Cheatniks Among Beatniks

Mortified, the editors of Corral, the Oklahoma State University literary magazine, last week discovered that there are cheatniks among the beatniks of the new generation. The poem they printed, as gloriously beat as anything ever incanted by Allen (Howl) Ginsberg:

Dissentient, arrant they come. Such paucity transcends

Existence, the very essence of life.

With affinity these extrinsic souls -furiously incarnate,

Their entity cognate, spectral, absolute, perpetual -show

The aberration of the fraternity fraught with the ignis

Fatuus ideal that to transpose coalescent nullities with

Ubiquity, a bourgeois, primordial driblet of reality is

Vital to eternal equipoise.

Haunted they come, their balefully intaglio psyches

Sublime with illusory grandeur -acquiescent with restless

Self-deception.

An editor appended the observation: "The vocabulary is demanding, but an interesting subject makes it worthwhile."

Only then did the poet, Robert L. McCulloh, head of the university news bureau, speak up. There is no subject, said he, but the vocabulary is demanding, all right. Word-dazzled one night while browsing through a thesaurus, onetime Newsman (Neosho, Mo. News) McCulloh wrote 35 especially incandescent words on separate pieces of paper. Then he stuck them in a box, pulled them out at random, tacked them together with appropriate connectives, and added a wry title: Counterfeit Generation.

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