JAZZ AND POETRY IN GREENWICH VILLAGE

The Beatnik era in Greenwich Village, NYC, 1950′s to the early 60′s, was the age of Poetry in America.  Birdman lived on Perry street, not far from MacDougal, in the early 60′s and witnessed the beat movement right up close and personal.  He saw Bob Dylan perform his folk songs and poetry at the Gaslight cafe next to the bar called the Kettle of Fish.  Dylan was virtually unknown and wrote like a wandering Walt Whitman, and used the harmonica for increased attention to his words, about America, Highway 61, he had spent time in the Red Wing Minnesota reformatory, on the Mississippi River.  Other beat poets met daily and on the weekends at the center of the movement, the fountain in Washington Square park.  Moondog and Big Brown, street poets, jailhouse poets, spoke from memory at the fountain, and made up poems spontaneously from their lifes experience.  Moondog was a giant of a man, wore a pirates hat and high boots, and spent his nights camped out in the Jersey Flats.  Big Brown, ("It was down in Sonora where the pot grows tall, where wildcats scream and scorpions crawl over dead mens bones, it was there in that god forsaken place,  I first came face to face with Rosito Esposito, my Mexicali street walker”). Gregory Corso was often seen rapping out his verse to the tunes of a trumpet player, at the Washington Square fountain.  It was the real deal.  No other time in American literary history, have so many poets had a forum.  Folk musicians also showed up and played at the fountain, they called them street bards.  Jack Kerouac and Peter Orlovsky with Allen Ginsburg were seen wandering around with a brown bag of wine, looking for a place to read.  In the cafes called the cafe Why?, the cafe Why Not? and the Fat Black Pussycat, poets read with jazz musicians at their side.  It was quite amazing.  BirdMan could go to a reading, then wander over to the Village Gate and see Miles Davis play cool jazz, and from there go to the Five Spot and see the great piano jazz creator, Thelonious Monk.  This unusual bohemian period of NYC, fazed out when the Vietnam war tookover the national attention, and put everyone, poets included in a bad mood.  Now poets are on the back burner, occasionally you will observe a young college kid, looking over a worn copy of On The Road by Jack Kerouac or Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.  The worship of money in America is not everything but close to it, and two wars go on forever.