(1) Much of the formal poetics of the beat writers and a number of their contemporaries are documented in two books edited by Donald Allen for Grove Press: The Poetics of the New American Poetry (Allen 1973) and New American Story (Allen 1965). (Back to reference)
(2) The president of Doubleday, for example, estimates that Doubleday receives "an average of ten thousand unsolicited manuscripts a year, out of which three of four may be chosen for publication" (Coser 1982). (Back to reference)
(3) Allen Ginsberg saw the modernist movement, exemplified by William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, as one of the central literary traditions that the Beats were heir to, and he considered the Black Mountain Review to be the bridge between the modernists and the Beats. (Back to reference)
(4) Anne Waldman was later to found, with Allen Ginsberg, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Boulder's Naropa Institute. (Back to reference)
(5) Literary magazines were not the only magazines which gave the Beat writers a national exposure. Seymour Krim describes an "alternative" magazine outlet for Beat writing during the early sixties (Krim 1978):
I edited a "Beat Section" for the girlie mag Swank and then moved my operation to the more classily tits-and-assed Nugget from 1961 to 1965. Along the way, right through the legs of the photos you might say, we published Kerouac, Ginsberg, Mailer, di Prima, O'Hara, Selby, Terry Southern, John Clellon Holmes, [...] just about everybody [...] who was closely or tangentially connected with the Beat impact.(Back to reference)
(6) Lawrence Ferlinghetti felt that the Howl precedent went even further with Grove, saying in a recent interview that Barney Rosset "wouldn't have gone on to publish Miller's Tropics [in 1961] if the Howl trial didn't set a precedent" (Guntarski 1990). (Back to reference)
(7) The American publication was delayed while Grove fought the legal battles surrounding Tropic of Cancer. (Back to reference)
(8) Following his association with Grove Press, Donald Allen moved back out to the West Coast, where he founded his own small press: Grey Fox, which published a number of works by the Beat writers, including Lew Welch and Allen Ginsberg. (Back to reference)
(9) San Francisco Blues was later published in a 1983 bootleg edition in Bristol, England. (Back to reference)
(10) Included were recipes for a "Kerouac Kocktail" ("named for the one who started the whole rat race"), "Subterranean Spudniks" ("supplied by a young Beat doll who is also the mother of three Beatlets"), "Haiku Hash" ("carried far and wide by On-the-roaders as they visit and exchange rituals and traditions with other Beats everywhere"), and "Ginsburgers." (Back to reference)
(11) It is interesting to note the changes in the way that these books were presented throughout their various editions. On the Road's first paperback edition in 1958 trumpeted that it was "the bible of the 'beat generation'," chronicling "wild drives across America . . . buying cars, wrecking cars, stealing cars, dumping cars, picking up girls, making love, all-night drinking bouts, jazz joints, wild parties, hot spots . . . This is the odyssey of the Beat Generation, the frenetic young men and their women restlessly racing from New York to San Francisco, from Mexico to New Orleans in a frantic search - for Kicks and Truth." The 1967 edition dropped all references to the Beat Generation on the cover copy, instead calling the work "the riotous odyssey of two American drop-outs, by the drop-out who started it all." Jack Kerouac is further referred to as the "Hippie Homer of the turned-on generation, shocking the country from coast to coast with this wild odyssey of two drop-outs who swing across America wrecking and rioting - making it with sex, jazz, and drink as they Make the Scene." (Back to reference)
(12) Ironically this tendency to Romanticization derives from the same process of simplification and reduction to stereotype which had generated the original image of the Beatnik during the fifties. (Back to reference)
(13) Note that not all of Ong's characteristics have parallels in the Beats, at least not in an immediately obvious way. For example his "Conservative or traditionalist" characteristic may be hard to reconcile with the anything-but-traditional tone of Beat writing. (Back to reference)