Category: poetics

“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.)

 

New mini chapbook (mine)!

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I am in the middle of making a new lil chapbook. As always, formatting and photocopying are more traumatic than expected. But it WILL be ready by Saturday. About 5 people in the world are as excited about this as I am.

 

 

If you want one you should come to Agitprop on Saturday at 7pm. Or you can knock on my sideporch door any time after Sunday. Or, I can send one to you in a sort of delicious correspondence barter (you’d have to write me back). I’d do that. I have a lot of stamps.

 

($2 each, or traded for $2 worth of what you got. Photograph & cover design by my farmer, Misha J.)

 

“Ballad in the Streets of Buenos Aires” (poem) (Amichai).

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Ballad in the Streets of Buenos Aires

 

And a man waits in the streets and meets a woman

precise and beautiful as the clock inside her room

and sad and white as the wall that holds it

 

And she does not show him her teeth

and she does not show him her belly

but she shows him her time, precise and beautiful

 

And she lives on the ground floor next to the pipes

and the water which goes up starts at her wall

and he has decided on softness

 

And she knows the reasons for weeping

and she knows the reasons for the holding back

and he begins, and he begins to be like her

 

And his hair grows long and soft like hers

and the hard words of his tongue melt in her mouth

and his eyes in tears will look like hers

 

And the traffic lights light up her face

and she is standing there in the permitted and the forbidden

and he has decided on softness

 

And they walk in the streets which will be in his dreams

and the rain weeps into them as into a pillow,

and restless time has made them into prophets

 

And he will lose her in the red light

and he will lose her in the green and in the yellow

and the light is always there to serve all loss

 

And he won’t be there when soap and lotion run out

and he won’t be there when the clock is set again

and he won’t be there when her dress is raveled out in threads

 

And she will shut his wild letters in a quiet drawer

and lie down to sleep beside the water in the wall

and she will know the reasons for weeping and for holding back

and he has decided on softness

 

-Yehuda Amichai (translated by Harold Schimmel)

Belated brunch sonnet #7 (mine).

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I want to walk around Hastings but nobody lives here

anymore. Pretty soon I won’t either. My home will be

some yellow morning in a place with seasons, a couple

of strips of bacon still scenting the rooms near the kitchen.

Tomorrow I’ll show friends the spots on my tour of Hastings:

the tennis courts, the entrance to the woods, the back door

of the bar where you can smoke anything, the long lightless

road along Reynolds Field. I haven’t lived here for years,

proved by today when I tried to mail my letter in two mailboxes

no longer in service, painted brown but still standing, handled

mouths glued shut. When I come home, the cat relearns me.

I sleep under a mountain of blankets. My appetite is misplaced

and I get lost driving simple places. All this not-knowing

is a sort of exhaustion. All these knots have pull.

 

Brunch Sonnet 6: Patti Smith at St. Mark’s Bookshop (mine).

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Brunch Sonnet 6

Patti Smith at St. Mark’s Bookshop

 

Patti kicked the g’s off the ends of words—thinkin’,

fryin’. She had long dyed hair with undercurls of grey,

no secrets there. She arrived on time in a black beanie,

her voice skidding out of her throat like wet feet on sand.

She was amazed to have her name on a New Directions book,

she waited fifty years but it happened. Fifty years isn’t so long

for a dream. Her neighbors in Detroit used to spiff up her lawn

while she was gone on trips, she hated that, she wanted

those flowers for tea, for wine, the dandelions. The worst thing

about Detroit wasn’t the lack of a coliseum or museum, but

the lack of a café. She said she’d sit in some whitewashed

corner at the nearest 7-11 and try to read, pretending  herself

at the Café des Poètes with a mug, a watch, a bit of time,

a few sips left, a cigarette, the table wooden, stained.

 

 

Brunch Sonnet 4 (mine).

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The river was swollen. There were rocks

covered completely by water. We three stood

by the water. It was too cold for smells.

There is nothing so serious as each instant

occurring right after the last. Only this. Then

this. We unribbon. We peeled back, pulled open.

And from our mouths: sets of words. Laughs

of white breath. The story of a star. We are anything,

except that we are only this: this single minute.

One truth after another. My hands were in

my pockets. The river licked at rocks. All

that liquid, all that thirst. The temperature took

away my toes. I see some people twice a year.

There is a fullness to the sky, an emptiness.