He came up with some of the best lines in the language. "Hitch your wagon to a star" ... "The shot heard around the world"... "Build a better mousetrap."
He was Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), the New England poet and Transcendentalist. His latest biographer is Robert D. Richardson, who has just followed up his tremendous "Emerson: The Mind on Fire" with a little book called "First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process" (Univ. of Iowa Press).
Bob Richardson is a local Key West writer, incidentally married to local Key West writer Annie Dillard. As for my own reading and writing, I know enough to be dangerous.
Some fun, then, as we take a look at the true wonder of modern American diction and marvel at how it came to pass through Emerson.
The first revelation in "First We Read, Then we Write" is the degree to which Emerson, especially in his essay "The Poet," goes into matters so vital to writing today. The 19th-century Emerson, with his huge, rolling style - it makes syntax sound like deep breathing - has managed to be crucial to an understanding of our monosyllabic 21st century sentences.
That is because he knew what he was talking about. Meaning that, in Richardson's words, he aimed to deliver "the thing behind the words." Writing, for Emerson and for the future of the American voice, has depended on "proper creation," what Jack Kerouac called "first thought best thought" (first as in leading thought), the ability to reveal from within the image its message for real.
Not an easy thing to get across, nor to do. One feels Emeron's enormous presence looming over Richardson's shoulder as he sat absorbing Emerson's own endless reading and writing in order to, at the last, with brilliant insight, distill it into one central idea: How we use language in America. (Bob can take the looming presence; he has already written two masterful biographies on William james and Henry Thoreau.)
It all begins with reading and it is something that happens to all of us at one time or another in ourt lives. We encounter a book that appears to have been written just for us, whose intoxication seems exclusively our own. And, "having exhausted that cup of enchantment," concludes Emerson, "we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in Paradise again."
Everything that has ever been thought can be written, whether by "inspiration, by virtue or vice, by friend or fiend, angels or gin." One day a dream of a book really will get it just right for you and go straight to the heart of your matter.
How it does it will depend on the word and the sentence. "In writing," shares Emerson, "there is always a right word, and every other that is wrong." By this he is not referring to the horror of endless choice but noting that the best and first (meaning winning) word is there to be found. Although the origin of most of the English language is lost in the misty murk, "each word was at first a stroke of genius," says Emerson. And Richardson gives a couple of rich examples of words we do know about: Supercilious, literally "raising of the eyebrow," from "super" meaning raised and "cilia" meaning eyebrow; and the word consider, literally "to study the stars," from the Latin "sidus, sideris," meaning star.
"In good writing," says the master, "every word means something." In other words, no italics in Plato.
And no abstractions. "No idea but in things" is the Modernist version of this, from William Carlos Williams' "Patterson" of 1927. The future is intrinsic to Emerson's point because of the way we have come to favor his tenets. Now we can read such perfect lines as these, from John O'Hara's final verse in his "Autobiographia Literaria" of 1951:
And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!
One of the very last poems by the late John Updike, the one that begins with the line, "All praise be Valium in Jesus' name," follows Emerson's every dictum to create a bittersweet reality grenade of our time:
All would be well, I felt, all manner of thing.
The needle, carefully worked, was in me, beyond pain,
aimed at an adrenal gland. I had not hoped
to find, in this bright place, so solvent a peace.
Days later, the results came casually through.
The gland, biopsied, showed metastis.
Finding the right word in order to say the right thing takes mindfulness and a delight in recollection and possibly an expanded consciousness. Often it is entirely accidental, as when "a glance reveals what the gaze obscures," in Emerson's words. It is best to write as thouh to an unknown friend. "When I write a letter to to anyone whom I love, I have no lack of words or thoughts; I am wider than myself ... but what I write to fill the gaps of a chapter is hard and cold, is grammar and logic; there is no magic in it; i do not wish to see it again."
Ah, yes ... Anyone who thinks writing can be done any old way has got it wrong. First of all there's what Richardson calls the "endless velvet alternatives to hard work." Then there's Emerson's problem of mood. "Our moods do not believe in each other. Today I am full of thoughts and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression tomorrow." Not a chance.
When a writer does get it right, the clear blue sky is the limit. Every good sentence implies all truth, says Emerson. There's more: "Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand different things." Thus is each one of us emblematic of the whole. "All history," writes Emerson, " is to be explained by each life. This is no abstraction."
And more still: The real writer is compelled to convey everything, believing with Emerson that "all that can be thought can be written, first or last. The writer would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it." The visible world, then, is the "dial plate of the invisible." We, too, "must write Bibles, to unite again the heavenly and the earthly world."
Here we go to holy ground, beyond even American diction, beyond the beating heart of the people, the call of the meadow or the cry of the cauldron, and directly into the nature of the thing itself: supernatural and eternal.
It is here that we will write what Emerson claimed for us: "America is a poem in our eyes."
This is an impeccable and exalted little book.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
The Sacred Secret of American Diction
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Review of Penguin edition of Kerouac’s Scroll Version of “On the Road” wins two top journalism awards: Review is one paragragh long!
A 2,000-word review of Jack Kerouac’s scroll version of “On the Road” (Viking) by Mark Howell has won two first-place journalism awards in 2008. The single-paragraph review, titled “Why Else Should I Live?” won top honor in the Florida Press Club Awards of Excellence competition in October, 2008, and top honor in the Society of Professional Journalists’ Awards of Excellence competition in December, 2008.
Read More...Sunday, October 26, 2008
RoadDreams
The Barber Institute at Birmingham University in England has come up with some big Kerouac events this fall.
There’s “Road Dreams: A Super-8 American Film Diary 1968-82” by Elliott Bristow. There’s “Exhibition in Focus” from Richard Ellis. And there is Jim Sampas’ “One Fast Move and I'm Gone: Kerouac's ‘Big Sur."
The scroll itself arrives in Birmingham in December.
Kerouac never made it to B’rum, but he did encounter one of the city's top 1950s gangsters, Paul Lund, on his trip to Tangier. Kerouac called Lund "John Banks" in “Desolation Angels,” in Part Three of Book Two, "Passing Through Tangiers, France and London."
A good friend of ours who lives in Birmingham, England, once had reason to know Paul Lund and has told us here at abouthedbeats that the fellow was "the black sheep of a wealthy Birmingham family who became a bank robber and escaped to Tangier to avoid a long stretch [no extradition from Morocco]. He married a black sheep of the Kellogg family. A great tale with an intriguing ending but I don't think Jack was very impressed with him.”
So.
Keep reading ...
... A Book of Names for Kerouac fans by Britain's Dave Moore coming soon
... we hope ...
... And Bill Burroughs' autobio, "River of Evil"
... We pray ...
- more later -
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Satin and Vacant: Hart Crane’s “Key West”
by Mark Howell
This is not going to be easy.
Before he fell from the stern of the U.S.S. Orizaba off Key West, never to be seen again, the great American poet Hart Crane planned to produce a third collection of poetry he called “Key West: An Island Sheaf.”
The thing is, Crane never did make it to Key West, although he undoubtedly made it with a number of sailors who did.
The other problem is that the poem in the sheaf titled “Key West” is so difficult that, when all is said and done, it’s just about incomprehensible.
But not quite.
Seventy-six years after Crane made his fateful leap into our waters, now is the time to take a fresh look at “Key West” and find out what it may mean for us.
Starting at the beginning: Harold Hart Crane was born near Cleveland, Ohio, on July 21, 1899. His father made a fortune in the candy business; he originally held the patent for Life Savers but sold his interest just before they took off.
Crane’s father and mother were forever fighting; there was a lot of separating and making up. Hart (it was his mother’s maiden name) was sent to live with his maternal grandmother at the age of 9. He shared with his mother an emotional instability and at 16 he attempted suicide on the Isle of Pines off Cuba, a property owned by his mother’s family.
In 1917, after his parents divorced, Crane dropped out of high school and headed straight for New York City. There he became known for letters introducing himself, setting up meetings, writing reviews of some of the most important figures of the time such as photographer Walker Evans, artist Georgia O’Keefe and playwright Eugene O’Neill.
He began to drink heavily. Working as a cub reporter in Manhattan and at his father’s factory in Cleveland, Crane found in alcohol a state of ecstasy where his poetic phrasing lay. He felt he could not access it any other way and so he hung out in speakeasies where he associated with sailors and sinners.
“Voyages,” a seven-part sequence of poems he published in 1926, was inspired by his relationship with Emil Opffer, a ship’s purser he met in 1924. Crane was quite open about homosexuality at a time when it was not fashionable to be so.
Hart Crane is back in favor these days for his language, his “scrolls of silver snowy sentences.” As he tried to explain to critics of his first collection, “White Buildings,” the sounds of his words were like echoes, options, gateways to all kinds of meanings.
His work ranged from the obscure to the obscurer. “O Carib Isle” from the Key West sheaf is accessibly obscure:
Slagged of the hurricane —
I, cast within its flow,
Congeal by afternoons here,
Satin and vacant
while “Lachrymae Christi” is beyond obscure:
Whitely, while benzene
Rinsings from the moon
Dissolve all but the windows of the mills.
But try, sometime, reading this verse from “The Broken Tower” on wine. It’s a revelation:
Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping
The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!
Pagodas campaniles with reveilles outleaping —
O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain!
The poet e. e. cummings claimed that “Crane’s mind was no bigger than a pin, but it didn’t matter; he was a born poet.” Tennessee Williams said he could “hardly understand a single line” but insisted he wanted to be buried at sea at the “point most nearly determined as the point at which Hart Crane gave himself back.”
Crane had his critics — Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound come to mind — but Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg used to read “The Bridge” together, John Berryman wrote one of his famous elegies on Crane and heavyweight Robert Lowell included his “Words for Hart Crane” in “Life Studies.”
An aggrieved Crane once wrote to his father: “Try to imagine working for the pure love of simply making something beautiful — something that maybe can’t be sold or used to help sell anything else, but that is simply a communication.”
The fact is, Crane did take money for his work. A smooth and affable financier, Otto Kahn, whose son was the leader of one of the great dance bands of the 1920s, advanced him the money to complete his projected poem about the Brooklyn Bridge.
Written on the Isle of Pines, “The Bridge” is Crane’s master work. Filled with lines like “a rip tooth of the sky’s acetylene” and “till elevators drop us from our day,” it is a nine-part epic truncated epic (he wrote the climax first) centered on the Brooklyn Bridge and it gave him tremendous trouble to complete. But he would never again write as mightily as he did on the Isle of Pines in that summer and fall of 1926.
— can you
imagine — while an EXpress makes time like
SCIENCE — COMMERCE and the HOLYGHOST
RADIO ROARS IN EVERY HOME WE HAVE THE NORTHPOLE
WALLSTREET AND VIRGINBIRTH WITHOUT STONES OR
WIRES OR EVEN RUNning brooks connecting ears
and no more sermons windows flashing roar
breathtaking — as you like it … eh?
So the 20th Century — so
whizzed the Limited — roared by and left
three men, still hungry on the tracks, ploddingly
watching the tail lights wizen and converge, slip-
ping gimleted and neatly out of sight.
This verbal rendition of the train of the century (“so whizzed the Limited”) crashing through the fundaments of the nation and leaving a trinity of the hungry in its wake had a vibratory effect on the readers and writers of the time. Man Ray took Crane’s photo for Vanity Fair in 1929 and in 1930 his work was included in a New York University course in contemporary poetry. He was awarded a Guggenheim in 1931 and settled in Mexico to work on a long poem about the Aztecs.
But little was done there. In the words of Crane’s friend Waldo Frank, “the periodicity of his excesses grew swifter.” Those who’d not seen Crane for awhile were horrified at how he’d aged, his hair grey and his face, once mustached and exotic looking, become puffy and bloated. Then his publisher, Harry Crosby, killed himself.
Crane now began a heterosexual liaison with Peggy Baird, the soon-to-be ex-wife of his friend, the critic Malcolm Cowley. Peggy joined Crane in Mexico when the Cowleys agreed to divorce. Malcolm, who would later be editor of Kerouac’s “On the Road,” was actually kind to Crane, calling “The Bridge” “in many respects the most important volume of American poetry since Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass.’”
Crane’s drinking led to alternating bouts of depression and elation. He seemed to be drinking himself to death when his his stepmother wrote to him on April 12, 1932, following his father’s death: “Nothing can be paid from the estate account to you in the way of your bequest. There isn’t any income from stocks to speak of. We are not making any money from our different businesses. The only thing we can do is to give you an allowance from my salary each month, and that I have made arrangements to do.”
Crane spoke of suicide and is said to have made a number of wills.
He and Peggy Cowley booked themselves aboard the U.S.S. Orizaba to sail back to the States from Veracruz. In the early hours of April 27, 1932, after a stop in Havana, Crane became emotionally distressed and may have had a sexual encounter with one of the ship’s cabin boys. He was badly beaten and robbed, then tried to jump off the ship but was restrained by a member of the crew. Crane visited Cowley in her cabin and told Peggy, “I’m not going to make it, dear. I’m utterly disgraced.”
One of Crane’s fellow passengers, Gertrude Berg, recalled that that morning “he had a black eye and looked generally battered.”
Close to noon, when the passenger steamship was anywhere between 30 to 60 miles off Key West, Crane appeared on deck. “He walked to the railing,” Berg remembered, “took off his coat, folded it neatly over the railing — not dropping it on deck — placed both hands on the railing, raised himself on his toes and then dropped back.
“We all fell silent and watched him, wondering what in the world he was up to. Then, suddenly, he vaulted over the railing and jumped into the sea.
“Just once I saw Crane, swimming strongly, but never again.”
Other witnesses said they heard him cry, “Goodbye, everybody!” before throwing himself over the railing. His body was never recovered.
He was 32. A marker on his father’s tombstone in Garrettsville, Ohio says, “Harold Hart Crane 1899-1932 LOST AT SEA.”
What Crane left behind was “Key West: An Island Sheaf.” It was literally a sheaf, a file folder complete with a table of contents and an epigram from William Blake: “The starry floor, The wat’ry shore, Is given thee ’til the break of day.”
Crane began the file in Mexico and had accumulated 18 poems by the time he jumped. “Key West” is the 15th poem in the sheaf. The others have intriguing titles: “The Mermen,” “To the Cloud Juggler,” the baffling “Connecticut-Cuban Overheard (Bacardi Spreads the Eagle’s Wings).” Many are successful, indeed terrifying; here’s how “The Hurricane” ends:
Whip sea-kelp screaming on blond
Sky-seethe, dense heaven dashing —
Thou ridest to the door, Lord!
Thou bidest wall nor floor, Lord!
But “Key West” remains the most obscure of all the works in “Key West: An Island Sheaf.” What could the poem possibly mean?
It is useless to rewrite a poem in prose in order to explain it, since poetry is meant to take us where prose won’t go. But a look at “Key West’s” four verses individually may bring its meaning to light.
It was at the Key West Literary Seminar that poet Mark Doty said that, although “he was never actually here,” Hart Crane “loved Key West.” He loved Key West because it was, by all reports, the opposite of Ohio.
In Crane’s imagination Key West was a high-risk café, a potent playground packed with people of every kind. The Key West sheaf was a kind of lifebelt to him, keeping him afloat on oceanic waves of tropical dissipation.
Here has my salient faith annealed me.
Out of the valley, past the ample crib
To skies impartial, that do not disown me
Nor claim me, either, by Adam’s spine — nor rib.
(Here in Key West the poet’s leaping faith has toughened him, who sprang from the uterus into a big crib and thence into the real world beyond the Garden of Eden.)
The oar plash, and the meteorite’s white arch
Concur with wrist and bicep. In the moon
That now has sunk I strike a single march
To heaven or hades — to an equally frugal noon.
(The splash of the oar and the arc of a falling meteorite work in unison with the rower. Under a gone moon the poet now heads either to heaven or to hell, both under a meager sun.)
Because these millions reap a dead conclusion
Need I presume the same fruit of my bone
As draws them towards a doubly mocked confusion
Of apish nightmares into steel-strung stone?
(Since the millions of dead can have reached no other conclusion than death, why need the poet go through life’s double jeopardy of a primitive past through a Brooklyn Bridge future?)
O, steel and stone! But gold was, scarcity before.
And here is water, and a little wind….
There is no breath of friends and no more shore
Where gold has not been sold and conscience tinned.
(We can sing of steel-strung stone but gold has always been around. And before gold,not much. Here at least is water and some wind … There are no people and no places left in the world untouched by how gold has coated the conscience.)
Bottom line:
We are born strong.
By the noontime of our lives we are well at sea, securely headed toward either heaven or hell.
So why go through all of that if it’s just the same old past and future?
Because we are snagged by the gold.
Not to worry about this in Key West, however.
For “here is water, and a little wind….”
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Today's Sounding
"Leaving L.A. by Train at Night, High"
by Neal Cassady
"Signs, signs, lights, lights, streets, streets; it is the dark between that attracts one -
what's happening there at this moment? What hidden thing, glorious perhaps, is being passed and lost forever?
"The congestion slackens, a cone of widening sparcity stretches before the train, now one has left the center and its core is burst past as the interlocking plants terminate grip and entrust us to the automatic block system's meticulous care.
"The maze of tracks have unwreathed from cross-over webs of railroad intellectuality to become simply main line dignity; these ribbons of accurate gauge so ceaselessly toiled over, respected, feared.
"Oh, unending high rail of intrigue!"
Saturday, February 9, 2008
This Is When the Mind Surpasses Life Itself
from "Rain and Rivers: The Notebooks of Jack Kerouac" (1949):
"Neal and I were still dreamily uncertain of whether it was Market Street in Frisco or not -
at dreamy moments. This is when the mind surpasses life itself. More will be said and must be said about the sweet, small lake of the mind which ignores Time & Space in a Preternatural Metaphysical Dream of Life."
*****
Therefore In Your Writing Work
from "Sketches" by Jack Kerouac (Oct. 31, 1952):
Lights in the foggy
night are not necessarily
bleak & friendless, but
just lights (in fact to
light yr. way), & fog
from the necessary sea -
Stupid, fatuous men
are not necessarily all stupid and fatuous.
nor all on the horizon,
nor completely devoid of
good, or hope - The evil in them will die, the
good will live - Bleak
& friendless universe is
only one of several
illusions, the greatest &
only immortal one of
which is good -
Enough, the words to
this "idea," or belief,
are limited, the combi-
nations to describe it
almost exhausted al-
ready - Manifestations of this in humanity, there-
fore in your writing work,
are endless however-
(March 30 1953)
PLANS FOR NEW WRITING
"Newspaper accounts"
of what happened, short
ones or long novel ones,
with moral theme ... since
that is the final question,
do we live or die bleak.
- Fullscale explanations
in unpausing sometimes
hallucinated prose, of
these things -
*****
Her Real Name Was Hope
from the Paris Review interview with Jack Kerouac by Ted Berrigan and Aram Saroyan in 1968:
"Her real name was Esperanza. You know what that means? In Spanish, 'hope.' Tristessa means, in Spanish, 'sadness,' but her real name was Hope."
(reaches for interviewers' pills)
"Give me one of those. What are they? Forked clarinets?"
*****
America I Forgive You
from "Benediction" by Bob Kaufman (1956):
... I forgive you
Nailing black Jesus to an imported cross
Every six weeks in Dawson, Georgia.
America, I forgive you ... I forgive you
Eating black children, I know your hunger.
America, i forgive you ... I forgive you
Burning Japanese babies defensively -
I realize how necessary it was.
Your ancestor had beautiful thoughts in his brain.
His descendants are experts in real estate.
Your generals have mushrooming visions.
Every day your people get more and more
Cars, televisions, sickness, death dreams.
You must have been great alive.
*****
enormous Christian bat
from"Junk /Angel" by Lenore Kandel (1967):
Radiant with a black green radiance
he extends his hollow fingered hands
blessing blessing blessing
his ichorous hollow fingers caressing the shadow
of the man
with love and avarice
and Then unfurls his wings and rides the sky like an
enormous Christian bat and voiceless
flies behind the sun.
*****
The Planet Drifts to Random Insect Doom
from "Wouldn't You?" in "The Naked Lunch" by William Burroughs (1959):
"... Power groups of the world frantically cut lines of connection ... The planet drifts to random insect doom ... This book spill off the page in all directions, kaleidoscope of vistas, medley of tunes and street noises, farts and riot yipes and the slamming steel shutters of commerce, screams of pain and pathos and screams plain pathic, copulating cats and outraged squawk of the displaced bull head, prophetic mutterings of brujo in nutmeg trances, snapping necks and screaming mandrakes, sigh of orgasm, heroin silent as dawn in the thirsty cells, Radio Cairo screaming like a berserk tobacco auction and flutes of Ramadan fanning the sick junky like gentle lush worker in the grey subway dawn feeling with delicate fingers for the green folding crackle ... This is Revelation and Prophecy ...
"Gentle reader, we see God through our assholes in the flash bulb of orgasm ...; Through these orifices transmute your body ... The way OUT is the way IN ... Now I, William Seward, will unlock my word horde."
*****
Off Our Backs by the Next Millennium
from "New Democracy Wishlist: For President Clinton White House" by Allen Ginsberg (January 17 1993):
Purge U.S. military death squad subsidies in Salvador, Guatemala, etc.
We backed up dictators in Zaire, Somalia, Liberia, Sudan, Angola, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, we're responsible; admit it then figure ways out.
Open CIA & FBI & NSA archives on Cointelpro raids, Government drug dealing, Kennedy/King assassinations, Iranian Contragate, Panama Deception, Vatican, Hand & Lavoror Bank thuggery, etc. including Bush-Noriega relations and other CIA client-agent scandals.
Open all files on J. Edgar Hoover-Cardinal Spellman-Roy Cohn-Joe McCarthy alcoholic Closet-Queen Conspiracy with organized Crime to sabotage the U.S. Labor Movement, native African-American Hispanic and Gay minority leaderships; and blackmail U.S. Presidents Congress each other for half century.
Get Government Secret Police (DEA CIA FBI NSA etc.) off our backs by the next millenium.
*****
"A Nation of Finks" - W.S. Burroughs,
opening quote to "Sexual Abuse" by Allen Ginsberg (1997):
Re Boston Herald headline "Sexual Abuse Law Targets Clergy"
"Senator: Religious leaders must report child molesters"
Priest should turn each other in, fink -
So, say it in the confession box, not
over sherry at intimate dinner.
Saturday, December 1, 2007
GleeNinGs
The Beats were non-violent. They were branded by the press of the time as delinquents, but in real life the beats packed most of their excess power into sexual liberation and self-expression, not pugilism.
*****
Maybe we didn't get to hear enough about the women of the beat generation because Kerouac's references to single women living on their own in late-1940s New York City were cut by the publishers from his first novel ("The Town and the City," 1950).
*****
What Works on Which Drugs:
"Tristessa" by Jack Kerouac, 1960 ... morphine
"Magic Psalm" in "Kaddish" by Allen Ginsberg, 1961 ... ayahuasca
"Nova Express" by William Burroughs, 1964 ... heroin
"Wales, A Visitation" by Allen Ginsberg, 1967 ... LSD
"Guilty of Everything" by Herbert Huncke, 1990 ... heroin, marijuana, benzedrine
*****
"Standing on the street corner waiting for no one is Power."
*****
"Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations."
"Death is the mother of the Universe."
"One room is all I'll ever own in eternity, one bed -
memory
ramblings
over tall mountains carrying me away to that nomads
land."
from "Writing Poems Is a Saintly Thing"
Top beat sounds:
* “Raindrops in My Coffee” by Sexsmith & Kerr, from “Destination Unknown" (song included in "Radio Bob: Dylan’s theme Time Radio Hour" CD)
* From “Instant Karma: To Save Darfur” - Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars’ “Give Peace a Chance,” also Regina Spektor with “Real Love” and Jakob Dylan and Dhani Harrison on “Gimme Some Truth.”
* "Nus Gniik" from the Beatles' latest, “Love.”
*****
The words all in caps in Michael McClure's poetry "never mean that the lines are shouted or that they are chanted," explains the poet. The capital letters are a "disruption of the allure of the poem and a reminder that it is a made thing ... Later I experimented with using the lines of capitals to signify a small shift of intensity in the voice or mind ... The lines of capitals at the opening of the poem came to signify the quality of energy with which a poem begins."
Much of McClure's verse is centered - not so common a practice in the years before word processing. ("By 1955 I began centering poems so that it would be clear they are the stuff of consciousness" - 1991.)
*****
"Jack Kerouac is not for prudish persons. His 146th Chorus'(I almost said Canto, and he does find it hard to get away from the manner of Pound's Analects and Cantos) has unity, a tune, and the feel of the mountains. Allen Ginsberg can foul the nest in a way to marvel at, but it is an innocent enough picture of himself. Gregory Corso has vehemence."
Since the War," a review of Donald Allen's "The New American Poetry:
1945-1960" in The New York Herald Tribune, 26 June 1960
*****
Last words of the 242nd, and last, Chorus of Kerouac's "Mexico City Blues" -
with nobody
To save the old man being hanged
In my closet for nothing
And everybody watches
When the act is done -
Stop the murder and the suicide!
