Category: beats

“You’re a Genius all the time” (list) (Kerouac).

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Here’s a list that Jack Kerouac titled “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose.” He enclosed it in a letter to Don Allen, written in 1958. Here are his essentials, each of them so very Kerouac, each of them reminding me to be just as wild as I want to.

 

  1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
  2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
  3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
  4. Be in love with yr life
  5. Something that you feel will find its own form
  6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
  7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
  8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
  9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
  10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
  11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
  12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
  13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
  14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
  15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
  16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
  17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
  18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
  19. Accept loss forever
  20. Believe in the holy contour of life
  21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
  22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
  23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
  24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
  25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
  26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
  27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
  28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
  29. You’re a Genius all the time
  30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

 

(list via a great new site I just began loving, lists of note. photo of jack kerouac, lucien carr, and allen ginsberg, in the middle of being geniuses all the time, via tumbling dice.)

 

Thursday night (mine) (poem).

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Illastep

 

Three dudes making music

on a rolled-out rug

 

Outside the table umbrellas

are lined with lights

 

One red guitar

One guitar with four shining knobs

 

Ian like a young Allen Ginsberg

on the drums

 

The lips of the man I kiss

taste like new smoke

 

People are talking and people

are nodding along

 

All my hair is safely stowed

underneath my hat

 

Good god thank you, this

is exactly what I wanted out of my twenties

 

 

“Friday evening in the universe” (Kerouac).

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Yes, it’s early, late or middle Friday evening in the universe. Oh, the sounds of time are pouring through the window and the key. All ideardian windows and bedarvled bedarvled mad bedraggled robes that rolled in the cave of Amontillado and all the sherried heroes lost and caved up, and transylvanian heroes mixing themselves up with glazer vup and the hydrogen bomb of hope.

 

(-Jack Kerouac, from his narration of the short film “Pull My Daisy,” part of which you can watch right here, with Italian subtitles, black and white versions of late afternoon Manhattan sunlight, and Kerouac, rambling long and short and narratively.) (I just learned how to embed videos on my site thanks to this really cool person’s daily song website. One small step for panache perhaps.)