European Beat Studies Network European Beat Studies Network

The 9th annual conference of the EBSN took place virtually 29-31 October 2021. This is one of a series of recordings from that event. More info, including participant bios, is on the website: https://ebsn.eu/ebsn-2021/
This panel, chaired by Peggy Pacini and moderated by Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo, is titled "Art and the Beat Generation"
Panelists/papers:
Beatriz Cordero: “Abstract Expressionists and the Beat Generation”
Daria Baryshnikova: “Art Language Radically Revised”
Tanguy Harma: “Counterculture, Counterpower? Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation”
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The 10th annual conference of the EBSN took place virtually 29-31 October 2021. This is the first part of a series of recordings from that event. More info is on the website: https://ebsn.eu/ebsn-2021/
Conference organizers Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo, Benjamin J. Heal, and Chad Weidner introduce the event, with a short speech from EBSN president Oliver Harris. The panel titled "Spiralling Back to the Beats’ Spiritual
Roots, Spiralling Forth to the Beats’ Neo-Shamanic Potential" is chaired by Franca Bellarsi.
Panelists/papers:
Sarah Biratate: “A Wordsworthian
Reading on Diane di Prima’s Quest for
Interfusion”
Anikó Juhász: “‘The Skeleton of My
Poetry’: The Beat Generation’s Influence
on Ferenc Juhász”
Jeremy Wastiaux: “The Ecopoetics of
Jack Kerouac: Dissipative Structures in
Visions of Cody and Mexico City Blues”
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Interview with Austria-based Beat Scholar, poet, filmmaker and musician Thomas Antonic. Discussion includes updates on the upcoming EBSN virtual conference EBSN2021, new content on the EBSN website, before focusing on the connections between the Beats and Austria, ruth weiss (including Thomas’s upcoming co-edited volume ruth weiss Beat Poetry, Jazz, Art , and film ruth weiss: One More Step West Is the Sea), and his recent Moloko Press book on William Burroughs’ time in Austria.
Ralf Friel's Moloko Records compilation featuring tracks utilizing cut-up techniques, including a track by Thomas: http://www.molokoplusrecords.de/finder.php?folder=Label&content=89
The re-issue of the 50 track William S. Burroughs Hurts album mentioned in the podcast was also released by moloko in 2019: http://www.molokoplusrecords.de/finder.php?folder=Label&content=77
A new William S. Burroughs Hurts single will come out later this year. Bandcamp page: https://wsbh.bandcamp.com/
The Fenn O'Berg track played is on this MEGO compilation: https://bleep.com/release/20813-fenn-oberg-magic-return
A cd featuring a ruth weiss performance Thomas recorded in oakland in 2017 came out on absurdia records in 2018, mastered by kramer: https://absurdia.bandcamp.com/releases
Benjamin J. Heal's third album under the name Coaxial came out this year on Cruel Nature Records: https://cruelnaturerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/neo-ism
His other albums (including a cut-up inspired by Burroughs expert Jim Pennington) can be found here: https://coaxial.bandcamp.com/
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Benjamin J. Heal and Erik Mortenson present an EBSN panel titled "Beat Internationalism" for the American Comparative Literature Association annual conference, April 2021. The recording of day 1, featuring Sonya Isaak and Esther Marinho Santana was unfortunately lost.
Abstract:
The Beat Generation as literary movement is usually regarded as quintessentially American, rooted in the great American tropes of free expression, border crossing and anti-materialism. Often overlooked in favor of other literary movements, this seminar proposes to look beyond the familiar figures of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs to investigate the relations between their works, aesthetics and techniques and those of Beat voices from across the globe. The shock waves of Howl's radical poetics, publicized via the anti-obscenity court case, and the success of On the Road, reverberated globally, and can be seen to form a foundation for experimental, politically radical works published around the world. Building on the developing and widening formulations of ‘Beat’ by scholars such as Jimmy Fazzino, this seminar will work towards a definition of ‘Beat Internationalism’ as applied to the works examined, and consider areas of convergence. More theoretical questions pertaining to the transnational turn in American literary studies, and the para-textual nature of Beat literature are also welcome. The Beat legacy continues to be felt across popular culture; with retrospectives and exhibitions featuring work by the Beats continuing to be a success. What do the Beats mean to contemporary audiences, and how are their techniques and styles employed in the works of contemporary writers and artists? How has the radicalism of the Beats manifested internationally?

Spain Beat: Influence and Assimilation of the Beat Generation in Spanish Poetry. Presenter
Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo
Polytechnic University of Cartagena (Spain)
 
Abstract Info
While the Beat Generation foundational texts were published in the mid to late 1950s – Howl (1956); On the Road (1957); and Naked Lunch (1959) – one had to wait over a decade for the first serious translations of Beat poetry to crack through a Spain still under Franco’s dictatorship. As if slipping through the fissures of the “apertura” (opening), the so-called diplomatic and economic new phase of Franco’s regime, Beat poetry started to slowly but steadily infiltrate the Spanish poetic sphere.
Nowadays, six decades after the first hints and murmurs about Beat poetry in Spain, a Beat ethos reverberates ever so strongly in different generations of Spanish poets. Beatitud: Beat Generation Visions (2011) and Hey Jack Kerouac: Beat Footprints in Spanish-speaking Poetry (2017), two recent anthologies which collect Spanish and Latin American poets directly influenced by the Beat Generation, attest to the still growing relevance of the Beat Generation across international waters. As the more than sixty poets included in their pages show, and as collections such as A. Robert Lee’s The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature (2018) or Erik Mortenson’s Translating the Counterculture (2018) also demonstrated, the Beat movement, more than quintessentially American, translates well internationally.
This presentation maps the influence and assimilation of the Beat Generation in Spanish poetry. After a brief contextualization of the Spanish literary scene when the first Beat encounters took place, this presentation focuses on the different ways in which contemporary poets such as Uberto Stabile (1959), Ángel Petisme (1961), Antonio de Egipto (1975), or Mónica Caldeiro (1984), transpose Beat aesthetics, themes, and sensibilities into their poetry. Through varied and heterogeneous strategies, these and other Spanish poets revisit and revive the Beat poem to fit their own artistic vision.
Speaker Bio
Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo, currently a lecturer at the Polytechnic University o

Benjamin J. Heal and Erik Mortenson present an EBSN panel titled "Beat Internationalism" for the American Comparative Literature Association annual conference, April 2021. The recording of day 1, featuring Sonya Isaak and Esther Marinho Santana was unfortunately lost.
Abstract:
The Beat Generation as literary movement is usually regarded as quintessentially American, rooted in the great American tropes of free expression, border crossing and anti-materialism. Often overlooked in favor of other literary movements, this seminar proposes to look beyond the familiar figures of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs to investigate the relations between their works, aesthetics and techniques and those of Beat voices from across the globe. The shock waves of Howl's radical poetics, publicized via the anti-obscenity court case, and the success of On the Road, reverberated globally, and can be seen to form a foundation for experimental, politically radical works published around the world. Building on the developing and widening formulations of ‘Beat’ by scholars such as Jimmy Fazzino, this seminar will work towards a definition of ‘Beat Internationalism’ as applied to the works examined, and consider areas of convergence. More theoretical questions pertaining to the transnational turn in American literary studies, and the para-textual nature of Beat literature are also welcome. The Beat legacy continues to be felt across popular culture; with retrospectives and exhibitions featuring work by the Beats continuing to be a success. What do the Beats mean to contemporary audiences, and how are their techniques and styles employed in the works of contemporary writers and artists? How has the radicalism of the Beats manifested internationally?

Li Yuan-chia’s Art and Transnationalism, a Connection with the Beat Generation. Presenter
Ya Chu Fu
Independent Scholar
 
Abstract Info
The article discusses how the Chinese artist Li Yuan-chia’s life philosophy and experiences as well as his art style resonates with the Beat Generation, in terms of the historical context of the Post-World War 2 period and their similar experimentalism and transnationalism. Li was born in China, and he later moved to Taiwan, Italy, and finally settled in the UK. The reason he kept moving has a lot to do with historical context in Taiwan, for instance, the 2nd KMT-CPC civil war（1945-1950), and the ‘White Terror’ (1947-1987). At the same time the writers, and often overlooked artists, of the Beat Generation- were experiencing similar political events, the Cold War between the US and Russia, and McCarthyism, in the US. Li Yuan-chia’s art utilizes the simplicity and minimalism of East-Asian visual art and Japanese Haiku and combines with Western Avant-guard styles, such as abstract expressionism. He often paints with calligraphic symbols with ink backgrounds and abstract blocks of colors. Interestingly, one of the artists associated with the Beat Generation, Brion Gysin, also experimented with abstract ink roller poems. If we put their works together, we can see a lot of similarities between them. This paper will explore Li Yuan-chia’s Beat connections and make comparisons between his life and work and that of Beat artists and writers, for example, Brion Gysin's paintings and permutation poems, and Bernice Bing and Jay DeFeo's abstract and minimalistic artworks and Beat sensibility.
Speaker Bio
Fu Ya Chu, graduated in 2019 from National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan, with a first-class honors degree in Psychology and Philosophy. She has an ongoing interest in visual art, literature, and translation, having translated letters of Taiwanese Modernist novelist Qi Deng Sheng and Professor A Robert Lee's poetry. She plans to study for a master's degree in comparative literature in the UK, and continue her research on Li Yuan-chia and Hong Kong writer Eileen Chung.
 
Hsia Yu: Translingual Cut-ups Presenter
Benjamin Heal -
National C

Estíbaliz Encarnación Pinedo presents a panel titled “Beat generation goddess ruth weiss (re)considered” for the British Association of American Studies digital conference, April 8, 2021, in support of the book ruth weiss Beat Poetry, Jazz, Art (De Gruyter 2021).
European Beat Studies Network
BAAS
Chad Weidner Reaching Towards the Light: Transitory Spaces and the Negated Material Body in Selected Texts by ruth weiss
Ben Heal ruth weiss: Transnationalism and Resistance
Polina Mackay ruth weiss and the Poetics of the Desert
Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo Gender and identity in ruth weiss
Stefanie Pointl Place, Movement, and Identity in ruth weiss’s Poetry
Peggy Pacini ruth weiss: a poetics grounded in intermediality and performance
Frida Forsgren ruth weiss and painted haikus
Thomas Antonic The ruth weiss Papers
Abstract: This session brings together a selection of European Beat Studies Network members to
redress, and in some cases introduce, the work produced by Beat-associated poet ruth weiss (1928-
2020). Conceived as flash presentations (limited to 10 minutes followed by workshop-like discussions)
the aim is to offer a wide selection of critical and aesthetic points of entrance into weiss’s work.
Chair: Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo
ruth weiss: Transnationalism and Resistance
Benjamin J. Heal resituates and recovers the work of weiss through a transnational context of poetic
experimentalism, outlining the many liminalities in her life, art and writing, with a particular focus on her ongoing attack on the conventions of authorship and constructions of the singular literary genius
through the use of contradiction, collaboration and various forms of multimedia expression.
ruth weiss and the Poetics of the Desert
Polina Mackay explores ruth weiss’ depiction of the desert as a multifaceted symbol of contrasting
values. She compares weiss’s images of the desert as a local of both light and shadow or life and death to the socio political poems of poets like Sandra Osborne which write against America’s wars beyond its border (e.g., invasion of Iraq). The aim is to encourage discussion on ruth weiss’s relevance to current concerns in American poetry.
Gender and identity in ruth weiss
Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo explores ruth weiss’s complication and blurring of established
categorizations through which she documents both the struggle and the balance, the exclusion and the dissolution of the (de)gendered selves that inhabit her work. To study the ways in which weiss’s
resolves these tensions, she analyzes the thematic traits as well as the stylistic choices that allow weiss to write beyond gender in collections such as Steps (1958), Desert Journal (1977) or Single Out (1978).
The ruth weiss Papers
Thomas Antonic delivers an overview and evaluation of the ruth weiss papers. The aim of it is to
provide scholars with information about the content and extent of published and unpublished written
and audiovisual material, as well as other documents such as photographs and correspondence. It is
intended, for future analyses, to make scholarship aware of the vast amount of works ruth weiss has
created over the past seven decades which go far beyond the scope of her published poetry collections that were the only subject of studies to date.
Place, Movement, and Identity in ruth weiss’s Poetry
Stefanie Pointl examines the representation of movement in ruth weiss’s autobiographical poetry,
arguing that weiss, as an Austrian American Beat writer and Holocaust survivor, provides an alternative perspective on the recurrent Beat theme of mobility. In her writing, she constructs a transnational identity founded on border-crossing movements and the resulting interpersonal connections. Through depictions of both physical and metaphorical journeys, weiss’s poetry portrays movement as a unifying link between people from different cultural backgrounds that replaces national origins as a source of identification.
ruth we