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Exhibit, programs to examine counterculture poetry, 1950-1975 Print E-mail
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
The emergence and evolution of American counterculture poetry in the third quarter of the 20th century will be the topic of an exhibit April 21 through July 3 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Wilson Library.

“The Beats and Beyond: Counterculture Poetry, 1950-1975” will showcase approximately 120 publications, drawings, photos, and handwritten items associated with writers from groups including the Black Mountain poets, the Beats, the San Francisco Renaissance, and two generations of the New York School of Poets. The exhibit will also examine the literary counterculture’s engagement with issues including censorship, feminism, Black nationalism, and the Vietnam War.

A free public panel discussion about avant-garde poetry in post-World War II America will open the exhibit on April 23 at 6 p.m. in the Pleasants Family Assembly Room of Wilson Library. For program information, contact Liza Terll (919-962-4207 or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ).

Panel participants will be:
  • Bill Morgan (moderator), author, archivist and collector who was poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s personal bibliographer in the 1970s and later spent more than 15 years working with Allen Ginsberg.
  • Robert Cantwell, UNC professor of American studies, whose areas of expertise include the literature of the 1950s.
  • Ed Sanders of Woodstock, N.Y., a poet, writer and musician, author of “The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg: A Narrative Poem,” and a founder in 1965 of the band The Fugs.
  • Anne Waldman, poet and co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute (now University) in Boulder, Colo., where she currently is distinguished professor of writing and poetics.
Sanders and Waldman also will give a free public reading from their work on April 22 at 3:30 p.m. in the Bull’s Head Bookshop in the UNC Student Stores off South Road. For information, contact the Bull’s Head at (919) 962-5060.
   
“The Beats and Beyond” builds on successful UNC Library exhibits about Lawrence Ferlinghetti (2002), Allen Ginsberg (2004), and Jack Kerouac (2005) to launch a broader examination of American counterculture poetry between World War II and the Vietnam War, said Charles McNamara, curator of the Rare Book Collection in Wilson Library.

Poets represented include Ginsberg, Kerouac, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Diane di Prima, Michael McClure, Frank O’Hara and Amiri Baraka.

McNamara said that the library has been actively building major collections in these areas, and that many items will be on public display for the first time.

Some exhibit highlights will include:
  • One of approximately 25 mimeographed copies of Ginsberg’s 1956 poem “Howl”;
  • A 1970-71 manuscript journal by Beat poet Diane di Prima, the earliest of the 82 volumes held by UNC, spanning 20 years;
  • an unproduced play (ca. 1953) by New York School poet Frank O’Hara titled “Amorous Nightmares of Delay: An Eclogue”;
  • works by poets including Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Denise Levertov, who were associated during the 1950s with North Carolina’s Black Mountain College. Founded in 1933, the small, experimental college near Asheville lasted 24 years; and
  • a sampling of “little magazines” – small-run publications in which many poets published their work during the 1950s, as part of the so-called “mimeograph revolution.”
Visitors will be able to see the diversity of what was being produced and the highly collaborative relationships among many of the poets, said Sarah Fass, project librarian in the Rare Book Collection and curator of the “The Beats and Beyond.”

Fass said the exhibit also will show the importance of poetry as a force for change. “These writers believed that poetry could change the world,” she said. “They expected it to have an impact on the war and on society.”

For exhibit information, contact the Rare Book Collection at (919) 962-1143 or www.lib.unc.edu/rbc .

Images of items in “Beats and Beyond”:
http://www.lib.unc.edu/spotlight/media/images/BeatsBeyondWaldman.jpg
Cover of Anne Waldman’s “Fast Speaking Woman and Other Chants” (1975).

http://www.lib.unc.edu/spotlight/media/images/BeatsBeyondLastGathering.jpg
“Last Gathering of Beat Poets and Artists, North Beach, 1965.” Photo by Larry Keenan.

http://www.lib.unc.edu/spotlight/media/images/BeatsBeyondPowWow.jpg
“Pow-Wow: A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In.” Broadside advertising the Human Be-In in San Francisco, 1967.

Library contacts: Charles McNamara and Sarah Fass, (919) 962-1143, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Interview requests: Judith Panitch, (919) 962-1301, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
News Services contact: LJ Toler (919) 962-8589