essay “Essentials of Prose” (which Ronna C. Johnson quotes in “Three Generations of Beat Poetics”), “No periods separating sentence-structures already arbitrarily riddles by false colons and timid usually needless commas — but the vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing breath between outblown phrases)” (744). This technique has a direct link to the jazz musicians of the day, how jazz musicians rely on the breath as a “physiological thing” (85). This technique is a departure from existing modernist poetics, which called for a lyrical quality based on the sounds of the words. The Beats focused more on the origin of the breath sound, the syllable as the smallest part of the line.
Beyond this focus was a celebration of the spontaneous outpouring of emotions. Beat poetics required a practiced air of spontaneity, as Osborne explains in “The Beats.” Much of their poetry appears to be created upon first draft, but the poems underwent revisions that crafted the poems into something more. One of the most celebrated poems of the Beat era is “Howl,” which Ginsberg revised and published in several versions (188). Even Kerouac’s novel On the Road was “the mature product of ten years’ graft by several pairs of hands” (188). In a similar manner, jazz was the result of practiced spontaneity. Jazz musicians played riffs of music without prior planning, but their hours of practice allowed them to perfect the technique, something Osborne explains Bukowski did with his poetry to create a similar effect. Bukowski, according to Osborne, drafted “different poems and stories for approximately a quarter of a century before arriving at a style a reputable publisher thought worth preserving” and he also gave the editor a “carte blanche” to pick and choose poems from the material he sent him (188-189).
Also within jazz was a sense of educated barbarism. In Beat poetics, this aspect is described as an elevated intellectual writing style combined with harsh, cruel, or barbaric content and narrative events (189-190). Beat poetry used allusions to many highly intellectual references, texts, philosophical theories, and more, but the content was more raw and brutal, creating juxtaposition. Osborne explains that, despite the Beats anti-intelligence attitudes, their writing was often “erudite, bookish, sedentary” (191). Jazz, on the other hand, created an educated barbarism in a different way. The complexity of the music musicians played in contrast with the harsh, depressing, often forlorn lyrics revealed an intellectual capacity for music, but a deep and disturbing awareness of the human capacity for sorrow and cruelty. But where jazz was able to make peace with its use of musical genius and its content, the Beat poets, according to Osborne, kept “wobbling between shame and pride in their own scholarliness, lurching from the crudest anti-intellectualism to dandified flaunting of artistic knowingness” (190). Osborne points out that many of the Beat poets wanted to include very simplistic, anti-intellectual meanings within their poems, but they just cannot completely shed their intellectual heritage.
The influences of jazz on Beat poetics are far more reaching than a simple blog post can encompass, but the similarities between the two can speak for the culture’s artistic conversation, the exchange among artistic mediums to improve, expand, improvise, and experiment to reach the best possible art form.
Question for Further Consideration: What other elements of jazz are present in the Beat poems we’ve read? What methods of creating/practicing jazz music are similar to the Beat poets’ methods? Did jazz have a negative influence on Beat poetics?
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