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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, MARCH 6, 2015
PARTING SHOTS
A weekly snapshot from The Daily Astorian and Chinook Observer photographers
A log is sprayed with WD-40 to resemble a smile before a crosscutting round at the Timber Festival at the Clatsop County Fairgrounds Feb. 7.
JOSHUA BESSEX — The Daily Astorian
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Continued from Page 1C
Voices rising
One by one, people read.
They shared their own po-
ems and stories and recited
the work of authors whose
writing cheered them, excited
them and touched them.
Some selections — like
Ginsberg’s poem, Ameri-
ca, read by Tracy Abel, and
Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s I Am
Waiting, read by Mark Mizell
— fell neatly into the Beat
genre. Others — like what Pe-
ter Lindsey called a “piece of
doggerel” by a Reed College
professor about his unapolo-
getic love of tobacco — rather
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Lisa Kerr, the program co-
ordinator of the arts colony
who organized the Beachnik
Café, read her poem, Habana,
recently published in the fall
issue of Agave, a literary and
art magazine. Her daughter,
Ariel Kerr, inspired the big-
gest laughs of the evening
with her deadpan reading of
poems by Bill Watterson, cre-
ator of “Calvin and Hobbes.”
Keyaho Rohlfs, who has
written plays performed at the
Astor Street Opry Company,
read a stream-of-consciousness-
style monologue he composed.
Jeanie McLaughlin read
three original poems: a hai-
ku called Impressions, written
when she was pregnant with her
one “blood son”; a free-verse
piece called Ode to Beach Log;
and a third about meeting a fam-
ily who taught her the meaning
of “mi casa es su casa.”
In honor of Valentine’s
Day, Vinny Ferrau read a
poem he wrote at age 19 upon
falling in love with the wom-
an who later became, and
still is, his wife. And Jennifer
Childress, whose husband,
Watt Childress, emceed the
event, read a passage from
David James Duncan’s novel
ERICK BENGEL — EO Media Group
Frank Milan, aka “The Red Snapper,” reads from his recently published book, Beat Poet-
ry from the 1980s at the Beachnik Café. He snapped his way through the performance,
which often sounded like hip-hop.
Mark Mizell, right, an English teacher at Seaside High
School, chats up Watt Childress, co-owner of Jupiter’s
Rare & Used Books, moments before the Beachnik Café
kicks off at the Cannon Beach Gallery. Allyn Cantor, man-
ager of the White Bird Gallery, mingles in the background.
10 folks who had attended the
arts colony’s two-part Beat
Poets workshop held at Tolo-
vana Hall that Friday and Sat-
urday.
Taught by Mizell, an En-
glish teacher at Seaside High
School, the workshop covered
the usual household names,
as well as the underappreci-
ated women writers of the
Beat movement, including the
still-living Diane di Prima.
A conversation ensued about
whether the Beats had mar-
ginalized women, consigning
them to groupie or cheerlead-
er roles. At the time, “they
didn’t get much play,” Kerr
said.
The workshop also touched
on the role drugs played in
the movement, she said, pro-
ducing questions like: Were
drugs necessary for the Beats?
Were they a catalyst for cre-
ativity? Could the Beats have
Wearing a headlamp to help him read in the dimness,
Peter Lindsey, a Cannon Beach resident, recites his own
work and others’ work during the Beachnik Café. He was
the first of many readers that evening.
ERICK BENGEL — EO Media Group
The River Why: (L)ove really
is like poison oak: it’s highly
contagious. Scratch it, it gets
worse. Touch other people
with it, they catch it, too.”
Then there was “The Red
Snapper” (aka Frank Milan, a
Portland pianist).
Dressed for the occasion in
a scarf, black turtleneck and
red-rimmed sunglasses, his
wavy gray hair pushing out
from beneath a tilted green
beret, the Snapper read from
his recently self-published
anthology, Beat Poetry from
the 1980s. True to his name,
he snapped his fingers to the
rhythm of Kerouac’s free
verse, his lyrical delivery sug-
gesting that Kerouac had writ-
ten the hippest of hip-hop.
What is Beat?
Though the Beachnik Café
was open to everyone, it was
also a reward for the roughly
“loosened up” without them?
Would the Beats have been
the same artistic and intellec-
tual forces without marijuana,
peyote and LSD?
But there remains an un-
derlying question, one that is
perhaps unanswerable: What,
finally, is “Beat”?
When Steve Allen, on his
show, posed the question to
Kerouac, the writer respond-
ed: “Sympathetic.” Childress
posed the same question at the
Beachnik Café.
Beat is so much larger
than a subculture, fashion
statement or literary style. As
with anything humans affix
a label to, naming the Beat
movement somehow narrows
the movement, “deprives it of
something,” Childress said.
“It’s so big and so difficult
to define,” he said. “But it
means something compelling,
because we’re all here.”
ERICK BENGEL — EO Media Group
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