Reflected Lines - A Slideshow

'Be In Love With Your Own Life' - Jack Kerouac Quotes

While your correspondent is not the biggest Kerouac fan, he acknowledges a debt of gratitude to the Beat Writers for the gifts they gave him of Blake and Whitman, Ginsberg's Howl & Kaddish, and Burroughs' Junky & the Cities of The Red Night trilogy.

Kerouac always seemed to be an apologetic drunk to me, making literary excuses for his addiction - however these lists and the basic tenets of his philosophy do have a lot of truth in them. 

We have a choice how we live - that much is true, we can walk around in the gloom of capitalism's gasping dying breaths, or we can find a way to take a breath of our own. I particularly am moved by 'Be In Love With Your Own Life,' from this list. To do that for real in these narcissistic times. 

A Joycean YES to that.

# Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
# Submissive to everything, open, listening
# Try never get drunk outside yr own house
# Be in love with yr life
# Something that you feel will find its own form
# Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
# Blow as deep as you want to blow
# Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
# The unspeakable visions of the individual
# No time for poetry but exactly what is
# Visionary tics shivering in the chest
# In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
# Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
# Like Proust be an old teahead of time
# Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
# The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
# Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
# Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
# Accept loss forever
# Believe in the holy contour of life
# Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
# Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
# Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
# No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
# Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
# Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
# In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
# Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
# You're a Genius all the time
# Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Get Ready. Get set: Grandpaw Peter Koyote

Writing For Children

I discuss why presenting the best literature to children, and encouraging genuine creativity, is important. Plus a reading of my poem 'Making It Up'.

   

Poetry and The Human Spirit

A video to welcome Spring discussing the effect of poetry on the human spirit as an aid to overcoming political and media influence, plus a reading of an excerpt from Edna St. Vincent Millay's Renascence.



Still of John by Michael J Oakes

On Reflection - Keeping Promises Simple

From My Notebook:


It struck me hard in the guts today how most of us hang on the threads of promises. That frailty which we try to build sophistries, politics, and emotional and physical defensive walls against, is perhaps one of the tenderest spots in the human heart.

About ten years ago I was working as a Writer in Residence in a prison. It was important for me in order to do my job properly that I'd be Writer in Residence to the whole prison community, rather than just the prisoners, which meant I ran reading groups for staff, schemes for inmates who were young fathers to read their children when they came in for visits, as well as the usual creative writing kind of thing you might imagine such a role entails. Before taking up this job I received a lot of training in how to negotiate my way in such an environment, but if truth be told nothing really prepares you for working in a place where very different rules apply to what you are used to. However I found one thing in common with every situation I worked with in prison, one thing which was the difference between any form of success and whatever the opposite of that is in gaol. I had to do what I said I was going to do. If I told a prisoner I'd see him in his cell at 3pm I had to be there bang on time. If I told a staff member I'd find them a copy of that poem they remembered loving when they were younger and I'd give it to them on Tuesday, there they would be just happening to walk by my office on a Tuesday morning. If I was too busy, you'd get the 'Oh it's only a silly thing,' speech, but you could see the pain you'd brought. The prisoner, who you broke a promise to, on the other hand, would have had a fight or a really bad day after you failed to make it.

I've thought about this a lot over the years since I left that job to focus more on a more direct relationship with my love of literature. I realise that my head is so full of stuff oftentimes that I don't listen to people properly, and then later I find myself confused by the interaction or engaging in transference, and like an asshole thinking it was the other person's shit. It's my crap, my not listening, saying I'll do something and then remembering days after due date that there was something I should have done… and we're all so decent and aspirational we never say anything, or we wave it away. However the distance between us doesn't decrease, and we keep our connections on facebook and twitter and all the while have a dull hurt inside us for the lack of ordinary love and physicality we need to live on.

So here it is: I think we (I) need to listen more and keep promises simple and doable, turn up on time, do what I say I am going to do, and learn to start with a basis of love in my own being and go from there. As the digital world takes hold more and more, and as those in positions of power who should be an example of what 'Keeping Your Word' means, are found to be suffering from terminal malignant narcissism, it is more important than ever that we, for our own sake, learn to keep our words; for out here at the edge, that basic form is love is both armour and sword.

Renascence (Excerpt)

RENASCENCE (excerpt)

Ah! Up then from the ground sprang I

And hailed the earth with such a cry

As is not heard save from a man

Who has been dead, and lives again.

About the trees my arms I wound;

Like one gone mad I hugged the ground;

I raised my quivering arms on high;

I laughed and laughed into the sky,

Till at my throat a strangling sob

Caught fiercely, and a great heart-throb

Sent instant tears into my eyes;

O God, I cried, no dark disguise

Can e'er hereafter hide from me

Thy radiant identity!

Thou canst not move across the grass

But my quick eyes will see Thee pass,

Nor speak, however silently,

But my hushed voice will answer Thee.

I know the path that tells Thy way

Through the cool eve of every day;

God, I can push the grass apart

And lay my finger on Thy heart!

The world stands out on either side

No wider than the heart is wide;

Above the world is stretched the sky, --

No higher than the soul is high.

The heart can push the sea and land

Farther away on either hand;

The soul can split the sky in two,

And let the face of God shine through.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Tear it Down

Tear it Down

We find out the heart only by dismantling what

the heart knows. By redefining the morning,

we find a morning that comes just after darkness.

We can break through marriage into marriage.

By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond

affection and wade mouth-deep into love.

We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.

But going back toward childhood will not help.

The village is not better than Pittsburgh.

Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.

Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound

of raccoon tongues licking the inside walls

of the garbage tub is more than the stir

of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not

enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.

We should insist while there is still time. We must

eat through the wildness of her sweet body already

in our bed to reach the body within that body.

Jack Gilbert

Apple Blossom

Apple Blossom

The first blossom was the best blossom
For the child who never had seen an orchard;

For the youth whom whiskey had led astray

The morning after was the first day.

The first apple was the best apple

For Adam before he heard the sentence;

When the flaming sword endorsed the Fall

The trees were his to plant for all.

The first ocean was the best ocean

For the child from streets of doubt and litter;

For the youth for whom the skies unfurled

His first love was his first world.

But the first verdict seemed the worst verdict

When Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden,

Yet when the bitter gates clanged to

The sky beyond was just as blue.

For the next ocean is the first ocean

And the last ocean is the first ocean

And, however often the sun may rise,

A new thing dawns upon our eyes.

For the last blossom is the first blossom

And the first blossom is the last blossom

And when from Eden we take our way

The morning after is the first day.

Louis MacNeice

Get Drunk

Get Drunk

One should always be drunk. That’s the great thing; the only
question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on
your shoulders and bowing you to the earth, you should be
drunk without respite.
Drunk with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, 

as you please. But get drunk.
And if sometimes you should happen to awake, on the stairs
of a palace, on the green grass of a ditch, in the dreary solitude
of your own room, and find that your drunkenness is ebbing
or has vanished, ask the wind and the wave, ask star, bird, or
clock, ask everything that flies, everything that moans, every-
thing that flows, everything that sings, everything that speaks,
ask them the time; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird
and the clock will all reply: “It is Time to get drunk! If you
are not to be the martyred slaves of Time, be perpetually drunk!
With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please.”

Charles Baudelaire