What’s on Performance

Beat poetry with Miles Merrill

Miles Merrill performs Jack Kerouac's ‘On the road’ and Allen Ginsberg's ‘Howl’ with multi-instrumentalist Trevor Brown

Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and the beat poets were major influences on several artists of the 1950s and 60s, including Robert Rauschenberg. Often congregating at the Cedar Tavern in New York, the artists, writers and musicians that made up the beat generation celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity. With their subversive use of unconventional materials, Rauschenberg’s paintings are in themselves much like reading a beat poem or listening to free-form jazz.

In this Open Weekend performance, Merrill recites Kerouac’s iconic On the road and Ginsberg’s controversial ??How??l in the Gallery with Brown on bass. Merrill is the creative director of the literary arts organisation, Word Travels. He is also a writer, performer, facilitator and event co-ordinator who combines poetry with theatre, experimental audio, hip-hop beats, stand-up and, occasionally, political confrontation.