Greenwich Village Bohemia: A Winter Wonderland Turns Into An American Renaissance(Part II).

as so--To think that a soft woman desires a hard hairy man ! The thought of it amazes: where's the beauty ? But Ruth explains to me (as I asked, for kicks) that because of her excessive softness and bellies of wheat she grew sick and tired of all that, and desired roughness---in which she saw beauty by contrast--and so like Picasso again, and like in a Jan Muller Garden, we mortified Mars with our exchanges of hard & soft--With a few extra tricks, politely in Vienna---that led to a breathless timeless night of sheerly lovely delight, ending with sleep." (4)

Passion certainly seemed to run to the innermost of depths in those days in the village. Not only were the beats producing a form of poetry that was based upon the moment, but they were living the thoughts of emotion. A great deal of the beat movement was founded on the importance of being, the belief that to capture the moment held the fountain of wisdom, that to essence of life lay in grasing experience. Only then could a man truly to be able to say that he had lived. Emersonian in connotation, the beat movement took such philosophy one step further by capturing the feeling and lifestyle of the jazz musician and placing that emotion in the stanzas of poetry. Did this freedom apply to women in the beat movement as well ? Surprisingly, it did. One of the most fasinating aspects of this subculture, was the beginnings of sexual liberation emerging at a time when convenionality ruled the day in America. The beats were well twenty or thirty years ahead of their time. The poetry of the beat poets not only expressed a philosophy of free love; that a person should be able to love whoever they chose, but also placed little limitations on this freedom to love another person. The women also wrote poetry comparable in quality and stanza to anything that Kerouac or Ginsberg ever wrote. And, they as their male counterparts also lived a life considered risque in some circles of America. Diane Di Prima probably exemplifies this sense of sexual liberation to the fullest. Middle-class suburbia was definitely not ready for the vision of the poetry written by this young woman, but in due course of time, she was embraced by many in mainstream America. In some ways, her poetry had a larger impact than that of the poetry of Kerouac, for it opened up a new sense of being often denied to women in years before this North Beach poetical

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