beat-generation-writers

"He covered tons of paper with his words and made them his very own words... he branded them like cattle he rustled out there on the free ranges of Literature... Used by another writer who was attempting cut-ups, one single word of Burroughs vocabulary could ruin a whole barrel of good everyday words, run the literary rot right through them. One sniff of that prose and you'd say, 'Why, that's a Burroughs.'"

"Writers don't own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody? 'Your very own words,' indeed! And who are you?"

"I enjoy inventing things out of fun. After all, life is a game, not a career."

"Writing is fifty years behind painting."

"The Way Is Nor This Nor That."

"I view life as a fortuitous collaboration ascribable to the fact that one finds oneself at the right place at the same time."

"I Am the Artist when I am Open. When I am closed I am Brion Gysin."

"Of course the sands of Present Time are running out from under our feet. And why not? The Great Conundrum: 'What are we here for?' is all that ever held us here in the first place. Fear. The answer to the Riddle of the Ages has actually been out in the street since the First Step in Space. Who runs may read but few people run fast enough. What are we here for? Does the great metaphysical nut revolve around that? Well, I'll crack it for you, right now. What are we here for? We are here to go!"

"I may write only what I know in space: I am that I am."

"Language is an abominable misunderstanding which makes up a part of matter. The painters and the physicists have treated matter pretty well. The poets have hardly touched it. In March 1958, when I was living at the Beat Hotel, I proposed to Burroughs to at least make available to literature the means that painters have been using for fifty years. Cut words into pieces and scramble them. You'll hear someone draw a bow-string. Who runs may read, To read better, practice your running. Speed is entirely up to us, since machines have delivered us from the horse. Henceforth the question is to deliver us from that other so-called superior animal, man. It's not worth it to chase out the merchants: their temple is dedicated to the unsuitable lie of the value of the Unique. The crime of separation gave birth to the idea of the Unique which would not be separate. In painting, matter has seen everything: from sand to stuffed goats. Disfigured more and more, the image has been geometrically multiplied to a dizzying degree. A snow of advertising could fall from the sky, and only collector babies and the chimpanzees who make abstract paintings would bother to pick one up."

"...and worst of all, on June's huge doublebed with the Oriental drapecover on it we had ample room for sometimes six of us to sprawl with coffee cups and ashtrays and discuss the decadence of the 'bourgeoisie' for days on end."

"You should always cook eggs slowly" was Joan's advice in the kitchen on 118th Street. Joan did everything slowly, Edie reflected; she spoke, walked, dressed and read slowly, as if savoring every moment. She read everything, every newspaper and magazine. She liked the cartoons of William Steig in The New Yorker, particularly the one of the dejected fellow saying, "My mother loved me but she died." Joan didn't get along with her mother, and felt that she had nothing in common with her parents' country-club existence. She had rebelled against her background by living the New York City bohemian life."

"Joan's beauty was more than the sum of its parts. She was soft and feminine, and wore silky clinging clothes and small bandannas tied close to her head. In her reserve, in her achievement of a personal style, she reminded Edie of Garbo."

"Joan is brittle, blasé brittleness is her forte. With sharpened laughs and dainty oblique statements she fashions the topic at hand. You know these things, I need not elaborate. But you ask for an angle, well, Julie's hair is matted with dirt I am told; oh fuck it, normal disintegration of continued habit patterns (child raising here) has Joan laboring in a bastardized world wherein the supply of benzedrine completely conditions her reaction to everyday life. ETC. I love her."

"I can never forget how June's present husband, Harry Evans, suddenly came clomping down the hall of her apartment in his Army boots, fresh from the German front, around September 1945, and he was appalled to see us, six fullgrown people, all high on Benny sprawled and sitting and cat-legged on that vast double-doublebed of 'skepticism' and 'decadence', discussing the nothingness of values, pale-faced, weak bodies, Gad the poor guy said: 'This is what I fought for?' His wife told him to come down from his 'character heights' or some such."

"Edie thought Joan was the most intelligent girl she had ever met. She had an independent mind, always questioning what anyone said, including her teachers at Barnard. In one of her marginal notes in her copy of Marx's Capital and Other Writings, there are echoes of Burroughs's thinking: "Maybe Marxism is dynamic and optimistic, and Freudianism is not. Is one more serviceable than the other? Why does it always have to be either/or?"

"kummel and have deep conversations about Plato and Kant while listening to classical music. Or she would spend the entire morning in the bathtub, with bubble-bath up to her chin, reading Proust. If you wanted to talk to her you had to do it in the bathroom."

"When the attentions change / the jungle leaps in even the stones are split they rive"

"And all now is war Where so lately there was peace, and the sweet brotherhood, the use of tilled fields."

"He (Bob Creeley) introduced me to Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg-and Ginsberg has been a major model of mine. Olson has been a major model."

"with what violence benevolence is bought what cost in gesture justice brings what wrongs domestic rights involve what stalks this silence"

"In the early 1960s Denise Levertov introduced me to the work of Creeley, Duncan, and Olson. Also, of course, Williams, though I'd read him a bit before. But my own life, also, was pushing me into kinds of poetry I hadn't written before. Over the years, I was to draw in my own way on their (very different) poetics, but more on the poetry itself. The title and epigraph of The Will to Change are from Olson's "The Kingfishers.""

"Not one death but many, not accumulation but change, the feed-back proves, the feed-back is the law"

"When I saw him, he was at the door, but it did not matter, he was already sliding along the wall of the night, losing himself in some crack of the ruins. That it should have been he who said, “The kingfishers! who cares for their feathers now?” His last words had been, “The pool is slime.”"

"What does not change / is the will to change"

"The legends are legends. Dead, hung up indoors, the kingfisher will not indicate a favoring wind, or avert the thunderbolt. Nor, by its nesting, still the waters, with the new year, for seven days. It is true, it does nest with the opening year, but not on the waters."

"We can be precise. The factors are in the animal and / or the machine the factors are communication and / or control, both involve the message. And what is the message? The message is a discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in time is the birth of the air, is the birth of water, is a state between the origin and the end, between birth and the beginning of another fetid nest is change, presents no more than itself And the too strong grasping of it, when it is pressed together and condensed, loses itThis very thing you are"

"Not now. Love itself a flower with roots in a parched ground. Empty pockets make empty heads. Cure it if you can but do not believe that we can live today in the country for the country will bring us no peace."

"Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless. — through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks."

"I think of the poetry of René Char and all he must have seen and suffered that has brought him to speak only of sedgy rivers, of daffodils and tulips whose roots they water, even to the free-flowing river that laves the rootlets of those sweet-scented flowers that people the milky way"

"When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them — without distortion which would mar their exact significances — into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses. It isn’t what he says that counts as a work of art, it’s what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity."

"Each speech having its own character, the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form. The effect is beauty, what in a single object resolves our complex feelings of propriety."

"There is no poetry of distinction without formal invention, for it is in the intimate form that works of art achieve their exact meaning, in which they most resemble the machine, to give language its highest dignity, its illumination in the environment to which it is native. Such war, as the arts live and breathe by, is continuous. It may be that my interests as expressed here are pre-art. If so I look for a development along these lines and will be satisfied with nothing else."

"The cries of a dying dog are to be blotted out as best I can. René Char you are a poet who believes in the power of beauty to right all wrongs. I believe it also. With invention and courage we shall surpass the pitiful dumb beasts, let all men believe it, as you have taught me also to believe it."

"A man isn’t a block that remains stationary though the psychologists treat him so — and most take an insane pride in believing it. Consistency! He varies; Hamlet today, Caesar tomorrow; here, there, somewhere — if he is to retain his sanity, and why not? The arts have a complex relation to society. The poet isn’t a fixed phenomenon, no more is his work."

"Who isn’t frustrated and does not prove it by his actions — if you want to say so? But through art the psychologically maimed may become the most distinguished man of his age. Take Freud for instance."

"There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words."

"These are the desolate, dark weeks when nature in its barrenness equals the stupidity of man. The year plunges into night and the heart plunges lower than night"

"It's all you deserve. You've got the cash, what the hell do you care? You've got nothing to lose. You are inheritors of a great tradition. My country right or wrong! You do what you're told to do. You don't answer back the way Tommy Jeff did or Ben Frank or Georgie Washing. I'll say you don't. You're civilized. You let your betters tell you where you get off. Go ahead —"

"The War is the first and only thing in the world today. The arts generally are not, nor is this writing a diversion from that for relief, a turning away. It is the war or part of it, merely a different sector of the field."

"Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy."

"Of asphodel, that greeny flower,"

"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."

"By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast — a cold wind."

"The pure products of America go crazy —"

"Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?"

"He's come out of the man and he's let the man go —"

"Your case has been reviewed by high-minded and unprejudiced observers (like hell they were!) the president of a great university, the president of a noteworthy technical school and a judge too old to sit on the bench, men already rewarded for their services to pedagogy and the enforcement of arbitrary statutes. In other words pimps to tradition —"

"Among of green stiff old bright broken branch come white sweet May again"

"Brother! — if we were rich we'd stick our chests out and hold our heads high! It is dreams that have destroyed us.There is no more pride in horses or in rein holding. We sit hunched together brooding our fate. Well — all things turn bitter in the end whether you choose the right or the left way and — dreams are not a bad thing."