Beat Poetry.

Beat poetry is essentially roughed up soulful poetic verses arranged to form a story. It is a genre of poetry, but also more widely recognized as a rebellious literary movement that opposed traditional societal views of the mid-20th century. The sentences are imbedded with music; each word intertwined with musical notes that almost float across a page.

Beat poets clung to this form of expression, often producing their work with jazz in the background. Poets have always been dreamers, but they were seen as more on the intellectual side before this literary movement developed. Beat poetry was weird, chaotic, and quite literally filled with graphic obscenities throughout each work.

Many important figures in this movement leaned towards the idea of sprinkling all your thoughts into a page without a second thought. There was often little emphasis on revision, quite literally just,

Oh yes, one popular phrase was, "first thought, best thought." Let your English teacher chew on that for a while.

Now here comes the unfortunate part. This style was male-dominated and quite frankly, many women in the movement faced sexism and misogyny. Yet it did produce some fine work by women who were associated with the Beats. Among them were poets Diane di Prima, who in 1961 co-founded (with Amiri Baraka, then known as LeRoi Jones) the literary journal The Floating Bear, Ruth Weiss, and Anne Waldman. Several women who were involved with this movement wrote compelling collections and publications based on their lives.

The first words that come to my mind when I think of beat poetry are wacky, surrealism, stinky (Come on half of them were on drugs), and liberating.

Popular themes that can be found in many texts are social-alienation, drug use (told you), political and social rebellion, free verse, and last but arguably one of the most important...emotionally centered.

People were experimenting with what they were writing, and that's what made it so uniquely special. Each word that you glance over as you read a beat poem entraps you in this ephemeral state of confusion. Well, at least it did for me.