NOT A BEAT HISTORY, but a bridge and a wave between what was and what is today.

Context
by S.A. Griffin, Associate Editor

How loudly history repeats itself in the rapidly shifting climate of roaring twenties 21st century America. It's been over a half a century since Jack Kerouac's seminal novel On the Road set the world on its ear in 1957 with his liberating bop prosody during the Red Scare of the Eisenhower era. 1957, when Allen Ginsberg's Howl was tried for obscenity in the afterglow of the atomic bomb and the process prevailed as freedom of speech becoming the shot heard 'round the world as the Beat Generation. How far have we come from McCarthyism, the KKK, public lynching and the struggle for equal rights in a country where White Nationalism is openly embraced by political leaders, women no longer have rights to their own bodies and Critical Race Theory is being banned from critical thought in a majority of the United States? As Beat was then Beat is now as it is being studied, embraced and practiced around the world by young and old alike. Appreciated for its candor, sense of history and cultural and spiritual dynamism, more than ever Beat literature remains a vital and open invitation to self-expression elevated by the process of first thought best thought and be here now. What's old is new, here, in the present, where poets make news by reporting the facts as open verse ordinary enough to be appreciated by all, yet extraordinary in its presentation.