Lothlorien Poetry Journal Volume 7 - Beat Cafe, features the outstanding poetry and fiction of over 60 poets and authors from our virtual Beat Cafe with their own modern day take on dystopian reality and fantasy. These internationally renowned poets and authors continue the revolutionary legacy of the original Beat Generation poets and authors and bring their own original take on twenty-first century life and society. Discover poems of enchantment, fantasy, fairy tale, folklore, dreams, dystopian, flora and fauna, magical realism, romance, and anything hiding deep in-between the cracks. Cover Image – Ed van der Elsken – Bohemian Life in Paris 1950-52 “It’s a sort of furtiveness … Like we were a generation of furtive. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public’, a kind of beatness – I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are – and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world … It’s something like that. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.” ― Jack Kerouac “It really was a whole generation who were listening to Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Ella Fitzgerald, Sonny Rollins, James Moody, Fats Navarro and, a little bit later on, Mongo Santamaría and Chuck Berry, and these dozen or so guys gave them a voice. They led the way. They wrote what a whole generation wanted to read. The time was right and they seized the day by writing about their lives. They travelled, they got into scrapes, they got arrested, they got wasted … and they wrote about it. Isn’t that something?” ― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life. — Jack Kerouac Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does. — Allen Ginsberg Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact. — William S. Burroughs