Holism, Antagonism, Proto-Poetics, and Pedagogy Among the Beats

This essay examines the Beat entry into the academy, and their combined relevance and difficulty for the teaching canon, in terms of their immanent poetics and pedagogy. With the Beats, poetics was often realized in terms immanent to the work. To develop this reading, two aspects of Beat poetics are explored: their holism and antagonism. Beat holism, its assumptions of organic form after the Romantics, leads to a poetics that effaces boundaries and, by extension, a pedagogy that is not restricted to disciplinary formations. Antagonism may explain why many such experimental schools no longer exist: in foregrounding the “unspeakable visions of the individual” in terms that may not be easily assimilated into mainstream discourse Beat poetics led to positions asserting the romantic genius and refusal of absorption. Ultimately, readings of both Michael McClure and Lenore Kandel’s works demonstrate that the Beats’ difficulty in terms of their refusal to be absorbed into academic discourses, along with their holistic insistence on the dissolution of boundaries, makes their work uniquely teachable and relevant to the university today.