Burroughs Beyond Fiction

Many people associate William Seward Burroughs as a novelist who exposes the seedy underworld of drug addiction and homosexuality in America and Mexico. However, he also shaped the Beat movement, his prose affecting Ginsberg's poetics as well as his own. Burroughs once wrote, "a medium suitable for me does not yet exist, unless I invent it [Campbell, 22]," making it no wonder that he explored the art of poetry. Like his novels, poems by William Burroughs move in flashing pictures that often leave the reader filled with a sense of chaos and misunderstanding. He connects descriptive images with horrifying personal experiences in a calm, detached way. Like other authors and poets of the Beat movement, Burroughs "used 'madness'...as a breakthrough to clarity, as a proper perspective from which to see [Tytell, 11]."

Burroughs' poem "The Evening News" describes the corruption of the police force as well as American society in general. The title refers to all criminality, injustice, and acts of hate one finds whenever reading a newspaper. Like most artists of the Beat generation, Burroughs looks down on the police as part of the problem in society, feeling that "everyone in business violates the law everyday [Tytell, 42]." The poem tells the story of a police officer who, rather than arresting those who break the law, accepts and demands bribes, blurring the line between legitimate and criminal activity.