Sex, Lies and Arts&Crafts

What is Beat Poetry?

Beat Poetry is a form of poetry that evolved during the Beat Movement of the 1940′s and 50′s in New York and San Francisco as part of the ‘ battle against social conformity and literary tradition’ (1) .
The label of ‘Beat’  was first referenced in an interview by John Clellon Holmes the NY Times and summed up the feeling of the initial movement: Any attempt to label an entire generation is unrewarding, and yet the generation which went through the last war, or at least could get a drink easily once it was over, seems to possess a uniform, general quality which demands an adjective. It was John Kerouac, the author of a fine, neglected novel The Town and the City, who finally came up with it… “You know, this is really a beat generation.” The origins of the word “beat” are obscure, but the meaning is only too clear to most Americans. More than a mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness. In short, it means being undramatically pushed up against the wall of oneself. A man is beat whenever he goes for broke and wagers the sum of his resources on a single number; and the young generation has done that continually from early youth. (2)

Beat Poetry itself is a form of poetry with little structure, very different to the classical style of poetry, performed usually to a gentle, jazz-influence backing track, though not always. The original Beat Poets were Jack Kerouac, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and William S. Burroughs. More modern examples of Beat Poets include Tim Minchin and Ani DiFranco.
The text of the Beat Poem is spoken with a rhythm, and sometimes a rhyme, essentially a monologue to music.
Also referred to as Jazz poetry

Why do I want to attempt Beat?

In McDougal Street Blues Kerouac says that he writes prose, not poetry. A beat poem is prose with a rhythm, it brings it to life and, in my opinion, gives you something to listen to. Whether a monologue with a touch of beat, a la Spalding Gray, or a straight out Beat Poem, there is something about the form that interests me. I like the lack of form, the lack of rules, the music (if used) doesn’t need to match the words spoken, which is a lovely juxtaposition. Also, in a way, it can be seen that Beat Poetry is a song, for which you needn’t have the talent to sing- and as a non singer, that of course appeals to me!
I can’t exactly pinpoint what it is about Beat Poetry that fascinates me and makes me want to attempt  it, but there is something within the genre that pulls me in, and to attempt to do it justice would be an absolute honour, as well as a challenge.

Sources:
(1)http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5646 [accessed, 30/1/12]
(2)http://www.litkicks.com/Texts/ThisIsBeatGen.html [Accessed 30/1/12]

Often, just telling a secret isn’t enough, or isn’t possible.
People go to all kind of different places to share secrets, confessionals, agony aunts, and now the internet is becoming a popular place for sharing secrets.
Sites like tumblr provide lots of different  blogs people can confess or share secrets on, from personal confessions to confessions about ‘fandoms’
http://sharesomesecrets.tumblr.com/
http://blogconfession.tumblr.com/
http://fuckyeahgleesecrets.tumblr.com/
http://confessionsofawhovian.tumblr.com/

Another popular confession is that of the anonymous postcard, seen in Coffee Aroma in Lincoln:

and famously on the website/book PostSecret. This is a website, started off as a book, wherein people can send psotcards anonymously telling their biggest secrets. These secrets can be anything from information about affairs to simple comment on living room colours.


Whether people choose to post their secrets online, or tell a friend, it’s nothing new to suggest that as humans we cannot keep a secret. Do we long to be discovered? Or is it the result of constantly being told the truth is the most important thing?

Psychologists have tested over 20,000 subjects, showing them videos of people telling the truth and lying, and found that they performed no better than chance. A subgroup of so-called experts including polygraph operators, police investigators, judges and psychiatrists returned the same results. The truth is that liars don’t, as a rule, shift around uncomfortably, nervously play with their hands or avoid eye-contact. We fail to detect lies because we are basing our judgements on behaviours unrelated to deception.

More reliable signals are found in language. When Lying;
- Liars tend to say less and provide fewer details.
- Liars often try to psychologically distance themselves from their lies by including fewer references to themselves and their feelings.
- Liars tend not to admit memory lapse when it comes to relatively unimportant information. Instead they appear to develop incredible memories for made-up minutiae.
- Liars often pause and are more hesitant in speech.

In a 1994 British study, participants listening to lies and truths scored an impressive 73% accuracy rate in detection.

Dr Paul Ekman, a leading researcher into lie detection, believes that a select few (he found 50 out of 20,000 tested) have a natural ability to detect lies with an accuracy rate of at least 80%. He puts this down to the detection of involuntary facial ‘microexpressions’ that can last milliseconds. He has named these few, ‘Truth Wizards’, and hopes that by studying them we will learn more about lie-detection that can be transferred to fields such as airport security. At present, more conventional ‘behaviour detection’ is used in airport security and customs but it is a controversial practice that is subject to bias.

Source

Ani Difranco’s True Story of What Was suggests that reality and the stories we tell are two different things; ‘Real is real regardless
Of what you try to say;,  and also that we are no more than a ‘collection of recollections‘. This concept that history is only as accurate as the memory of it, perhaps the chosen memory of it is something that has interested me, and no doubt many others, for years. Whether by history we mean that which we learn in school of the wars and great global changes that have occurred over thousands of years, or we mean the memory of what we did last week, where we went and who said what, memory and our own opinion provides bias.
If two friends argue, and tell another friend their story, that third person will no doubt discover several discrepancies amongst the stories. Even if only one person is present at an event, more often than not stories are edited to make the teller seem better, or provide an excuse, a reason, for a specific action. In many ways, every story we tell is somewhat of a lie, the truth known only to oneself and often not even them. Haven’t you ever told a story, adapted slightly to show yourself in a better light, only to discover that after a number of tellings you can’t quite work out what actually happened? I have a friend who told people he’d been ski-diving so many times, he started to believe it himself, and the line between truth and a lie became blurred. This happens a lot more than people are willing to admit, I know myself that my memory of a  relationship I had at the age of 17 is wrong, because I chose to forget things that hurt me, and also, after telling the story of one particularly painful incident towards the end of the relationship many times, I can’t quite remember the other parts, and I’m almost certain the bits I can I remember wrong.
Lies and secrets fuel our lives, people bond over them, and even secrets about people you’ve never met can be intriguing and interesting, hence why I think it’s a suitable subject for a performance.

I am thinking of exploring the affect of lies and the use of truth, lies and secrets.
Everyone at some point in their life has lied, kept or told a secret and been hurt by a truth. But yet we still insist upon keeping secrets, and sharing secrets, and also telling lies.
Lies can range from the age old cliche of ‘no your bum doesn’t look big’ to lies about feelings, events and even such drastic things as murder and rape. There is a lot of value in our society put upon the importance of telling the truth and honesty, but still we insist on telling lies to ourselves, and to each other, all the time.
I’m considering keeping writing down, possibly for the performance, all the secrets that other people have told me, as well as the ones I felt necessary to share. There is something about secrets, often about lies that have been told, that we feel we need to share them with someone, even if it is regarding a lie. Human’s also have an innate need to find out other people’s secrets- if you are offered the opportunity to discover a secret, or the truth about a lie, you invariably say yes, and accept the knowledge.
People often describe being told a secret as being ‘burdened’ with it, and the weight of other people’s lies can make someone feel isolated or trapped, as well as the excitement of being included in something private.
I once read a book [the name I cannot currently remember, will update when I remember*] in which the protagonist, in a moment of fear, told every lie she had ever told to a man on a plane. These lies were simple things like ‘my dream date includes pink champagne’ and ‘I was the one who killed a workmates plant’ but once this man knew them, he had so much power over her, unintentionally. This is a really interesting idea, and I have considered using all the secrets I have been told over the past three years at university and perhaps telling them as part of my solo performance. I would be interested to see what people’s response would be if I a) proposed sharing these secrets b) told the secrets.

[*Edit 7/2/12: the book is Sophie Kinsella's Can you keep a secret?  Maybe not the most intellectual of literature, but an interesting point raised nonetheless.]