Julie Turley / Beat & Beyond

August 31, 2016

Beat & Beyond and Bowery Arts + Science teamed up to present a six-day celebration honoring the poets, musicians, bookstores, and significant individuals whose voices and energy created the Beat movement. The Beats transformed America by instigating change in those around them. Julie Turley, a frequent attendee at Howl! events, posted a beautiful note on her Instagram account during the Beat & Beyond Festival, sharing how the Beats made an impact on her life. We asked her to allow us to share it on the blog. Please find her writing below, photo also by Julie Turley. You can find Julie Turley on Instagram as @readingwearingrocking.

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Twenty-one summers ago, I moved to the Lower East Side from downtown Salt Lake City to live among the Beats, the ghosts and the living. I remember passing my copy of Howl to Allen Ginsberg, sitting in the audience of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church like a regular person and asking him to sign it, which he did without hesitation. I remember Gregory Corso leaning over the balcony heckling a performer. I remember Peter Orlovsky gesticulating wildly. I could not believe this town–my literary heroes walked the same streets as me, ate in the same Ukrainian cafes. I had discovered the Beats nearly a continent away from New York City at Mormon college, where Beat poetry and rock ‘n’ roll were our only allowable vices.

As a college student in Utah, what the Beats wrote gave me a window into a world beyond the repressed, rule-gridded, homogenous campus I studied on.  And over the years, when peers have asked me to list my favorite books, I always start with theirs. It’s not an original sentiment to say they saved me, but in a sense they did.

In June of this summer, I took my 14-year-old daughter to a reading of “Howl” at Howl! Happening, a radiant downtown cultural hub. This particular reading, part of Howl! Happening’s weeklong celebration of the Beats was an attempt to replicate the first legendary reading of Howl in October of 1955 at San Francisco’s Six Gallery. Michael McClure, who had been at the original reading, was also at Howl!. Here! I pointed him out to my daughter, trying to convey my awe. Having my daughter with me and passing my love–my long love–of all of this on to her, was overwhelming and I found myself getting choked up telling her who was there (Hettie Jones in the role of Allen!), how important many of the assembled were/are to American letters, how important this was to me as I was figuring out who I wanted to be in the world and she was getting it . . . and I couldn’t help but think that this must be what it feels like for a lifelong Mets’ fan to take their kid to her first game.

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