Heads-up on a show opening tomorrow at the Oxmarket Contemporary Art Gallery in Chichester, England – “Burn burn, burn, The Beats Light up the Ox” -an exhibition, curated by University of Chichester professors Dick Ellis and Hugo Frey, “exploring how Beat writers, (Jack) Kerouac, (Allen) Ginsberg, (William) Burroughs and (Gregory) Corso, also engaged with art, performance, music, photography and film” (“The results were”, the curators note, “experimental, colourful, incandescent, riotous, unpredictable, and often seen as scandalous”).
“As well as highlighting these Beat Generation explosions, focus falls also on two other dimensions of these Beats’ work – Kerouac’s close collaborations with the photographer Robert Frank, and the ways in which the Beats’ debts to Romanticism created fascinating links to Romantic writers”, spotlighting “local (West Sussex/Chichester) links, such as, Ginsberg’s debts to William Blake.”
The show’s title is, of course an allusion, referencing Kerouac’s famous lines, from On The Road:
“…the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candlers exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
Ellis and Frey were responsible for the successful 2021 Oxmarket exhibit – “Gregory Corso – Artist and Poet of the Beat Generation Revolt” – see here
I first read these poets in the Donald Allen Anthology and the early City Lights editions of their works, they put me on a path I follow still.