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One Fast Move Or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur

One Fast Move

He was called the vibrant new voice of his generation — the avatar of the Beat movement. In 1957, on the heels of the triumphant debut of his groundbreaking novel, On The Road, Jack Kerouac was a literary rock star, lionized by his fans and devotees. But along with sudden fame and media hype came his unraveling, and, by 1960, Kerouac was a jaded cynic, disaffected from the Beat culture he helped create and tortured by self-doubt, addiction and depression.

Desperate for spiritual salvation and solitude, as well as a place to dry out, he secretly retreats to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's rustic cabin in the Big Sur woods. But his plan is foiled by his own inner demons, and what ensues that summer becomes the basis for Kerouac's gritty, yet lyrically told, semi-autobiographical novel, Big Sur.

One Fast Move or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur, takes the viewer back to Ferlinghetti's cabin and to the Beat haunts of San Francisco and New York City for an unflinching, cinematic look at the compelling events the book is based on. (...)

Filed under  //   books   film   literature   music   poetry   video  
Posted November 6, 2009
// 1 Comment

Paintings by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

           
Click here to download:
Paintings_by_Lawrence_Ferlingh.zip (158 KB)

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

City Lights

Wiki

via George Krevsky Gallery

Filed under  //   art   poetry  
Posted November 4, 2009
// 0 Comments

Sylvia Plath Reads Lady Lazarus

via youtube.com

via Paula Mendoza-Hanna

Filed under  //   film   poetry   video  
Posted October 27, 2009
// 0 Comments

Hagamos Alma

via flickr.com

There are many signs like this by "acción poética" (poeta: Armando Alanís) in the streets of Monterrey MX

Filed under  //   poetry   street art  
Posted October 27, 2009
// 0 Comments

Data Goon and the Invitation Writer

 

Filed under  //   art   collage   cw   poetry  
Posted October 25, 2009
// 0 Comments

Limousine Eyelash

via flickr.com

Delusion Angel by David Jewell

from Before Sunrise

via 9000

Filed under  //   film   poetry  
Posted October 23, 2009
// 0 Comments

Scribes of Eternity

Word warriors, they dedicate their lives to the cause, as they make their daring "raids on the inarticulate / With shabby equipment always deteriorating", as TS Eliot described it. No ministry exists to help them in their quest. It is a journey of the spirit. Even when they find a perfection of language to catch the moment – and always with eternity in their sights – they mostly view their hard-won triumph as another kind of failure.

For them, as Eliot explains, "there is only the trying / The rest is not our business". Why do they do it? Certainly not for money – the epithet "best-selling poet" brings a wry smile to their lips. Fame? Not quite. Immortality, however, has its profound attractions. John Milton wrote, modestly, to a school friend: "I am thinking of immortality." And he got it.

"I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name," wrote Sylvia Plath, only weeks before she died. "The woman is perfected" is the chilling first line in Edge in which she became "one of those... great classical heroines", according to poet Robert Lowell. Alas, the problem with immortality is that it is awarded posthumously.

Plath died virtually unknown, as did poor Keats, who believed that his name was "writ in water". Shelley, who drowned a short time later (a book of Keats in his back pocket), died with most of his work unpublished – "Then, what is life?" was the last line he ever wrote.

It's a prophetic line, because it is in pursuit of the answer to that searing question that the poet lives and works. The heroism involved lies in the desire to penetrate "the sacred mystery of the universe" – which Thomas Carlyle believed was the essence of the poet's journey to the interior.

They are sent to make it more impressively known to us, he said, and thus their work belongs to all time. Indeed they speak to us more powerfully through the centuries than do novelists or playwrights whose work is often more worldly and therefore more rooted in its particular moment.

(...)

Scribes of eternity

Poets deserve our thanks for their dedication to the craft of

capturing and preserving experience

by Josephine Hart | Guardian

Read the article

Image via OMI

Filed under  //   poetry  
Posted October 21, 2009
// 0 Comments

Jack Spicer: No one listens to poetry

           
Click here to download:
Jack_Spicer_No_one_listens_to_.zip (449 KB)

In the '60s a great many poets were working very hard to break through poetry's received tonalities and modes of address, but Spicer went at it in a way that undermined even the pieties of the avant-garde. It seemed there were things that only Jack Spicer would put in a poem, and these turned out to be a whole category of syntactical fake-outs and parodistic distortions, deliberately frustrated expectations and mood-changing intrusions. Was that last bit a joke or a prayer, an outburst of self-pity or something more like savage mockery? Or were all these surface skitterings and chasms merely traces of the earthling Jack Spicer being moved around the board by the entity transmitting the message, a message whose unmediated significance would be revealed only in the original Martian? "If this is dictation, it is driving / Me wild."

Spicer's sound is finally as naggingly persistent as the surf that haunts his work, as in these lines from "Thing Language":

This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to
..............................................
                              Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.

This Is the End of the Poem - How Jack Spicer broke through the pieties of the avant-garde | Geoffrey O'Brien

via The Poetry Foundation

Read the article


Poems By Jack Spicer

This is the end of the poem.
You can start laughing, you bastards. This is
The end of the poem.

"Any fool can get into an ocean..."

A Diamond

A Poem Without a Single Bird in It

A Second Train Song for Gary

Berkeley in Time of Plague

Concord Hymn

Ode For Walt Whitman

Orpheus in Hell

Six Poems for Poetry Chicago

Thing Language


~.~

 

Jacks are figures of no small contradiction, and Jack Spicer was, true to his name, a poet of contradiction.

If nothing happens it is possible
To make things happen
Human history shows this
And an ape
Is likely (presently) to be an angel.

At the heart of his work is a paradox: Spicer means to produce a "pure poetry" that is self-sufficient, magical and ecstatic, yet he freely draws from his own relationships, his obsessions and interests, his thoughts and fantasies and wishes and swoons. He published his work in his lifetime only in small editions barely distributed outside San Francisco (and even in the city he sometimes avoided major poetry bookstores like Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights).

Jack Spicer on Mars | Jared White

via Open Letters

Read the article


~.~


Related post:  Poetry & Aliens

"The poet Jack Spicer did more than simply write poems about aliens. He famously explained that his work was written by them. Much like Lorca's notion of Duende—the dark force poets struggle with which "must come to life in the nethermost recesses of the blood"—Spicer reported that his relationship to his poems was similar to that of a radio to incoming broadcasts and that it was Martians who sent his poems to him through space.

Whether searching in earnest for answers or simply gazing up at the stars, poets continue to engage what lies just outside of their humanity."

Read the article here.

 

Filed under  //   books   poetry  
Posted October 21, 2009
// 1 Comment

Please Come Supernaturally Loud

Photo by Yell Saccani

He Had Sweat and Bedpost Spasm

Cut-Up / Remix
inspired by Alchymical Romance by Lee Battersby

he had she
he had sweat and bedpost spasm
he had nostrils where they count most

she'd had he before she'd gone
entering the long orgasm
with a ripple of sensational ghosts

he moaned, then
his eyes crisscrossed
and his curls toed

she'd had him and he'd swung open
supernaturally,
unexpectantly peering at the nothing weeds

and the nothing stars
into the dark warm mirrorheart
he paused to palm her burnished bronze

it was soft

~.~

Please Come Supernaturally Loud

Cut-Up / Remix
inspired by Alchymical Romance by Lee Battersby + AR baum-bastic mix by Matthew Lowe

please come supernaturally loud
please the animal be

put a finger on the skin
warm and sticky

then without a word
whirr and spark

oh god
oh god!

~.~

Superhuman Tongues with No Sense of Shame

Cut-Up / Remix
inspired by Alchymical Romance by Lee Battersby + AR Gender Exchange Remix by Sarah Xu

superhuman tongues with no sense of shame
decide to follow the headlights forever
they lick the slick oncoming lanes,
assorted bottles, rainbow dirt, cappuccino sugar cane

you've changed, one says to another

you don't any longer feel a thing

i'm sorry

drugs, clocks, blades or fluids caused it
or the empty nothing deadening everything it touched

today, however, the driveway doorway porch
has upon it a cardboard box which contains a lamp
or surely something better than money by much

a suntanned lamp held together with honey
a new wave hard-won torch or tether
an angel-winged tramp.

~.~

Reckon Remixes Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share alike 3.0

Remix My Lit

Download the electronic version of Through the Clock’s Workings and start remixing. The entire anthology can be remixed - the original stories, the remixes, and even the fonts.

Remix My Lit is a Brisbane based, international remixable literature project. The project aims to apply the lessons learned from music and film remixing to literature. It is designed to explore where remix fits into literature. It will provide a space within the discipline to encourage and foster a community and culture of remix.

RML Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5-Australia Licence.

Photo Credit:  Some Other Try by Yell Saccani

 

Filed under  //   cw   literature   photography   poetry   remix  
Posted October 17, 2009
// 0 Comments

Dear Andy Love Allen

In this photo taken on Aug. 13, 2009, books and a note by Allen Ginsberg found in one of Andy Warhol's time capsules wait to be catalogued at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

January 6 1978

Dear Andy --

Here's another big book Gordon & I manufactured -- with odd snapshots & Diary notes. See p 153 for Subliminal CIA-Iran story Oct 1960 -- No need to read this thru Just glance at it when you're too busy to remember what you're supposed to be doing.

Love Allen Ginsberg

via The Allen Ginsberg Project:  Warhol's Junk

+ The Huffington Post:  Naked Onassis Photo Found with Warhol's Junk

 

Filed under  //   art   books   history   photography   poetry   politics  
Posted October 16, 2009
// 1 Comment