Pocket Books to Global Beat: Andrei Voznesensky, Kazuko Shiraishi, Michael Horovitz

The Beat Movement has long been thought to centre only as an American cultural phenomenon and in key names like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso, and with William Burroughs as a presiding dark mentor. This essay argues for a far wider contextual understanding. It looks to Beat currents in the African American poetry of LeRoi Jones/Imamu Baraka, Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman, a circuit of Beat‐influenced women like Diane Di Prima and Anne Waldman, and a US multicultural arena to include Oscar Zeta Acosta and Maxine Hong Kingston. Most of all it analyses the Beat impact beyond America in three prime names: Andrei Voznesensky as leading 1960s–1970s Russian dissident poet, Kazuko Shiraishi as longtime vintage Tokyoite jazz‐and‐poetry ‘bad girl’, and Michael Horovitz as British counter‐culture voice. In these three Beat acquires a global reach, a force of vision, a poetics, well beyond Greenwich Village or City Lights Bookshop, San Francisco. It also links the local, miniaturist Pocket Poets series established by Ferlinghetti with his own Pictures of a Gone World (1955) to Beat writings which can best be thought at once national and transnational. Given this larger cultural context, the essay analyzes a relevant body of verse by Vosnesensky, Shiraishi and Horovitz, with particular attention given to vision, image, the shaping language each poet gives to Beat heritage inaugurated far from their own beginnings.