The literary movement of the Beat Generation continues to be a truly influential movement in our current society. From the popularization of hitchhiking across America to the rebel without a cause of James Dean, the Hippie movement of the 60s, and the explosion of poetry readings in coffee shops, the Beats have been influential to much of the social change in the last half-century. Commonly the architects of the movement are referenced as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. However, the Beat Generation was much bigger than six "white" men who wrote novels and poetry about disenfranchised youths of the 1950s. The Beat Generation had at its center several women and artists of color who have helped to redefine the movement, such as Joan Vollmer, Bob Kaufman, Raul Salinas, and Anne Waldman. This project troubles the categorization of the Beat Generation as a static movement in postwar America, and redefines it as an adaptive ideology that continues through today's Beat Movement. In this dissertation, I have broken down the three most prominent rhetorical elements that have kept the Beat Movement operating for over sixty years. The first element is the Beat desire to write for the underclasses of America and eventually to produce writers to write from the underclasses. The second is the importance placed on performance in their poetry and how that has changed the face of poetry over the last half century. The third is the ability to build a community through small presses and magazines, while at the same time pushing the boundaries of gender roles, queer relationships, and interraciality.

The scholars who have taken up the task of writing about Bob Kaufman have most often done so in response to a perceived demand: the lack of Kaufman scholarship, readership, anthology, publicity, canonization. The basis of this need is clear: Kaufman is almost never included as even a third-string Beat, a fringe Surrealist, or an underappreciated Jazz performer. To the committed readers of Kaufman – and almost all of his readers seem to be committed ones – it’s unforgivable. These various canons, major (mid-century American poets, Beat poets) and minor (Jazz poets, American Surrealists), are clearly missing one of their most important members. The task is to reintegrate Kaufman into the company it seems he has been omitted from, the company he deserves. The problem is that once the critic has overcome all the resistance – the capitalist publishing industry, the prison system, the white-dominated west coast poetry setting, the public demands of aesthetic production – she is resisted by the poetry itself, and by Kaufman the poet. Along the lines of Claude Pelieu’s back jacket blurb of Golden Sardine – “in spite of his continuing exclusion from American anthologies, both Hip & Academic” – Kaufman has excluded the anthology, the academy. I will read death through various critical lenses – some with nearly universal critical currency among readers of Kaufman, some with little – as Kaufman’s “FOUNT OF THE CREATIVE ACT.” But this thematic circumscription is also a reading of endurance, even of life. Kaufman writes: “[THE POET’S] DEATH IS A SAVING GRACE.” This becomes the vital relation at the center of my project: how does Kaufman, like Lorca, survive in his poem? How does Kaufman’s political poetry relate with poetic death and redemption? How does jazz involve these things? Does death exist? I want to know . . .