Poets

[WIREMAN]

Excerpt from genesis angels by Aram Saroyan .......anyone ever been paid to be Poet?

[judih]

Barry Fitton used to manage it
(maybe still does)
so, there's hope

[still.trucking]

I think poets get along better in Europe than they do here in the land of the oh can you see.



"within the territory of ourselves there can only be our own footprints" The Liars Club


I wish I could remember what Jack said about the world has meaning only as it unfolds for him.

[WIREMAN]

I remember at a Gary Snyder reading in DC back in the 90's he recommended sticking to your day job......after all these years of free this and that for performing, I finally have a paying gig once a month @ Wireman's poetry night......after taxes and paying my keyboardist it ain't much, but at least it's something.........

[still.trucking]

ten four, is definitely something


litkicks was a life changer for me
i feel lucky i got to be part of it for a while.



The Dharma Bums I need to read that again
“my karma was to be born in America where nobody has any fun or believes ..."

I have so much free time, a pity I am not a poet.

I could not make it without poetry
If not for the poets of studio eight I would be in dire straits

Lew Welch had to quit his day job writing ads for insecticides.



I used to borrow Lew's car sometimes, the one with the leaky water pump and alternator that whistled
Love that book Genesis Angels one of my most prized possessions.

[WIREMAN]

He was poet spirit
Lew welch
If ur out there we miss u
Never found him
Gave up trying
When I think of him
I think of vultures
He had the too much drink
Like saint jack
U know that ST
Dharma bums still awesome read
So was tristessa
Amazing book
Feel like yer hangin with jack
And the chicken thing
What is it with chickens?????

[zero_hero]

I remember the bit about chicken soup, I don't remember about the chicken thing.

I was looking for the chicken thing when I found this, just a snip from the middle of the piece caught my eye.

Beat America
What did we learn from Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg?

BY ARAM SAROYAN

..." he reports being commanded more than once when Kerouac had grown fat and old—to see in this drunken misanthrope a golden teaching. When all of us were caught up in being right, so to speak, Kerouac bedeviled everyone by being heart breakingly wrong. He kept the other side in human perspective, perhaps in a way similar to Allen's later teacher Chogyam Trungpa, the Tibetan Buddhist with whom Allen and Anne Waldman collaborated to create Naropa's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder.

Trungpa came from the Crazy Wisdom lineage in Buddhism. Before his early death, he scandalized the American spiritual community with his drunkenness, his promiscuity, and, most notably, a confrontation with W.S. Merwin in which his devotees at a retreat violently terrorized the poet and his girlfriend. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism is perhaps the most famous of Trungpa's books, and the title summarizes his approach. The story goes that when Allen first met him, he was surprised and put off by Trungpa's drinking.

"You should stop drinking," Allen told him. "You can't be a drunk when you're a spiritual leader."

Trungpa told Ginsberg fine, he would stop drinking if Allen would cut off his long hair and shave his beard. Allen, always up for a cosmic joust, went off and did that, then returned clean and shorn to Trungpa, presumably still at the bar.

"Okay," Allen said. "Now it's your turn."

Trungpa reportedly told Allen that he liked drinking too much to give it up—which sounds a lot like that Catholic Buddhist, Allen's other guru, Kerouac.''''

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/237260

I asked Jack what the difference was between Buddha and Jesus. He looked up at me quickly, nodded seriously, and said, "That's a very good question. There is none."

This response, not unexpected, nevertheless kept me quiet, for which I thank both deities. My planned answer: "Buddha knew karate."

During the interview Jack, perhaps intrigued that the son of one of his first literary influences was now looking to him, asked me to repeat after him, line by line, the words of a poem of his from Mexico City Blues:

KEROUAC: Delicate conceptions of kneecaps. Say that, Saroyan.

SAROYAN: Delicate conceptions of kneecaps.

Concluding:

KEROUAC: Like kissing my kitten in the belly

SAROYAN: Like kissing my kitten in the belly

KEROUAC: The softness of our reward

SAROYAN: The softness of our reward

I stumbled once or twice—there were some complicated lines—but a thick-skinned, hardheaded 23-year-old writer was getting some basic training, not in literature per se, but in repeating the words of a master. That is the correct existential posture in the lineage of mystery—surrendering to it—that the Beats revived. So, my young friend, it was as if Kerouac was saying, Let's appreciate it together; even though I wrote it, it's both of ours now. When I'd completed this exercise, Jack rewarded me with a modest encomium that has traveled with me down the years and that I've tried my best to be worthy of. "You'll do, Saroyan," he said.

ibid

[WIREMAN]

I find myself becoming
a little bit Jacked
As I get older
60 a big swallow
Jack old at 47
Call it the jabba the hut syndrome
Both him and trungpa
Gangster scary
Just watch that video of jack shooting pool
Stocky badass old crony
Still I'm not disappointed
Ya know I never saw a one of the
Beats in a beret

[zero_hero]

mark you are driving me crazy with the allusions to that video I can't find on you tube could you please give me a link to it. I would love to see Carolyn cry for jack. For my 34th birthday in 1974, my true love gave me a biography of Kerouac by Anne Charters, the last memory of Carolyn and Jack i have is her refusing his late night phone calls.

I feel like a turkey buzzard picking over these old bones

I will look some more later for the that video or hope you send me the link

got to hit the road now


I hope we never run out of road

[WIREMAN]

Rebels...a journey underground part 2.....YouTube

[zero_hero]

Thank you

[WIREMAN]

Now dats a poet....happy 60 city lights!

[stilltrucking]

I think about this thread almost everyday, money been much on my mind. I think of Lew Welch and his struggle for the legal tender.

Working in that ad agency, hell on earth for him. But it was grist for the poet's mill.
I wish he had stuck around for the long haul. Or joined the BBB (Better Buddhists Bureau)

Ferlinghetti walked the streets of Nagasaki in August of 1945. That was the day he ...

I am glad he is still here, Gary Snyder too, we need all the bad old men we can get, bad old men/women poets and artists.

.

[Hypatia]

not just blowing smoke
take care amigo
but don't worry be happy
first rule of jam
there is no rule
first word of jam
first thought of jam
it as close to the emotional truth
as I can get
second thoughts and after thoughts
carry on my wayward mind

one of these days I will fly
till then I am a greedy ignorant child
a bottom feeder who collects the crumbs of language dropping(s) from my high flying hero poets
as I limp along

St Jack's elements of spontaneous hyper text.
Grammar and syntax—A life sentence.

[the mingo]

What you sayin' Jack? Away with all that ya ol' fool ! I read your scribblings as you call them with much enjoyment. Always have. I think they all a fine-honed body of work and that is what they are, a body of work. You are the oldest old sage around here - you clock me by ten years & Wireman by twelve I believe. You the king of the place now and you don't know how many times over the years something you've scribbled down has carried my day or righteously pissed me off - either way I've enjoyed it.
As Trixie, a character in the HBO series Deadwood, once said to Sol Starr - "You're a funny fuckin' Jew" ... and if I read one more time about how you're "limping along" trying to keep up I'm gonna stuff you in a box of a dozen Baltimore bagels and mail you express to the gov't of Israel. Or maybe all the way to the Mighty Smitey God of your mothers.

Let me put it this way - this place has lost a couple of folks in the not too distant past. I am sorry the way they had to go but the truth is their passing didn't arouse any grief in me. But if you were to drop the fuck dead on one of your bike rides on that molten Texas macadam down there as in never coming back - I'd miss ya - & I'd go right on missin' ya 'til it was my turn to be called up.

Your voice, your writings, your way of expressing yourself is as strong and as good as anything that passes the board here. Always has been. The one thing you've never done is limp. When you and I are passing the shit back & forth it has ever entered my mind that I ain't in good company.

So I've said it - and there it is.

And a hearty up your ass from Gringolandia too!