Tag Archives: Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Remembering the Be-Ins at Willowbranch Park

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For the briefest of moments, it was the most magical time, wild yet somehow innocent. The be-ins at Willowbranch Park in the late ’60s featured a broil of young musicians, out of which rose the Allman Brothers Band. The be-ins meant long hair, beads and tie-dye, hippies walking barefoot through Riverside, cheap rent in old mansions, but more than anything, they meant music.

Beat Writers in Historic Springfield: William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lewis Marker in Jax

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In 1952, while the Beat novelist William S. Burroughs awaited trial for killing his “common law” wife, Joan Vollmer, in Mexico City, he wrote most of the novel Queer, in which a fictionalized Burroughs named William Lee pursues a fictionalized Adelbert Lewis Marker of Jacksonville named Eugene Allerton with undisguised lustful aggression through Mexico City.

When Marker sought refuge back home in Jacksonville’s Victorian Springfield, Burroughs came to call, as did Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg wrote novelist Jack Kerouac about drinking rum with Marker on East 4th Street or East 6th Street. Burroughs wrote his first two novels for Marker, said if Marker didn’t like them, he’d never write again, though he seems to have forgotten the wife he’d just shot in the forehead and killed.