Metaphysics: A Poem by Allen Ginsberg

This is the one and only

firmament; therefore

it is the absolute world.

There is no other world.

The circle is complete.

I am living in Eternity.

The ways of this world

are the ways of Heaven.

Your world is as big as you make it

Your world is as big as you make it
I know, for I used to abide
In the narrowest nest in a corner
My wings pressing close to my side
But I sighted the distant horizon
Where the sky-line encircled the sea
And I throbbed with a burning desire
To travel this immensity
I battered the cordons around me
And cradled my wings on the breeze
Then soared to the uttermost reaches
With rapture, with power, with ease!"

~ Georgia Douglas Johnson, 1886 - 1966

Allen Ginsberg, 1926 - 1997

IN DEATH, CANNOT REACH
WHAT IS MOST NEAR

We know all about death that
we will ever know because
we have all experienced
the state before birth.
Life seems a passage between
two doors to the darkness.
Both are the same and truly
eternal, and perhaps it may
be said that we meet in
darkness. The nature of time
is illuminated by this
meeting of eternal ends.

It is amazing to think that
thought and personality
of man is perpetuated in
time after his passage
to eternity. And one time
is all Time if you look
at it out of the grave.

New York Mid- 1949

________
Allen Ginsberg, was born in Newark, New Jersey (1926). His poem "Howl" is said to have turned America from the 1950s into the 1960s overnight. It begins:
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…"
He got a job in marketing in New York and then in San Francisco. He was working in advertising in San Francisco when in 1954, after getting his psychotherapist's approval, Ginsberg decided to cut loose, quit his job, and devote himself "to writing and contemplation, to Blake and smoking pot, and doing whatever I wanted."
Howl and Other Poems was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's newly established City Lights press in 1956. For publishing Ginsberg's poetry book, Ferlinghetti was put on trial, charged with obscenity. The publicity greatly boosted sales of Howl and made Ginsberg famous.
Many agree that Ginsberg's best poem is "Kaddish." He wrote most of it in one 40-hour sitting, an epic elegy for his mother who had suffered from mental illness all of Ginsberg's life and who died in a psychiatric hospital on Long Island in 1956. Ginsberg's mother had been a devoted Communist. In high school, he would ride the bus across town with his mother, going with her to her therapy appointments. Paranoia was one of her diagnosed illnesses. Shortly before she passed away, Ginsberg had signed the authorization for her lobotomy. Two days after she died, Ginsberg received a letter in the mail from her that said, "The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight in the window — I have the key — get married Allen don't take drugs. … Love, your mother."
The poem for his mother, fully entitled "Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg (1894–1956)," begins:
"Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on
the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village,
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking,
talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues
shout blind on the phonograph
the rhythm the rhythm — and your memory in my head three years after —"
He became a devout Buddhist. As Ginsberg got older, his poetry became less shocking and more toned down, and after decades of publishing with small independent publishers, he signed, in the early 1980s, a six-book contract with Harper & Row for $160,000. The first book to come out under that contract was an 800-page edition of his Collected Poems 1947–1980, published in 1984. In 1994, he sold his archives, made up of journals, various photographs, and personal letters, as well as some old articles of clothing and fresh trimmings of his beard, to Stanford University for a million dollars. Ginsberg gave readings up until a few months before he died in 1997, from liver cancer, at the age of 70.
Ginsberg said, "Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private."

Source: The Writer's Almanac

Tennessee Williams, 1911 - 1983

Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi (1914). He's the author of the plays The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). He was extremely close to his sister Rose; the siblings were rarely apart, and the family cook called them "the couple." When Tom was seven and Rose was nine, the family moved from the Mississippi Delta to a tenement apartment in St. Louis. The filth and noise of the city shocked them. Their mother forced Rose out into society, where she suffered a series of humiliations. After she had a mental breakdown she was institutionalized, and her parents forced her to undergo a lobotomy. Tennessee Williams once said, "I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really."


Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.

I didn't go to the moon, I went much further-for time is the longest distance between two places.

Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.

Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is.

Security is a kind of death.

When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.

Turn that off! I won't be looked at in this merciless glare! A Streetcar Named Desire

Blanch: I don't want realism.
Mitch: Naw, I guess not.
Blanch: I'll tell you what I want. Magic! A Streetcar Named Desire

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?-I wish I knew...Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can.Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Make voyages! - Attempt them! - there's nothing else... Camino Real

Brick: Well, they say nature hates a vacuum, Big Daddy.
Big Daddy: That's what they say, but sometimes I think that a vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)

Everyone says he's sincere, but everyone isn't sincere. If everyone was sincere who says he's sincere there wouldn't be half so many insincere ones in the world and there would be lots, lots, lots more really sincere ones!

We have to distrust each other. It's our only defence against betrayal.Camino Real

William Faulkner, 1897 - 1962

Walt Whitman, 1819 - 1892

*A great city is that which has the greatest men and women.

*A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

*After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains.

*And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero.

*Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity, When I give I give myself.

*Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.

*Freedom - to walk free and own no superior.

*Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed.

This is what you shall do..." by Walt Whitman

"This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."
"This is what you shall do..." by Walt Whitman, from the preface of Leaves of Grass.

____________________________

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
from Song of Myself

46

I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and never
will be measured.

I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)
My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,
I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, or exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooks you round the waist,
My right hand points to landscapes of continents and the public road.

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.

It is not far, it is within reach,
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,
Perhaps it is every where on water and on land.

Shoulder your duds dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth,
Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.

If you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand on my hip,
And in due time you shall repay the same service to me,
For after we start we never lie by again.

This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look'd at the crowded heaven,
And I said to my spirit When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the
pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we be fill'd and
satisfied then?
And my spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.

You are also asking me questions and I hear you,
I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself.

Sit a while dear son,
Here are biscuits to eat and here is milk to drink,
But as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes I kiss you with
a good-by kiss and open the gate for your egress hence.

Long enough have you dream'd contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of
your life.

Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly
dash with your hair.

Reverie and Invocation by William Carlos Williams, 1883 - 1963

Whether the rain comes down
or there be sunny days
the sleets of January or the haze
of autumn afternoons, when
we dream of our youth our gaze
grows mellow, wise man or fool,
we were young, the future
beckoned us.

Now we grow old and grey
and all we knew is forgotten
there comes alive in
the ash of today, memory! a god
who revives us! the apple trees
we climbed as a boy
the caress on our necks of
a summer breeze.

Come back and give us
those days when passion drove us
to break every rule.
We weren't bad, but good!
May our preachers find us
the courage still to sin so
and win so! and win so!
a life everlasting.

_______________________________________________________________

Spring and All

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast -- a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines --

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches --

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind --

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined --
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance -- Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

____________



* “We sit and talk quietly,
with long lapses of silence,
and I am aware of the stream that has no language,
coursing beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes, which has no speech.”

*“It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

*“As the rain falls
so does
your love

bathe every
open
object of the world”

*“Time is a storm in which we are all lost.”

*“Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.”

*“As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.”

*“Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.”

*“It is not fair to be old, to put on a brown sweater.”

*“The only realism in art is of the imagination.”

*“At our age the imagination
across the sorry facts
lifts us
to make roses
stand before thorns.
Sure
love is cruel
and selfish
and totally obtuse—
at least, blinded by the light,
young love is.
But we are older,
I to love
and you to be loved,
we have,
no matter how,
by our wills survived
to keep
the jeweled prize
always
at our finger tips.
We will it so
and so it is
past all accident.”

*“There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else. Porpoises risen in a green sea, the wind at nightfall bending the rose- red grasses and you- in your apron hurrying to catch- say it seems to you to be your son. How ridiculous! You will pass up into a cloud and look back at me, not count the scribbling foolish that put wings at your heels, at your knees.”

Mark Twain, 1835 - 1910

The man who wrote under the name Mark Twain Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri (1835). He's best known to us today for his novels about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, but in his own lifetime his best-selling books were his travel books, such as Roughing It (1872), A Tramp Abroad (1880), and Life on the Mississippi (1883).

He spent most of his life traveling. He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, and he loved observing the people who flowed in from the river: the gamblers, confidence men, boat captains, pioneers, and slave traders. He traveled east to try to make a living as a printer, but eventually came back to Missouri and took a job as an apprentice pilot on a riverboat. He would later say that his years working on the Mississippi River were his happiest.

When Civil War broke out — and tied up traffic on the river — Clemens followed his brother west to Nevada. He rode out on a stagecoach. While his brother worked for the governor, Clemens loafed around, drinking and playing poker all night long. He tried his hand at mining, but it was hard work and he didn't like it. He was running out of money, so he started writing freelance stories for the Territorial Enterprise. They offered him a full-time job and he moved to Virginia City, Nevada.

He was supposed to cover the mining industry for the newspaper, but he found that he preferred writing about accidents, street fights, barroom shootings, and parties. Virginia City was a rough town. Clemens interrupted one of his letters to his mother to write, "I have just heard five pistol shots down the street. ... I will go and see about it." It turned out that two policemen had been murdered a few blocks away.

He had always written entertaining letters to his family, and he treated his newspaper work like those letters: humorous, exaggerated, entertaining, but always conversational. He took the name "Mark Twain" from his riverboat experience. The phrase "Mark Twain" means two fathoms deep, which for a riverboat captain is just deep enough water to navigate.

In 1867, Clemens persuaded a San Francisco newspaper to send him on a steamboat pleasure cruise to Europe, and he got paid 20 dollars for each letter he sent home. Those letters brought him significant recognition, and in 1868 he published them in a book called Innocents Abroad, and that was the book that made him famous.

Clemens wrote about his travels in Europe, his travels in the West, and his boating days on the Mississippi. But some of the most beautiful passages in his writing come from his descriptions of Huckleberry Finn traveling down the river with Jim. He wrote, "It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened. Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to MAKE so many. Jim said the moon could a LAID them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn't say nothing against it, because I've seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak down. Jim allowed they'd got spoiled and was hove out of the nest."

It the middle of writing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Clemens decided he needed to do some research on his hometown, so he traveled back to Hannibal, Missouri, for the first time since he was a teenager. It was the most depressing trip of his life, because all the romanticized ideas about the place where he'd grown up were shattered. He met old women who had been just young girls when he was a child. He saw how poverty-stricken the townspeople were.

Samuel Clemens said, "The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in Heaven."

*Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

*Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

*All generalizations are false, including this one.

*All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure.

*Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.

*“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

*“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”

*“Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.”

*The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.

*Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does all the work.

*Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

*Don't go around saying the world owes you a living; the world owes you nothing; it was here first.

*Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.

Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.




Robert Frost (1874–1963) was born in San Francisco.  He cultivated the image of a rural New England poet with a pleasant disposition, but Frost's personal life was full of tragedy and he suffered from dark depressions.
He graduated from high school at the top of his class but dropped out of Dartmouth after a semester and tried to convince his high school co-valedictorian, Elinor White, to marry him immediately. She refused and insisted on finishing college first. They did marry after she graduated, and it was a union that would be filled with losses and feelings of alienation. Their first son died from cholera at age three; Frost blamed himself for not calling a doctor earlier and believed that God was punishing him for it. His health declined, and his wife became depressed. In 1907, they had a daughter who died three days after birth, and a few years later Elinor had a miscarriage. Within a couple years, his sister Jeanie died in a mental hospital, and his daughter Marjorie, of whom he was extremely fond, was hospitalized with tuberculosis. Marjorie died a slow death after getting married and giving birth, and a few years later, Frost's wife died from heart failure. His adult son, Carol, had become increasingly distraught, and Frost went to visit him and to talk him out of suicide. Thinking the crisis had passed, he returned home, and shortly afterward his son shot himself. He also had to commit his daughter Irma to a mental hospital.
And through all of this, Robert Frost still became one of the most famous poets in the United States. He said, "A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching out toward expression, an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the word."
And, "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."

Bob Dylan, May 24 1941 -

Trust Yourself

Trust yourself,

Trust yourself to do the things that only you know best.

Trust yourself,

Trust yourself to do what's right and not be second-guessed.

Don't trust me to show you beauty

When beauty may only turn to rust.

If you need somebody you can trust, trust yourself.

Trust yourself,

Trust yourself to know the way that will prove true in the end.

Trust yourself,

Trust yourself to find the path where there is no if and when.

Don't trust me to show you the truth

When the truth may only be ashes and dust.

If you want somebody you can trust, trust yourself.

Well, you're on your own, you always were,

In a land of wolves and thieves.

Don't put your hope in ungodly man

Or be a slave to what somebody else believes.

Trust yourself

And you won't be disappointed when vain people let you down.

Trust yourself

And look not for answers where no answers can be found.

Don't trust me to show you love

When my love may be only lust.

If you want somebody you can trust, trust yourself.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1896 - 1940

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota (1896). In April of 1920, at the age of 23, he published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, which made him an overnight sensation. A week later, he married his sweetheart, the belle of Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda Sayre, in St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. They were young and beautiful, and they were emblems of the Jazz Age, a name Fitzgerald himself had coined. Dorothy Parker said they looked "as though they had just stepped out of the sun." By the time the stock market crashed in 1929, Fitzgerald had started to crash too. His marriage was coming apart—Zelda had her first nervous breakdown in 1930. The changes that came with the Great Depression made F. Scott Fitzgerald seem like ancient history, along with everything else from the "Roaring Twenties." He had written about the lives of the rich, and now he remained associated with them and had fallen out of favor. His books, including The Great Gatsby (1925), did not sell well. In 1929, the Saturday Evening Post paid him $4,000 per story, but his total royalties on seven books that year were only $31.77.

In 1932, as the Great Depression was approaching its worst point, Fitzgerald was living in New York, a city that he loved. He said, "New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world." One evening he did what a lot of New Yorkers did that year—he went to the top of the newly built Empire State Building. He wrote about it in his essay "My Lost City": "Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits—from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground."

After The Great Gatsby, it took Fitzgerald nine years to write his next novel, Tender is the Night. When it came out in 1934, it got a mixed reaction. In the spring of 1936 he was broke, looking for advances from Esquire magazine, but the editor told him he'd have to write something, anything, just to show the accountants. So Fitzgerald looked at his problems, his situation as a writer, and wrote a series of personal essays called "The Crack-Up," about what it was like to hit bottom. The essays were shocking; it was a time when people didn't air their own dirty laundry in public. Fitzgerald's writer friends—Hemingway, Maxwell Perkins, John Dos Passos—didn't understand why he would expose himself in that way. But "The Crack-Up" not only put Fitzgerald's name back out in front of the public, it also paved the way for a new confessional style in American writing. It begins: "Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again." Fitzgerald died in 1940 at the age of 44. That year, all of his books sold a total of 72 copies, with royalties of $13. Today, The Great Gatsby alone sells about 300,000 copies a year.

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

It takes a genius to whine appealingly.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.

Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.

The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaieties, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.

The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

That was always my experience-- a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton ... . However, I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.

THE DIAMOND AS BIG AS THE RITZ by F. Scott Fitzgerald

http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/diamond/diamond.html

Walt Whitman, 1819 -

For You Democracy


Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,
I will make divine magnetic lands,
With love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades

I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of Amerca,
and along he shores of the great lakes, and all over the praries,
I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other's necks,
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.

For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!
For you, for you I am trilling these songs.

What a nice word

bandersnatch

\BAN-der-snach\ , noun;

1.

An imaginary wild animal of fierce disposition.

2.

A person of uncouth or unconventional habits, attitudes, etc., especially one considered a menace, nuisance, or the like.

druthers

\DRUHTH-erz\ , noun;

"You mean if I had my druthers? Why, if I had mydruthers I'd druther eat speckledly gravy," Dove assured him.

-- Nelson Algren, A Walk on the Wild Side

"Like I say, I think George would go right on living in the house if he had his druthers," Judy Diment said.

-- Stephen King, Everything's Eventual

Origin:

Druthers comes from a jocular American English formation of the phrase "I'd ruther" meaning "I'd rather."

Game by Maxine Kumin

Before he died

Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
gunned down in Sarajevo
to jump-start World War I,
bragged he had shot three
thousand stags and a miscellany
of foxes, geese, wolves, and boars
driven toward him by beaters,
stout men he ordered to flush
creatures from their cover
into his sights, a tradition
the British aristocracy
carried on, further aped
by rich Americans
from Teddy R. to Ernest H.,
something Supreme
Court Justice Antonin
Scalia, pudgy son of Sicilian
immigrants, indulged in
when, years later, he had
scores of farm-raised birds
beaten from their cages and scared
up for him to shoot down
which brought him an inner joy.
What happened
to him when he was a boy?

Maxine Kumin (born June 6, 1925) is an American poet and author.

Jack Kerouac, March 12 1922 - October 21 1969

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the author of On the Road (1957), a book that brought him instant fame and labels like "King of the Beats" and "the voice of a generation." Writers Ken Kesey, Haruki Murakami, Richard Brautigan, Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs, and Tom Robbins have all pointed to Kerouac as a defining influence on their writing. And songwriter Bob Dylan said about On the Road: "It changed my life like it changed everyone else's."

Jack Kerouac was born Jean Louis Kirouac to French-Canadian immigrants, and he didn't learn to speak English until grade school. He was a star athlete; he ran the 100-meter hurdles and played running back on the football team at Columbia University. He ended up dropping out of Columbia but staying in New York, with his girlfriend Edie Parker, who years later said of him:

"He seemed immediately larger than life. He just didn't look like anyone in New York. He had a ruddy complexion and jet-black hair. He looked like he had just walked in from the woods. ... As he often was, Jack was dead broke the night I met him."

During that time in New York, he met Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and others who would help found the Beat Movement. It was with Neal Cassady that he would take the momentous cross-country road trip in a Cadillac limousine in 1949, going over 100 miles an hour on two-lane roads until the speedometer broke, the trip that would form the backbone of his book On the Road.

The story about how Kerouac composed On the Road is well-known: He cut up strips of tracing paper so that they'd fit in the typewriter, and taped them all together so he wouldn't have to interrupt his flow of writing to adjust or add paper. He wrote the whole thing from start to finish in three weeks, with no paragraph breaks and minimal punctuation; and when he got up from his typewriter, he had in his hands a 119-foot-long scroll of a book that defined his generation.

But there's a bit more to the story. For almost a decade, Kerouac had been keeping careful, meticulously detailed journals — notebooks full of them — about his cross-country travels, and much of the material in his journals appear in his first manuscript. And though he did sit down and have a three-week marathon session in which much of the first draft was produced in 1951, it was not until 1957 that the book was published. In those intervening years, Kerouac was constantly revising the book, trying to please publishers, who kept rejecting his manuscript. One publisher who rejected the book wrote, "His frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don't think so."

Kerouac replaced the real names of his friends with pseudonyms (publishers feared libel suits) and he removed sexually explicit passages (publishers feared obscenity charges; this was beforeGinsberg's Howl trial), and Kerouac added various literary touches and rewrote sections of the book.

And scholars have recently discovered that Kerouac had in the early 1950s written another book about his travels on the road that had never been published. It was written in a French dialect called joual that Kerouac grew up speaking, and is called Sur le Chemin, which translates to "On the Road." An additional unpublished French-language novel written by Kerouac has been found. It's entitled La nuit est ma femme.

And just last year, the curator of the Kerouac Archives at the New York Public Library, Isaac Gewirtz, published a 75-page book detailing Jack Kerouac's little-known obsession with fantasy baseball, called Kerouac at Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats(2009). Throughout his early life, Gewirtz explains, Kerouac created elaborate teams, players, and games. Kerouac gave his players names like Wino Love, Heinie Twiett, Warby Pepper, Phegus Cody, and his teams got names like the Cincinnati Blacks and the New York Chevvies. He meticulously recorded their exploits on index cards.

In On the Road, Jack Kerouac wrote: "... the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'" (less)

Original name Jean-Luis Lebris de Kerouac

*The beat generation.

*All of life is a foreign country.

*This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do.

*The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars...

Jack Kerouac, On The Road, 1957

*The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!”

*I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

* I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.

*My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.

*Maybe that's what life is...a wink of the eye and winking stars.

*Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.

*What is the feeling when you're driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? -it's the too huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.

*All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.

*Now you understand the Oriental passion for tea," said Japhy. "Remember that book I told you about the first sip is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.

*Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk- real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.

*What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?

*No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.

*Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.

*Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.

*...colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets is each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness...

*Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much.

*Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.

*Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?

*We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.

*...and everything is going to the beat - It's the beat generation, it be-at, it's the beat to keep, it's the beat of the heart, it's being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown and like in ancient civilizations the slave boatmen rowing galleys to a beat and servants spinning pottery to a beat...

*Oh little Cody Pomeray if there had been some way to send a cry to you even when you were too little to know what utterances and cries are for in this dark sad earth, with your terrors in a world so malign and inhospitable, and all the insults from heaven ramming down to crowd your head with anger, pain, disgrace, worst of all the crapulous poverty in and out of every splintered door of days, if someone could have said to you then, and made you perceive, "Fear life, but don't die; you're alone, everybody's alone. Oh Cody Pomeray, you can't win, you can't lose, all is ephemeral, all is hurt.

*It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.

Jack Kerouac quote

*Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, estabilished-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance.”

*I was going to be left alone on my butt at the other end of the continent. But why think about that when all the golden land's ahead of you and all kinds of unforseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?

° Beat Movement:

developed in the second half of the 1950's. It was launched by a group of poets and novelists who shared a set of attitudes-anti-establishment, anti-intellectual-opposed to the reigning political, moral and cultural values of the post-World War era and claiming self-expression and self-realization. "Beat" alludes to "beaten down" ( by the values of the time), to "beatitudes"

(reached in esoteric or Eastern religions, or drug-induced visionary experiences), or to the "beat" of jazz music. Main poets: Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti; main novelists: William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.