Happening in Athens: the travels of Sinclair Beiles

Abstract

Sinclair Beiles is often referred to as “the South African Beat poet”. His prolonged travel enabled his formative development as a writer in Europe, and his contact with the international literary scene, notably several of the American Beat writers. These encounters and collaborations shaped his literary identity and voice, as did his own personal sense of exile, and his assumption of the modes of flânerie in a postmodern, expatriate context. In this essay I discuss several poems from Beiles’s debut collection, Ashes of Experience (1969,) in relation to these biographical interactions and literary-historical scenes.

Keywords: Sinclair Beiles, Beat Generation, South African poetry, flânerie, exile