Tuesday 15 March 2016

3 quotes and 4 photographs related to Beat Poetry

"Poetry can stand out as the one beacon of sanity, a beacon of individual clarity, and lucidity in every direction — whether on the Internet or in coffee houses or university forums or classrooms. Poetry, along with its old companion, music, becomes one means of communication that is not controlled by the establishment." (Allen Ginsberg, 1996)



"the poem itself must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge. (...)
And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes, and thus is, it is here that, the daily work, the WORK, gets in, for only he, the man who writes, can declare, at every moment, the line its metric and its ending — where its breathing, shall come to, termination.
(...)
It is an advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables." (Charles Olson, Projective Verse", 1950)



"SET-UP The object is set before the mind, either in reality. as in sketching (before a landscape or teacup or old face) or is set in the memory wherein it becomes the sketching from memory of a definite image-object.
PROCEDURE Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image.
METHOD No periods separating sentence-structures already arbitrarily riddled by false colons and timid usually needless commas-but the vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing breath between outblown phrases)" (Jack Kerouac, from Essentials of Spontaneous Prose, c. 1953)

Carr, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs


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