Beat Hotel

The plaque celebrating the writers who resided at the Beat Hotel, 9 Rue Git le Coeur in Paris, was unveiled in 2009 to mark the 50th anniversary of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, with Harold Norse’s name added almost as afterthought. At the event poet Eddie Woods indelibly linked the unveiling with Norse by reading from the little known 1983 cut-up novella Beat Hotel. Written between 1960-63, the work is disconnected from the other cut-up texts published at the time such as Minutes to Go (1960), as it was not published until a German edition came out in 1975, the English edition in 1983. It feels therefore like another afterthought, ever in the shadow of Burroughs and Brion Gysin’ 1960s cut-up revolution. This essay resituates Norse’s novella in both Beat and cut-up canons, by placing Norse as an exemplary nascent ‘paratextual’ poet and writer, with Beat Hotel distinct by being both accessible and poetic. By building on contemporary models of transnational and post-national literatures, alongside discussion of prose poetics and narrative time, the essay rehabilitates Norse as a trailblazer of post- and transnational literature, and as an exemplary cut-up poet.