The parallels are most apparent when we take items from Ong's list of "characteristics of orally based thought and expression" (Ong 1982), and compare some examples of Beat writing against certain of his characteristics (13). According to some of Ong's characteristics, orally based thought and expression is:

1. Additive rather than subordinative: Ong uses as an example a passage from Genesis, pointing out the repeated use of introductory "ands". I would cite the final paragraph of Kerouac's On the Road as a comparable example in the Beat canon:

   So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peak and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarity, I even think of old Dean Moriarity, the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarity.

2. Aggregative rather than analytic: Ong: "oral expression thus carries a load of epithets and other formulary baggage which high literacy rejects as cumbersome and tiresomely redundant because of its aggregative weight." Compare this with Kerouac's call for "the infantile pileup of scatalogical buildup words till satisfaction is gained" in his statement on poetics (Allen 1965).

3. Redundant or copious: again, "the infantile pileup of scatalogical buildup words" seems relevant. The repetition of "I think of Dean Moriarity" in the above passage illustrates this, as does Ginsberg's repetition of phrases in Howl.

4. Close to the human lifeworld: Allen Ginsberg's discovery that even his journal writings could be the the raw material of poetry (cited above) is relevant here, as is the Beat emphasis on using the language of the street, rather than a contrived, "academic" vocabulary.

• There are similarities between the use of the vernacular in the early days of print, and the Beat writer's use of the language of the streets, mentioned above. Lew Welch points out in an interview that "the difference between the ordinary kind of language that we use everyday and the language that we call poetry is very slim when we have great poets working" (Meltzer 1971).

• Lew Welch makes the following statement linking poetry to song, in a 1969 discussion of his poetics (collected in Meltzer, 1971):

  The poem should be able to be spoken so that the performance is just as much a part of it. ... In other words, what you do when you write down a poem is that you are transcribing a voice. You are not learning how to read the poem, you are learning how to write the song. For me, poetry is the sound of a man in words. And it partakes of song, of chanting, of prayer, of all the things we do when we intensify language.

• Allen Ginsberg description of how, "ideally each line of Howl is a single breath unit" (Allen 1973) is, of course, an excellent illustration of the oral nature of his poetry.

• Gary Snyder speaks of how, following the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, poetry readings came to play a very important role for the Beat writers, not necessarily as a subsitute for publication, but as an important complement to it, helping to build an audience (Snyder 1980):

  Building that audience is done in part by going on the road and using your voice and your body to put the poems out there; and to speak to the people's condition, as the Quakers would say, to speak to the conditions of your own times, and not worry about posterity. [...] So poetry readings as a new cultural form enhanced and strengthened poetry itself, and the role of the poet. They also taught us that poetry really is an oral art.

• Michael McClure's experiments with Beast (or "grahhr") language as first used in his play ! The Feast ! (McClure 1972), strike me as being an extreme example of the attempt to return to a stronger orality in Beat poetry: if Kerouac, with his Spontaneous Prose, is attempting to rid writing of conscious intervention, McClure takes things one step further, exploring language as a biological function.

• The connection between the Beat writers and jazz is fertile ground for exploration, both in terms of jazz's "oral attributes" (Ong cites a Yugoslavian Bard who never "rhapsodized" a lengthy song the same way twice, in the same way that a jazz musician will improvise upon a theme), and the Beat writers' self-association of their work with jazz music: Kerouac calls his poems in Mexico City Blues "choruses," and says "I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday. I take 242 choruses; my ideas vary and sometimes roll from chorus to chorus or from halfway through a chorus to halfway through the next" (Kerouac 1959).

• Lawrence Ferlinghetti's biographer also addresses the jazz-Beat link, saying that (Silesky 1990):

  the combination of poetry and jazz seemed a logical extension of both forms. Poetry had been, after all, an oral medium in the beginning, and all good poets still composed with close attention to the sound of their words, to the rhythm of the line; to the "beat." And the irregular, improvisational rhythms of jazz seemed naturally suited to poetry. The solo techniques and unpredictable movements as the piece unwound corresponded to the movement of modern free-verse poems.

Unspeakable Visions: The Beat Generation and The Bohemian Dialectic. © August, 1991 Michael Hayward