Steemofconsciousness: filling steemit with beatniks & steemniks

Beat writing was spontaneous, unedited storytelling inspired by the bebop jazz of the '50s and the selflessness of Buddhism... amongst other things.

We've all heard of the Beat Generation (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S Burroughs were the ultimate beatniks). Unless we haven't, I guess. If you haven't, I recommend that you check it out - at least check Wikipedia (for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kerouac).

Beatniks wrote poems and novels fuelled by creative inspiration, caffeine, alcohol and possibly other drugs. (Well, these guys did preceed and usher in the 60s.) They unravelled the thoughts of the authors in sometimes angry, sometimes dreamy, continuous prose. Poems that didn't rhyme, yet were poems still. Stories that were part fiction, part travel monologues.

Beat writing was about streams of consciousness and beauty and a better world, but also about bearing witness to wrongs. It was anti-McCarthyism (and facsists) and pro freedom. It was about the endless always unfulfilled promise of the road ahead. Today, beat writing may be reminiscent of the rap of the streets - not literally, perhaps poetically: the rhyming describing the struggle and pain of existence and the desperate need for something better, not that obsessed with wealth and sex.

Other forms of music cross effectively into the hazards of the ordinary. But some rap, compassionate rap, in its inventive invective and breathless condemnation is a good illustration.

The battle against social conformity and literary tradition was central to the work of the Beats. Among this group of poets, hallucinogenic drugs were used to achieve higher consciousness, as was meditation and Eastern religion. Buddhism especially was important to many of the Beat poets; Snyder and Ginsberg both intensely studied this religion and it figured into much of their work.
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/brief-guide-beat-poets

But for our purposes, we can latch on to one central principal: spontaneous prose. Capturing the thought-train of the moment in words and writing - the #steemofconsciousness.

And there we have it. Stay tuned for an exciting @drwom #steemofconsciousness initiative.

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