Battered Luggage: Celebrating Jack Kerouac, Ronda Wicks Eller, ed.

“I guess what I am trying to share is how much the Beats meant to me”
Warren Dean Fulton, Zen and the Art of Prefaces Following Kerouac’s Rules for Spontaneous Prose

On the Road was published in 1957; The Dharma Bums was published in 1958. Seventy-five years later, both books are still widely read. Jack Kerouac died in 1969, at 47 as a result of too much drinking, hard living and the perils of jousting with the social and economic conventions and constraints of post-war white middle-class North America. By that time, the Beat Generation’s vision of an unfettered counterculture had already inspired great admiration and considerable vitriol . The Beat Generation ethic rejected materialism and endorsed sexual freedom, spiritual development, psychedelic drugs and stream-of-consciousness writing as pathways to achieving truth and higher consciousness:

“….we saw ourselves seeing ourselves

in the rapid romance of the road

like travelers landless and free broncos

forming a vagabondage of liberty

and adventure….”

John B. Lee, That Kerouac Season

“….I’d like instead to be startled,

have one last wild adventure.

Implode into space,

wonder and terror fused,

outrageously alive.”

Janet Barkhouse, Rootless

“….I’m a rebellious moment discarding the beliefs that mankind is disconnected from Yah’s grace, that we are separated by pigmentation and the duality of knowledge limits our potential….

Someday the pilgrims will sit by the river to take in the cries of our souls hoping to understand that respecting life is not utopic.

…..to be free as spiritual beings that inspire the air that binds us as one.”

Rawle James, Magnificence of Desolation

Battered Luggage brings together the diverse offerings of 23 contemporary writers in celebration of the Beat Generation and of the 100^th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s birth.

“….I like like because it links

The most unlikely things….

Max Layton, I Like Like

I graduated from high school in the year Jack Kerouac died. My belief that I could write in ways that my English teachers never taught came largely from my reading of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and other Beat poets and writers. Similarly, and in common with many other young people of that time, my evolving commitment to feminism, environmentalism, anti-racism, and exploring spirituality was inspired in part by the Beat Generation vision.

There were women writers among the members of the Beat Generation. As Penn Kemp notes in When Hours Hover Over Ours, dedicated to Diane di Prima, “Her words stay with us”. Why the women received less recognition and public attention than their identified male counterparts is a topic well beyond the scope of this review. What was notably clear to me as a teenager however, was that rebellious women and girls were generally treated as mental cases, rather than visionaries. Fortunately, changes have taken place in the last half century—ten of the 23 writers included in Battered Luggage identify as women.

“…Intoxicated by the humming drone

of yellow jackets,

I lick honeyed second-hand knives.

Holding back my sharpened song,

I pray my private pasture will predominate,…”

Bunny Iskov, My Private Pasture

What is the legacy of the Beat Generation? If Kerouac and his Beat friends had not been who they were, would Michael Fraser be free to write as he does?—

“…..we mainlined binge shows stowed away on Netflix in our unhip hovel dwellings hurling eyerolls at the orange-haired clown playing world bossman and hawking bleach ingestion on scriptline newsreels and fevering thuglike through touchscreens till there was a global tug-of- war bracketing truth thus taking things to unprecedented batshit screwball levels….”

Covid Subterraneans

Brian J. Francis writes in Two Worlds, “…You come from a different world but you are with me here.”

Publisher ‏ : ‎ 978-1-989573-02-0 (June 13 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 79 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1989573029
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1989573020

Susan Wismer

Susan is grateful to live on Treaty 18 territory at the southern shore of Manidoo-gitchigami (Georgian Bay) in Ontario, Canada with two human partners and a very large dog. Recent publications include a collaborative chapbook,Hand Shadowswith Michele Green and Suzette Sherman (Wintergreen Press, 2024). Hag Dancesis coming out with At Bay Press in Spring 2025.www.susanwismer.com