Artists, Beats and Cool Cats

This fifth collection of essays and reviews ranges over a variety of subjects, some of them connecting to material in the earlier books. The Beats are an obvious example, though it’s perhaps using the term loosely to link someone like Herbert Gold with them. But he did comment on the Beats in writing and perhaps saw himself as having had experiences which gave him insights into what Kerouac and Ginsberg and the others were doing. I’ve included a short piece about an obscure poet, Marty Matz, because it shows what fringe figures like him got up to. And Robert Reisner was someone who was on the fringes of the bohemian scene, though in a more productive way than Matz. It seems to me that people like Reisner ought to be remembered, if only in a short article. There are surveys of several little magazines, as there were in my previous collections. I’ve always thought that they deserve to be written about because of how they can often evoke a particular period better than a detached history can.