The third of this year's Warwick Seminars in American Studies will take place on Thursday 2nd March at 5.15pm in the Ramphal Building (Room 3.41). Daniel Kane, Reader in American Literature at the University of Sussex, will be giving a talk titled 'I Saw the Best Minds of My Generation Rock: Punk and Poetry in New York City.' All welcome.

Abstract:

During the late 1960s, throughout the 1970s, and into the 1980s, New York City poets and musicians played together, published each other, and inspired one another to create ground-breaking art. In this talk, I'll read deeply across poetry and punk music to capture this compelling exchange and its challenge to the status of the visionary artist, the cultural capital of poetry, and the lines dividing sung lyric from page-bound poem. I'll reveal how the new sounds of proto-punk and punk music found their way into the poetry of the 1960s and 1970s downtown scene, enabling writers to develop fresh ideas for their own poetics and performance styles. Likewise, groups like The Fugs and the Velvet Underground drew on writers as varied as William Blake and Delmore Schwartz for their lyrics. Drawing on a range of archival materials and oral interviews, I'll show how and why punk musicians and downtown poets drew on and resisted French Symbolist writing, the vatic resonance of the Beat chant, and, most surprisingly and complexly, the New York Schools of poetry.