Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

maybe it's ironic that the word beatnik
was coined by a San Francisco newspaper reporter
as a kind of mockery I guess, that he likened them
to that early Russian space vehicle that orbited
the planet, I guess he thought those bongo
beating, turtle necked, jazz and poetry loving
weirdos were like commie space heads

I identified with beatniks because I saw a movie
that began with a beat type poet reciting his poem
when I was around twelve, it was a spoof movie
but the poem was pretty good, and for some
inexplicable reason it put a deep impression on me

I think because I was a rebel when I was a child
in the sense that I always seemed to feel at odds
with authority figures like my teachers, or some of them
I don't know what it was, I decided I was going to write
a book when I was in third grade, I only wrote a few
sentences, but that was always somewhere in my mind

It was not like I had some real talent, it was more like
I just felt like an anarchist at heart, and I wanted to say so
so when I really began trying to write poetry, it came slow
I really had to make myself do it, but reading a lot of poets
started to rub off on me, and just then I met a poet
in the town I was living in, and he showed me his writing
and it was almost like I knew him from a past life,
his poetry was strangely like some of the stuff
I had been writing, and the rest as they say is history

....."I guess he thought those bongo
beating, turtle necked, jazz and poetry loving
weirdos were like commie space heads"

Ha. Never thought of it that way, but come to think of it, I guess you're right.

And it didn't stop there. "Nik" was appended to other words after that-- usually with some sort of perjorative connotation. Like "peacenik" for example.

I wonder if old Sputnik still up there. Or maybe it crashed long ago...

And that is where the Beat writers/poets came in at the beginning of the so-called space race.