On Monday’s Access Utah we’ll not only talk about key writers of the Beat Generation--such as Allen Ginsburg, Philip Whalen, and Kenneth Rexroth, but we’ll hear their voices as well. John Suiter, author of “Poets on the Peaks,” a book about Beat poets and their experiences as fire lookouts in the Northwest during the 1950s, discovered some historic photographs and audio tapes during his research.
These materials were in Walter Lehrman’s Ohio attic and have not been seen or heard in decades. Lehrman, a retired English professor, attended school in Berkeley in the 1950s and knew the poets. An exhibit titled “Nobody Goes Home Sad” is now on display at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University. The exhibit grew out of an idea of showing Suiter’s contemporary photographs of Beat writers against Lehrman’s historic photographs, and also features audio excerpts. We’ll ask Walter Lehrman and John Suiter to tell us some stories about Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder and others and to contextualize this important period of American cultural history.
