Beat
Share your inner
Tolovana Arts Colony hosts Beat poetry workshop and Cannon
Beach Gallery welcomes one and all to open mic this weekend
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The cultural landscape of 1950s America
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While “Father Knows Best” — that perfect
paean to the status quo — ran on television, the
specter of nuclear annihilation hung over the
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While the country’s industrial production
skyrocketed, the existential threat that techno-
logical “progress” presented to America’s way
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While clean-cut family men drove to work
dressed in suits and fedoras to support their up-
wardly mobile middle-class lifestyles, a consid-
erable number built bomb shelters, stocked up
on ammunition and hoarded canned goods and
jugs of water, just in case the Cold War with the
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“You had a lot of really scary stuff,” said
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Meanwhile, the writers of the Beat Genera-
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and said: Are you all out of your minds?
The Beats — including such luminaries as
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Burroughs — beckoned the masses to “wake up
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original literature of the 20th century, many
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ral two-part workshop called “The Beat Poets”
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ly sign-ups will receive a book about the Beat
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non Beach Gallery will host “The Beachnik
Cafe,” an open mic for people to read their work
(or someone else’s work), even people who
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Lisa Kerr, program coordinator of the Tolo-
vana Arts Colony, which is presenting both
events, said the open mic is designed for people
to read their work in a comfortable, nonjudg-
Photo by Erick Bengel
Mark Mizell, left, an English teacher at Seaside High School, and Lisa Kerr, program coordinator of the Tolovana Arts Colony, discuss
the Beat Generation over coff ee at Bella Espresso. Mizell will teach a workshop on Beat poetry at the arts colony this weekend.
trol, moving outside the corporate boxes, being literature — contains passages “that you feel
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As a counterculture movement, the Beats 1D]LLQPHZDQWVWRHGLWLWWREHIUDQNEXW,¶YH
may have been “smaller than the hippie move- never read anything in any literature that so cap-
ment” that grew out of it, but it was “more rev- tures the free feeling of being on the road, hitch-
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Live sharing
Kerr’s father actually turned her loose in
Beat poetry can be especially powerful when
Lower Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, the Beat
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Public performance is integral to the Beat
“It was like walking into another world,” she
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the doors and windows between our rooms as
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The Beat writers ushered in a “new freedom LQGLYLGXDOV´
“If all we did was write things down and
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pass notes back and forth between each other,
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Beat literature “launched a new freshness that would be better than no communication at
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Dylan credit the Beat writers with raising their WKDW¶VHYHQPRUHEDVLF7KDW¶VVRPHWKLQJWKDW
Artwork by Stirling Gorsuch.
awareness of what was happening in the world we as human beings have been doing before we
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Kerr hopes that the Tolovana Arts Colony
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can turn the workshop and open mic into annual
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When Kerr hears the opening lines of Gins- events that branch out into other genres of po-
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“There’s something kind of magical about a
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6LPLODUO\ -DFN .HURXDF¶V QRYHO ³2Q group of people sitting around celebrating lan-
Intellectual and revolutionary
Known for embracing Bohemian sensibil- WKH5RDG´²SHUKDSVWKHGH¿QLQJZRUNRI%HDW JXDJH´0L]HOOVDLG
ities while rejecting conformity, mindless con-
For more information contact Lisa Kerr at 503-440-0684 or email tolovanaartscolxony@gmail.com
sumerism and mainstream preferences in art,
literature, fashion and sexuality, the Beatnik
subculture encouraged people to “break out of
the mold, because the mold was so tight after
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To the Beatniks — now associated with be-
rets, sunglasses, goatees and bongos — there
were the “squares” unconsciously trapped in a
box, and then there were the “hip” folks who
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For Watt Childress, co-owner of Jupiter’s
Rare & Used Books who will emcee the open
VISUAL ARTS • LITERATURE • THEATER • MUSIC & MORE
mic, the Beat movement created “the sense of
breaking free from the cage of institutional con-
Story by ERICK BENGEL
the arts
February 12, 2015 | coastweekend.com | 9