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When thinking about Gary Snyder's poetry, prose, and essays, the central point of their intersection is unmistakably located at the writer's ruminations over the coexistence of humans and nature, which has earned the poet a stature of a prominent green author not only among the Beats but also among the most significant nature-oriented writers of the twentieth century. One of the green themes addressed by Snyder which, for one thing, resonates exceptionally well with much of contemporary eco-critical thinking on the Anthropocene and, for another, challenges common perceptions of time and space, is ecocide, a notion occupying central position in the poet's 2004 book entitled Danger on Peaks. By looking at the ways Snyder's texts in the collection coalesce the motifs of natural catastrophes, nuclear threat, and mass extinction of life, I intend to explore their correspondence to theoretical concepts devised by scholars such as Bruno Latour, Franz Broswimmer, Jessica Rapson, and Ewa Domańska (geostory, history of life as the history of disasters, the fluidity of memory sites, ontology of the dead body) in order to further demonstrate the hybrid nature of the poet's post-catastrophic and transcultural landscape imagery, which is capable of traversing time and space as well as transcending the binaries of the ordinary vs. the sublime, the Eastern vs. the Western as well as the public vs. the private. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever since setting their foot on the social and cultural landscapes of the post-World War II realities, the Beats have been both the subject of and subject to pop-cultural representations and appropriations. While figurations of Beat sensibility in film, television, press and popular music have been well recognized and analyzed, an area which remains uninvestigated for Beat influences, perhaps due to its relatively short pop-cultural presence, is the one of video games. Recent years, which have marked the release of titles such as Fallout 4 (Bethesda Game Studios, 2015) and Life Is Strange (Square Enix, 2015), attest to a certain amount of interest invested in Beat mythos by both indie game developers and the biggest game studios in the world, thereby opening a new chapter in representing the Beats in visual media. By, on the one hand, mapping out the categories of Beat references in video game narratives and, on the other, setting them against the backdrop of existing models of (mis)appropriating the Beats in visual culture, I will seek to explore the ways in which video game designers venture into the Beat ethos and I wish to address the implications this bears for the lineage of Beat pop-cultural presence. The final part of the essay takes a closer look at Fallout 4, making references to such theoretical concepts as Derridean hauntology, Zygmunt Bauman’s retrotopia and Simon Reynolds’ retromania, to further demonstrate how complex and ambiguous Beat video-game figurations can be.

Space ownership is a key-concept in the writings of the Beat women. Anne Waldman, for example, portrays the complicated relationship she has with the city of New York through mappings and descriptions of various locations, which she experienced or marked her imagination. I have labeled these special locations 'meta-manifest places' by which I mean places that writers may use to raise awareness of social, political and/or environmental problems manifested through protests and riots, usually linked to a certain space. The space and the crisis attached to it will always remain in the reader's mind as interconnected. How does Anne Waldman make use of 'meta-manifest places' to reflect the urban crises in the mid-twentieth century American metropolis? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is one of the most distinguished “Bombay poets”, whose career spans six decades, from his first workBharatmata: A Prayer(1966) brought out by the Ezra-Fakir Press he founded to his recently publishedCollected Poems 1969–2014. His contribution to the Indian English language tradition has been far-reaching, not only through his poetry itself, but through his role as translator, anthologist, editor and critic. In this interview, conducted on April 20–21, 2016, Mehrotra ranges over his extensive career, reflecting on the transnational web of genealogies, associations and translations that lie behind an “Indian poem”, on his friendship and artistic collaborations with Arun Kolatkar, Adil Jussawalla and A.K. Ramanujan, on the break that Indian writers and artists of his generation were trying to make, and on the way his own poetry was inspired by the American Beats. He also discusses his role in the little magazine/small press movement of the 1960s and 1970s when he editedezraanddamn you: a magazine of the arts, and co-founded the Clearing House collective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I want to address more directly and extensively than previous studies why Bob Dylan chose his stage name. There are three contexts which allow us to arrive at an answer: the first, for which there is a good deal of evidence; the second, more speculative; and the third, evaluative. The article puts forward the proposition that Bob Dylan's choice of surname was motivated by the pervasive mythology and enviable cultural capital of Dylan Thomas in the years after his death in 1953. The first question to be addressed is why would anyone want to adopt the name Dylan in the late 1950s. Second, attention focuses on Robert Zimmerman in particular and asks why he, given the broader context of the Welshman's cultural capital, decided to take Dylan Thomas's Christian name as his surname. The third context is that of poetry and the influence Thomas had upon Bob Dylan's work. I suggest that Robert Zimmerman's choice was not because he was influenced by the poetry itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining the 1960 film version of Beat writer Jack Kerouac's The Subterraneans, this article explores screenwriter Robert Thom's creation of a female artist for the film, considering the character's challenges to traditional female roles, her reflection of Beat philosophies, as well as her return to those traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]