Beat Generation essay 1.8 | Page 26

longing”. Here is the sign of the “wounded healer”. Wieners is astutely aware of a spirit world and animism and presents a question to the reader if they feel or sense the same as he in “Time” when he states “Are you quiet enough to hear horned owls at dawn?”. Wieners is the shaman-poet of secrets and shadows. II In his writings on “the theatre of cruelty”, Artaud seeks to develop a theatre which “inspires us with the fiery magnetism of its images and acts upon us like a spiritual therapeutics whose touch can never be forgotten” (Gorelick, 2011). It has been termed “an impossible theatre” vital for what it generated but ultimately “hopelessly vague and metaphorical in its concrete detail” (Abiline, 2013). The living project of Carl Solomon follows similar lines. He had travelled abroad and become interested in surrealism and Dadaism. His pursuit and search in the Avant-garde led him to a showing of Artaud’s theatre which had a profound and lasting impact on him but he was soon to become stricken with, in the words of Ginsberg's Howl, "the concrete void of insulin". Solomon was committed to Rockland and one of his best poems 25