Allen Ginsberg Textbook

Allen Ginsberg Textbook

squat and cat-eyed

after several whiskey shots

full of deep paternal loathing

cold noodles & hot broth

Burovski puts me flat out

on a bed of burnt floorboards

& reads me summons from the

                Allen Ginsberg Textbook

he will not assemble you

he reads,

he will use your broken pieces

to create a marvelous mosaic  

invite you under a withered oak

pluck a flower from King Arthur’s            

grave pressed between your thighs

to carry home to your love’s hand

these pages

even when paraphrased

fills the belly & fills the lungs w/

a jittery joy that strikes you like

a quick clean cut of perpetuity

                you imagine him

enormous empty mirrors eyes

scrabbling at paper all hours of

a gale-force darkness in a single               

solitary room of the Beat Hotel  

9 Rue Git-le-Coeur, Latin Quarter

Paris, France

rolling & rocking against mourning

gibberish gyrating

Burovski pours two shots of Jägermeister

toasts to torrential torments

exigencies

                uncensored vernacular

                                explicit candor

the ecstatic

the rhapsodic

& the sincere

slow songs & slurred speech map out

our world

                in view

as told in the blasphemous preface        

catalogued in the extensive index

of an out-of-print Poet’s Holy Writ

                when Burovski closes the book

he joins me on the emboldened floor

& we raise our voices just to evolve

**

I had Allen Ginsberg on the brain today. Not sure why but because of my thinking, a poem.

In propinquity,

Nic

Dear Neal Cassady

Neal Cassady is another figure of note from the Beat Generation.  He served his inclination for trouble with the law from a young age and spent his early years slumming with the occupiers of skid row and did a stint in reform school.  Raised by an alcoholic father after his mother’s death at ten years old, he performed a slew of petty crimes that eventually landed him in jail despite the efforts of a prominent Denver educator who tried to help Neal turn his life around. He served eleven months of a one year sentence for receipt of stolen property.  It was from this incarceration that some of his earliest letters survive.  

When Neal was released from prison in 1945, he married fifteen year old Luanne Henderson and together they moved to New York City where he was introduced to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac at Columbia University.  Cassady was never a Columbia student but it was there that he rubbed elbows with the denizens of the Beat Generation.  During this time he met Carolyn Robinson, who later wrote Off The Road, its pages outlining their relationship and where she coined Neal as ‘the archetype of the American Man’.  Robinson originally dated Kerouac but after walking in on Neal, Luanne and Allen Ginsberg in bed together, she fled the Beat’s group.  Five weeks later, Neal Cassady annulled his marriage to Luanne and wed Carolyn.   The two settled down on a ranch in Monte Sereno, California and has three children.  In 1950, Neal  entered a bigamous marriage with Diane Hansen and eventually fathered a son. Diane appears in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road as the character Inez.  It is said that Neal maintained a sexual relationship too with Allen Ginsberg for close to twenty years.

Cassady worked in California for the Southern Pacific Railroad and kept in touch with his Beat counterparts even though they were miles apart in their philosophical views.  Drugs played a role in his life and he soon found himself serving time at San Quentin for offering to share marijuana with an undercover agent at a bar.  When he was released in 1960 he was unable to provide for his family so Carolyn sent him packing, divorcing him.  He shacked up with Allen Ginsberg and another roommate in San Francisco.  It was around this time he first met Ken Kesey and was adopted as one of the Merry Pranksters (immortalized in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), circles formed around Kesey and were choral about the use of psychedelic drugs.   

Neal would make his way across country with his Beats and Pranksters, traveling, experimenting until his demise in Mexico when he attended a wedding.  After the reception, he took a stroll along the railroad track that stretch on into the neighboring town.  It is believed he passed out and slipped into a coma somewhere along that way.  He was found wearing just jeans and a t-shirt and carried to the nearest hospital where he died only a few hours later, four days shy of his forty-second birthday.  A veil of mystery still shrouds his death.

In many ways, Neal Cassady is a true American icon. Upon his death Ken Kesey penned an illusory version of his death titled, ‘The Day After Superman Died’.  And famously, Jack Kerouac built the character of Dean Moriarty in On The Road from the foundation of Neal’s persona.  Kerouac also fashioned Cody Pomeray after him in other novels as well.  Ginsberg mentions Cassady in his epic poem ‘Howl’ and it is even said that Neal was the inspiration for main character in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. 

Neal was a Beat poet and a Prankster but perhaps is most noted for his letters and for the influence he had on the writings of his counterparts.  The title of my poem reflects that fact that his letters are often talked about.  I still haven’t read them all but this piece was written as a letter and/or a response to his legacy and his place in the Beat Generation history.  Perhaps those affiliated with the Beat Generation are less than desirable to some in terms of their lifestyle and beliefs and are by no means heroes.  Yet it was Cassady who is credited for helping to release Jack Kerouac from his sentimental writing style, Thomas Wolfe-like, to what he excelled in and delivered to us some of his best work by writing ‘spontaneous prose’ – a stream of consciousness  chic.  I love the whole idea of spontaneous prose.  Like the old adage says, rules were meant to be broken and the concept of free-flowing thoughts that turn into classic pieces of writing resonates with me deeply.  I’m a big fan of free verse when writing poetry, I’m not much of a rhymer and would be a terrible rapper.  I enjoy the idea of verses being free of rules and unrestricted.  They form easier for me that way and I am better able to get onto the page what needs to be said.  The Beats really gave creative license to this style of writing and way of living.  I abide by so many rules on a daily basis but I never allow my creativity to be powered by 'procedure'.  It’s liberating.

Dear Neil Cassady

aesthetic waste

makes a metaphor of me

in my old empty

smoke-smeared art

drunk writers

break the angry balance

of my splotched screaming

and pacing shadow

here it is

my deep canvas

absurd with mess

Yours,

Secret Hero Howl

**

Jack Kerouac said of Neal Cassady that he was, ‘more like Dostoevsky than anyone I know’.  Neal Cassady lived and breathed the things that only others wrote.  My to-read bucket list includes his book of letters published by Penguin detailing the years 1944 to 1967 and a biography by William Plummer called The Holy Goof. 

My fascination with the Beats continues.

In propinquity,

Nic

Why I (Don't) Meditate

The 1950s was an exciting time for the literary demesne.  We saw the influence of the Beat Generation, a group of American post-World War II writers who chronicled and inspired a cultural phenomenon.  A augury rife with tentative attitudes towards drugs and sex, an ardent meditation on Eastern religion, blatant rejection of Materialism and an ideology of exuberant, unexpurgated means of expression and existence.

My bookshelves are stippled with works of the Beat Generation, Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg etc.  Their published works, biographical material and books exploring the movement.  I was enamored with them, just as I was with Jim Morrison, almost around the same time.  I revered bohemian hedonists, not so much for their inimitable writing panache and lifestyles but because they stood up for non-conformity and were vessels dedicated to spontaneous creativity.

Some years back, a writer friend of mine gave me a collected volume of Allen Ginsberg’s poetry for my birthday.  I was grateful for such a gift.  One of his poems, ‘Why I Meditate’ stuck out to me and that year, instead of celebrating my birthday with cake or dancing with friends, I stayed home, blasted the stereo and wrote a response to his poem, ‘Why I Don’t Meditate’.  It was an excellent birthday and great exercise for the creative muscles.

Here is the Ginsberg poem:

Why I Meditate

I sit because the Dadists screamed on Minor Street

I sit because the Surrealists are angry pillows

I sit because the Imagists breathed calmly in Rutherford and Manhattan

I sit because 2400 years

I sit in America because Buddha saw a Corpse in Lumbini

I sit because the Yippies whooped up Chicago’s teargas skies once

I sit because No Because

I sit because I was unable to trace the Unborn back to the womb

I sit because it’s easy

I sit because I get angry if I don’t

I sit because they told me so

I sit because I read about it in the Funny Pages

I sit because I had a vision also dropped LSD

I sit because I don’t know what else to do like Peter Orlovsky

I sit because after Lunacharsky got fired and Stalin gave Zhdanor

a special tennis court because I became a rootless Cosmopolitan

I sit inside the shell of the old Me

I sit for world revolution

Here is my humble, perhaps not so eloquent response as a writing experiment:

Why I Don’t Meditate

I stand because Suits black out book pages

I stand because Pop Art consumed Candy Perfume Girl

I stand because Mothers adopted Town & Country

I stand 2004 years

I stand in Canada because I’ve been saved

I stand because Yappers cooked up wooly blackmail

I stand because there is no Because

I stand because I have spied on the blueprint of conception

I stand because it is laborious

I stand because restlessness antagonizes

I stand because they told me not to

I stand because it was alleged in a refrain

I stand because I dream while drunk

I stand because I want to oppose Allen Ginsberg

I stand because Kurt Vonnegut shared his well-thumbed dictionary

and J.P Jensen blew up his computer in protest

I stand outside the box

I stand inside myself for Cosmopolitan Greetings

I stand for universal uprising

Mine is a little more modern in reference but kept the same format.  I don't know how good it is but it was fun to write, judging from my notes that accompanied the poem in my writing book.  In case you didn’t catch the reference, I wrote that in 2004. Early January to be exact since my birthday is in December, the timing makes perfect sense to me.  It also has a little shout out to my extraordinary writer friend, Johnny Jensen.  That guy can spin words.  I truly admire his sharp talent and his keen literary eye.  He deserves a wide and adoring audience.  I am first in line.  He’s also the one who got me reading Ray Bradbury’s work.  To this day, Fahrenheit 451 is one of my favorite reads.  I may be due to pull that down off the shelf again soon.  

I have a whole slew of poems that are inspired by the Beats.  Last night I tried to locate another to share in this blog but I couldn’t find that particular writing book which caused me to panic.  It could possibly be why I didn’t sleep well last night, trying to think where it could be.  It is always in the same place with my other book and when I reached for it last night there was the other volume, the one I was looking for, missing.  I will hunt high and low (a little A-Ha moment for all of you 80’s babes) for it tonight.  It will turn up somewhere or else my next blog will be full of ire because I’ve lost a whole binder full of writing.  It just cannot be!!

Grrr …

Shine on, you crazy diamonds!

In propinquity,

Nic