READINGS

Jack Kerouac
Allen Ginsberg
Diane di Prima
Harold Norse
Gary Snyder
Philip Whalen
Joanne Kyger
Albert Saijo
Lew Welch
Lenore Kandel
Will Petersen
Bob Kaufman
William Burroughs
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Michael McClure
Kenneth Rexroth
Anne Waldman

READERS

Jessica Baran
Jane Birdsall-Lander
Michael Castro
Allison Funk
Phil Gounis
Susan Grigsby
Ann Haubrich
Jennifer Kronovet
K. Curtis Lyle
Adrian Matejka
Chris Parr
Jonathon Smith
Buzz Spector
MK Stallings
Sally van Doren
Brett Underwood
Agnes Wilcox

LIVE MUSIC BY

The Dave Stone Trio 

FREE ADMISSON

REFRESHMENTS PROVIDED

In conjunction with the exhibition Reflections of the Buddha, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts and 88.1 KDHX partner for an evening of poetry, jazz and art. This event, part of the ongoing Sound Waves series, celebrates the pivotal role the Beat writers of the 1950s played in bringing Buddhism to America.

DJs, readers and musicians will perform throughout the Pulitzer galleries, alongside Buddhist artworks from the second to the eighteenth centuries. The Dave Stone Trio, an award-winning St. Louis jazz group, will play in the bebop style popular with the Beat Generation. Readers from a variety of artistic backgrounds will present works from Beats and Beat-affiliated writers who explored Buddhism in their writing.

Sound Waves is a collaboration between the Pulitzer and 88.1 KDHX. KDHX DJs and other performers create soundtracks to the Pulitzer's current exhibition, exploring themes in the exhibition and interacting with Tadao Ando’s architecture.

About the Beats and Buddhism 

Beat generation writers are often portrayed or perceived as degenerates, but the collective of writers actually viewed themselves as spiritual seekers, forging a new kind of consciousness. Many of the Beats found a refuge for their restless spirits in the philosophy and practices of Buddhism. The ancient teachings offered these curious Westerners a new way to understand the human condition, along with methods to free the mind from habitual and obsessive thinking. Also appealing to the Beats was the Buddhist emphasis on developing inner wisdom and universal compassion, antidotes to the values of the competitive consumer society that the Beats rejected. The Dharma also fed the Beat appetite for exotic experience, promising the immediacy of now, the feeling of being “with it," present for every note in the great jazz riff of life.

Not only did the Beats adapt the wisdom teachings of the East to a new, peculiarly American terrain, they also articulated this teaching in the vernacular, jazzy rhythms of the street, opening up what had been the domain of stuffy academics and stiff translators to a mainstream audience. With Kerouac’s bestseller The Dharma Bums and a paperback pocket-poet series published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the voices of American poets recounted the teachings of Buddha to the general public for the first time.

Sound Waves: Buddhism and the Beats will provide the audience with a taste of how the Beats discovered and practiced Buddhism, allowing a new Buddhism to take shape in 1950s/1960s America, transforming the landscape and culture in which we live. The body of work created by the Beats and their ancestors demonstrates their significance not only in terms of their literary legacy but also in terms of their spiritual legacy.

As scholar Carol Tonkinson states in her book Big Mind Sky, “the Beats (had) succeeded in picking up the thread of the Transcendentalists’ interest in the wisdom traditions of the East and in nature and began to weave it seamlessly into the fabric of American life.”

With this presentation, while we do not mean to infer that Beat spirituality was committed exclusively to one religious tradition, it is clear the Beats were inspired more deeply by Buddhism than by any other. What united the work of the early Beats and defined them as a movement was not so much a political stance or even a shared literary style but a distinctly spiritual quest for a “new consciousness."