FTLGTP: Continued Collaboration

Final Stop: The Bitter End

Finally, a short walk west along Bleecker Street brings us to The Bitter End, at 147 Bleecker Street, the final stop on our tour. We end the tour here because this location is back in the heart of the Greenwich Village neighborhood. It is also a place where the punk rock artists like Patti Smith performed along with folk artists like Bob Dylan. It is a central location for the both the literary and music scenes in the Village during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. It is where all of these different worlds and ideas combine and where they continue.

The Bitter End continues to play host to up and coming musical acts of all genres and on any given night you can see up to 4 or 5 groups play. The artistic and experimental vibe that was so prevalent in the Village during the early to mid part of the 20^th century is still present. That history continues to influence the musicians and artists that continue to hang out in the neighborhood.

FTLGTP: Mimeographed Magazines

Stop #10: Les Deux Megots

The New York School poets continued to move their hangouts east and began spending time at a place called Café Les Deux Megots, at 64 East 7^th Street. Les Deux Megots is French for “two cigar butts” and is a play on words of a famous café on the Left Bank in Paris called Café Les Deux Magots, which was a popular hangout for many members of the Lost Generation expatriates that situated themselves in Paris during the first part of the 20^th century as well as many European artists and writers.

Le Deux Megots in the East Village became what many of the bars on MacDougal Street and in the West Village had been for artists before them. It was a place for collaboration and presentation. Regular poetry readings were conducted at the café and much of the work was published in mimeographed magazines that were distributed throughout the artistic community.

Mellilo describes the Café Les Duex Megots and later Café Metro as “seedy and drug infested places…that hosted poetry readings where poets new and old could gather, drink, and play” (61).

Dan Saxon, the poet who created the magazines showcasing the poetry from Les Deux Megots, used the mimeograph technique for publishing his magazines because he could “create quick and cheap publications that avoided the inhibiting codes of taste and unofficial censorship that guided mainstream publishing” (Melillo, 61). Other members of the East Village poetry movement who published mimeographed magazines included, Ted Berrigan, Amiri Baraka, Diane DiPrima, Ed Sanders, Bernadette Mayer, and Vito Acconci.

By avoiding the mainstream publishing industry, these poets continued to push the limits of poetry and experimentation. Much of their work was sexually charged and purposely hard to comprehend. One particular example that Melillo discusses is The Fugs member Ed Sanders’s Fuck You/a magazine of the Arts. The work that was featured in the magazine was particularly sexual in content and a very aggressive example of breaking the boundaries of poetics.

Up Next: Cafe Metro

FTLGTP: Moving across town

Stop #9: St. Marks on the Bowery

During the late 1960s, the Beats began moving over to the East Village and began to mix with some of the new New York School poets who were spending time on the other side of town. The East Village was also where the poetry scene started mixing with a new music scene and the genre of early Punk was being formed.

One way in particular that the new poets congregating in the East Village differed from their predecessors in the West Village was the focus on performance and theatricality. According to John Mellilo in his essay, “Secret Locations in the Lower East Side: Downtown Poetics 1960-1980” for Lost New York, “meaning became a process that was literally worked out—in the air, in the community, on the actual page, on the body. A swirling interdisciplinarity defined this era in New York as artists rejected any and all stable boundaries” (60).

One of the most important places in the history of early punk and the poetry that influenced it, as well as an important performance space for this new interdisciplinarity that Melillo speaks of, was St. Mark’s Church on the Bowery, at 131 East 10^th Street. The Church started a Poetry Project, which continues today, that brought beats like Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs over from the west side, as well as up and coming poets, musicians, and other pop artists like Andy Warhol.

This is where Patti Smith debuted her mix of poetry and music in 1971 when she opened for Gerard Melanga. The performance was a turning point in the connection between poetry and rock n’ roll. She read and sang her poems while Lenny Kaye played guitar behind her. It was the first incarnation of what would eventually become Patti Smith’s first album, Horses, which was released in 1975.

Philip Shaw, in his book Horses, explains how her music was new and different:

The idea of performing poetry to musical accompaniment is nothing new; it began with the Beats in the 1950s and was carried over, via Ginsberg and Dylan to the counter culture in the mid-1960s. But two things…(were) different. To begin with Smith intends to sing as well as read, and the backing is not free-jazz sax, or languid bongos, but an overdriven crudely thrashed guitar (8).

The Church continues to be a place for experimentation with art, poetry, and music. Several other punk artists performed their poetry here as well including members of the band Television.

Up Next: Two Cigarette Butts

FTLGTP: The House of a Poet

Stop #3: 75 1/2 Bedford Street

I mentioned Edna St. Vincent Millay in my last post about Chumley’s and just down the street at 75 ½ Bedford Street is a very small townhouse where Millay lived for several years. It is also one of the smallest townhouses in the city. It is only 9 1/2 feet wide, about half the width of a normal townhouse. It was originally a carriage lane.

Edna St. Vincent Millay was famous even before she got to the Village because of a dispute over a poetry prize, but her poetry was significant during the earlier bohemian movement because she presented a woman who was not sensitive but sexually driven. As Melissa Bradshaw points out in her essay “Performing Greenwich Village bohemianism” for the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York, “No one exemplified this spirit of daring New Womanhood, as sexually driven as any man and just as wary of entrapment, like the Village golden girl, Edna St. Vincent Millay” (153).

In many ways, she was a precursor to the more explicit questioning of sexuality and sexual norms that would come from the Village, through the Beat Poets with pieces like “Howl,” by Allen Ginsberg, The New York Dolls and their performances in Drag, and Patti Smith’s poetry and music which questioned gender and pushed its boundaries.

Millay was also able to capture the carefree attitude of the Village in her poem “Recuerdo,” “We were very tired, we were very merry–/We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry” (155). As Bradshaw points out, it argues doing something for fun is worthwhile, a common theme in the Village.

Up Next: Minetta Tavern and MacDougal Street

From the Lost Generation to the Punks: An Introduction

For my final writing assignment of college, I recently finished writing a walking tour of the East and West Villages for one of my favorite courses of my college career. It was a course called “Writing New York,” which was listed under the English Department and was taught by Bryan Waterman and Cyrus Patell, both English professors.

The walking tour I wrote tours some of the vital locations for counter culture in the West Village and East Village while discussing the collaborative nature of counter culture creation in New York City in the middle of the 20th century.

I focused primarily on the path from the Lost Generation and the Bohemians in Greenwich Village, to the Beat Poets hanging out all over the place, to the Folk Artists around MacDougal Street, and finally to the new New York School poets and punk rock musicians of the East Village.

Because I am very proud of this piece and because I love the landscape that New York provides for creative minds, I have decided to post the walking tour in increments on Nebraskan Thoughts. And thus begins my exploration, “From the Lost Generation to the Punks.” Enjoy!

Introduction:

Most of you probably know about the rich literary history of Greenwich Village. Many famous authors throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries lived in this neighborhood. Names like Henry James, Edith Wharton, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, Willa Cather and more are associated with these crooked streets. However, there is also a strong link between this literary culture and the music scene that also formed in the East and West Villages in the 1960s and 1970s.

Many of the popular folk and punk artists that performed regularly in Greenwich Village were greatly influenced by the writers and poets who had lived and were currently living in the area. In fact, in the case of several of the punk artists of the 1970s, they were actively part of the poetry scene as well as the music scene.

In order to understand how Punk music being played in the Village in the 1970s is linked to earlier literary movements, it is first important that we understand the culture of the earlier literary generations.

The café and club culture of the writers, artists, and musicians allowed for a collaborative atmosphere, with everyone being influenced by everyone else and borrowing ideas from each other. In particular, the music scene collaborated with and borrowed from the literary and poetry movements.

Stop #1: The White Horse Tavern

We start our tour on Hudson Street, deep in the West Village at the White Horse Tavern, at the corner of 11^th Street. This bar was a favorite spot for many members of the literary community during the early 1950s. It is particularly famous for being one of Dylan Thomas’s favorite haunts and the story is that he drank himself to death here, however, although he drank at the Tavern often, he did not drink himself to death and died of unrelated causes.

Later on, this bar became an important spot for writers like Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson. Musicians such as Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison also began to spend time in this establishment in the 1960s. It is also worth noting that Bob Dylan, originally Robert Zimmerman, supposedly took his name from Dylan Thomas.

Next Up: Chumley’s