The internet is too big to talk about as a whole, but on the whole I’ll generalize and say that my favorite thing about the internet is….this.
So now that you clicked on that link, click the little play button, and now you’ll be listening to Frank O’Hara (THE MAN MY LEGEND) reading his poem “Ode to Joy” over an instrumental version of Drake’s “The Best I Ever Had.”
I already love Drake because he is a pretty good rapper and once made a video that took place at a bar mitzvah (combining Judaism and hip hop, which rarely happens). I’ve loved Frank O’Hara for always & always will, even though he is very easy to love and everyone seems to. I think I still love him differently. His little lispy-crispy pronunciation. His gap tooth. His neck in a crew neck sweater in the postcard that lives in my truck. I do love him. And now thanks to the internet, (well, thanks to Cassanda Gillig, whom I would like to meet because he seems hilarious and cool and smart and essential), I can have poetry & hip hop fused in just the way I never knew I’d love because I hadn’t fathomed it yet.
And there’s more. There’s Brautigan & Mariah Carey! Even better THERE IS JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE AND ALICE NOTLEY. I am going bonkers right now. You know when you find something that you like so much you can’t handle it? And you think about how good life was before and how now it’s one significant notch better? And you feel like your posture has gotten better and that there’s more space between your toes so you can stand and jump and dance better? Do you guys know what I’m talking about?
Chutzpah (pronounced huuts-pah) is a Yiddish word used by Jews and non-Jews alike to describe someone who is particularly audacious or has a major guts, or, more crudely put, someone with balls.
Otis Henry is a straight up gangster.
Everything Otis Henry does, he does gangsterized
Because he is such a straight up gangster.
When Otis Henry walks, he walks gangster.
Look at Otis Henry’s walk—
Oh Lord, it is too gangster!
When Otis Henry is hungry, he gangster eats.
Eating hard!
Ripping the celery from its stalk.
For that is what true gangsters eat.
Straight up gangster celery.
When Otis Henry drives a car—you guessed it:
Gangster.
How do gangsters drive cars, you ask?
Answer: just like Otis Henry.
Superduper gangster.
After washing his hands, Otis Henry straight up gangster dries his hands.
He dries his hands like a straight up gangster
On a gangster hand towel
Monogrammed with a G.
Cause everybody needs to know that this is a straight up gangster hand drying party
And Otis Henry
Is the original
Straight up gangster.
And when I say gangster
I mean gangster gangster ass gangster.
And when I say gangster gangster ass gangster.
I mean poet.
***
(via pank, where you can find more of Nick Demske’s Otis Henry poems.)
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.
Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
Submissive to everything, open, listening
Try never get drunk outside yr own house
Be in love with yr life
Something that you feel will find its own form
Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
Blow as deep as you want to blow
Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
The unspeakable visions of the individual
No time for poetry but exactly what is
Visionary tics shivering in the chest
In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
Like Proust be an old teahead of time
Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
Accept loss forever
Believe in the holy contour of life
Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
You’re a Genius all the time
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.)
