I can almost see and smell the smoke filled cafe with the small crowd that has gathered and seated themselves at the tiny tables centered with candles at dusk as the author takes the stage to spill his beaten soul to the weary who wait and listen with the sound of blues played with heart.

'Beat Poetry'...a movement beginning in the early 1950's with a phrase coined in the late 1940's. It was considered more of a slang term used in America after World War II. It means exhausted or beat down with a taste of jazz rustling in its bones.

It is a word that is used to describe carnies from the circus or carnival world and also used in reference to drugs as meaning robbed or cheated. In 1945 Herbert Huncke introduced the word to William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac intending the definition toward him self or against him self, and with this introduction the 'Beat Generation' was born.

The Window by Diane Di Prima

you are my bread
and the hairline noise
of my bones
you are almost
the sea

you are not stone
or molten sound
I think
you have no hands

this kind of bird flies backwards
and this love
breaks on a windowpane
where no light talks

this is not the time
for crossing tongues
(the sand here never shifts)

I think
tomorrow
turned you with his toe
and you will
shine
and shine
unspent and underground

This poem is written in the style of Beat and by one of the few prominent female writers of this form.

"The point of Beat is that you get beat down to a certain nakedness where you actually are able to see the world in a visionary way, which is the old classical understanding of what happens in the dark night of the soul." (quote from The Beat Page)

I am including a few of the writers considered part of the 'beat generation' along with a list of beat books, the top ten actually posted by The Beat Page. 

• 'Beat Generation' with their works:

• Bob Kaufman
• Frank O'Hara
• Peter Orlovsky
• Leroi Jones
• Philip Whalen

• Top Ten Beat Books (from The Beat Page):

• Beat Generation: Glory Days in Greenwich Village
   
• Portable Beat Reader
• On the Road
• Howl & Other Poems
• Coney Island of the Mind
• Naked Lunch
• Huge Dreams
• No Nature: New & Selected Poems
• Selected Poems
• Junky