Arnold Christopherson – Custom Harvester, Beat Generation Welder

This was recorded last winter during a reading series hosted by The Rasp and The Wine. On this particular evening, readers celebrated, honoured, or in some fashion referenced the Beat poets.

I post it here, on this Labour Day, in celebration of fall and harvest, and in honour of one particular man who would never have considered himself ascribing to anything related to the “Beat generation”—a term coined by Kerouac—but whose artisanship and south-of-the-border persona was to me telling of a kind of non-conformist swagger, a Zen commitment to an aspect of the agricultural trade and to the art and craftsmanship it necessitated. That is, Arnold was to welding, what Coltrane was to jazz and Ginsberg was to (Beat) poetry.

 


3 Comments

  1. I never got to know him as you have, but we chatted a few years ago at a gathering of some branch of his family to which we had been invited … his name was big around town, and I felt recognized when he approached me and struck up a conversation!

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