Ebb and Flow: Breath-Writing from Ancient Rhetoric to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg

Abstract

Following the path of Charles Olson, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg negotiate breath as a compositional principle for a new particularly American literature. Such a poetics of breathing turns out to be a revival of classical thought. For ancient rhetoricians, especially Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian, the breath-pause is constitutive for structuring speech. Already in the ancient approaches, a dilemma emerges: breathing is supposed to cut speech into well-measured units while physical respiration tends to be irregular. Even though the Beat poets seem to elude this problem in their attempt to adapt composition to the writer’s individual rhythms, breath, as they theorise it, is a point where bodily processes and cultural techniques intersect. The natural, organic body as Kerouac and Ginsberg celebrate it invokes a cultural memory, and thus, the idea of a purely embodied writing is upset.