Poet Allen Ginsberg was drawn into the Vortex. A fate known by the original Magic Locals, the people called the “Wichita Group.” They were the first to speak the myth of the Vortex, the story that became both a description of dire circumstances and the name of our place: Wichita, Kansas.
Bruce Conner fs ’53, David Haselwood ’53, and Michael McClure fs ’53 comprised the Wichita Group, a name given to the trio of Wichita-grown artists by art critic Peter Plagens. They met at Wichita’s Robinson Junior High School in the time of Harry Truman and began practicing magic that would expand our minds. They didn’t invent the idea of the Vortex, but they gave it meaning.
They described a physical force that held them against their will in a culture that didn’t want them. It explained their presence in a place that was alien to their desires and thoughts. They looked for a place where they could practice their magic, near others like themselves.
Each of the three found a formula for escaping the Vortex — McClure in 1953, Conner in 1954 and Haselwood in 1955. After many travels and searches each of them, independently, found home in San Francisco.
The myth of the Vortex grew as the words and the images of the Wichita Group gained fame and stature in the Bay Area. Hipsters spoke of it often in the shrines of North Beach and the galleries of Haight-Ashbury. So when another wave of Wichita poets and artists arrived in the Bay Area around 1959 (Bob Branaman, Glen Todd, Charlie Plymell, and more) they found recognition and a common bond — each had successfully escaped the Vortex.
But not all who wanted to made it out. Many couldn’t find the right formula to escape. Of those who stayed, some recognized the myth of the Vortex and named a holy place, a beanery, to signify its power — The Magic Theatre Vortex.
There, the remaining artists practiced the words and the images of their earlier kin. It was here that Ginsberg found the “center of the Vortex” on his Guggenheim-sponsored road trip of 1966. It was a place of magic in the midst of the “radio aircraft assembly frame ammunition petroleum nightclub Newspaper streets.”
Ginsberg knew of the myth of the Vortex from the Wichita Group, whom he had met in the Bay Area. He wanted to see the city that produced so many great minds and, at the same time, so many mass-manufactured weapons of death. “On to Wichita to Prophesy! O frightful bard! Into the heart of the Vortex,” he cried, for he was forewarned about the forces he would encounter.
The poet entertained the police at the Magic Theatre Vortex on Douglas Avenue and John Birch Society members at the Showboat Lounge near Edgemoor and Harry. At Wichita State University, he chanted his newly completed anti-Vietnam War poem Wichita Vortex Sutra at the Campus Activities Center under the watchful eye of Captain Bobby Stout, who waited in the back row, ready to arrest him if officials deemed his speech obscene. Calmness prevailed.
His words stumped the establishment and lifted the spirits of the resistance. Now, because of Ginsberg’s poem, all who read it know Wichita as the Vortex.
From the creative minds of young Wichita poets, going public on the streets of San Francisco and, immortalized in Our Great Poet’s Wichita Vortex Sutra, the myth of the Vortex is now a part of our American literary history.
“And that’s the Vortex in Toto!” — Bruce Conner, 1987
Wichita State University will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Allen Ginsberg’s 1966 visit to Wichita and the first reading of Wichita Vortex Sutra with events set to begin on campus at 1 p.m., Feb. 21, 2016 in the Santa Fe Room at the Rhatigan Student Center. There will be a panel discussion on the history of the trip with panelists Roger Irwin, who as a WSU graduate assistant arranged Ginsberg’s 1966 reading at WSU; Jay Price, WSU history professor; and independent curator James W. Johnson. KMUW commentator Jeff Beaudoin will read the complete poem Wichita Vortex Sutra. Admission is free.
