A poem about Jack Kerouac

Here's a poem about Jack I just discovered via Twitter. Click here.

A poem for our "Governor"

Jack being a poet, I thought I'd share this poem I wrote today.

A Poem for “Governor” Paul LePage
by Rick Dale

To our petulant pompously presumptuous postulant potentate
Who perniciously proposes Presidential perdition
Who prevented poetic participation in his political pomp
Whose predecessor now appears profusely polished
Who prattles about his plutocratic pursuits
Who prefers people press lips to his portly posterior
Who pines to poison preschoolers with plastic
Who perpetuates patriarchy
Who pilfers paintings to piss off the populace, then plays in paradise
Who proffers preferential privileges for the presently prosperous

Pardon my peevishness
But I pray and plead:
Promptly part from your political position
Please!

Michael McClure interview

I thought you might enjoy this interview with beat poet, Michael McClure.

"Jack Kerouac's Funeral"

My friend, Mitch Goldwater, turned me on to a poet, Bill Tremblay, via gifting me his excellent book, Duhamel: Ideas of Order in Little Canada. He's a real gone poet, and I highly recommend him to all my Kerouac friends.

Indeed, Tremblay wrote a poem titled, "Jack Kerouac's Funeral." Read it here.

I love how he captures not only the feel of the day but Jack's voice as well.

Right on and thanks, Mitch.

Poetry

Readers of the The Daily Beat may not be aware of my other blog where I write poetry. I set a goal this year to write 100 poems. I'm up to 15 - not on track, but gaining.

If you wish, you can read my poetry at Words Are My Drug of Choice.

Thank you for your support.

Supporting poetry and poets

Jack Kerouac was a poet, even in his prose work. Indeed, as Helen Weaver says in her fantastic memoir, The Awakener, "Jack always said that his books were poems." Try reading On The Road aloud and see what she means.

I think Jack would want us to support poetry, and to do that we need to support poets.

This coming Friday night at 6:30 PM, at A1 to Go in Gardiner, ME, there will be a poetry reading open to any poets who want to come and read their work. Crystal and I are going. I know I plan to read some of my original poems. I hope you'll consider coming out and supporting poetry!

Another way to support poetry is to buy the work of contemporary poets. For example, my good friend Charlie James just published a fantastic collection of 201 poems titled Life Lines. It's available at Amazon (click here).

Another contemporary poet is Rod Farmer, a colleague at UMF. He just published a book titled Fingers Pointing at the Moon and it's also available via Amazon (click here) or directly from Finishing Line Press (click here).

Thanks in advance for supporting poetry and poets! Jack says "Thanks!"

Rejection - again

I entered the following poem in the San Francisco Bay Guardian's 123 LIT Contest, whose 10 winners were announced today. Entries had to be 123 words. Mine was untitled as I sent it, but I am calling it Jack's Ghost (I read it at the open mike on Saturday night at Lowell Celebrates Kerouac).


Jack's Ghost

I trippled down Adler
hoping to meet Jack’s ghost
but ended up sitting on the floor
upstairs in City Lights
reading the blues
when a sexy gone voice behind me
said who’s your favorite?
and without looking to see
my angel in waiting
I wrote “Kerouac” on a blank page
in my little black notebook
stuck my pen in the fold
and passed it behind me
without looking
I felt it taken out of my nervous hand
an eternity fell on my shoulders
before a giggle
a sweet silky titter of a laugh
too afraid I still didn’t look
Something touched my shoulder
I reached up, felt my notebook
under Jack’s name was written
“I was here”
I turned around
she was
gone


If you want to read the 10 winning entries, click here.

I don't get it. I really, really don't.

But I am not disheartened, for, after all, I was cut from the high school varsity basketball team twice, which is twice as many times as Michael Jordan was cut from his.

Jack Kerouac & Emily Dickinson

I've loved Emily Dickinson since high school. I "got" her poetry. And that was an oasis of wonder amidst all the prescribed writing we had to suffer through (yes, suffer - because neither did we understand it nor were we interested in understanding it). But her poems "got through." I connected.

I had forgotten about a possible Kerouac-Dickinson connection until the other day when I was researching whether Kerouac had ever met Alan Watts. I knew they were contemporaries who opined about each other, but I couldn't remember a meeting.

Anyway, while thumbing through Gerald Nicosia's Kerouac biography, Memory Babe, I saw a passage I had marked up in which Nicosia was speculating about influences on Jack. In particular, he was focusing on Jack's use of a motif: "the slanting red light of afternoon sun" stirring "wonder in man" (1983, p. 312). Nicosia postulates that Jack may have learned to express this motif from the following Dickinson poem:

There's a certain slant of light
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything.
'Tis the seal, despair--
An imperial affliction
Sent us of air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, 'tis like the distance
On the look of death.

Jack Kerouac and Emily Dickinson. Can you imagine them collaborating? I know. Jack would fall in love with her and want to take her to bed. But afterwards, after all the fol-de-rol, when they got down to writing, wow . . . .

Poetry and other thoughts

I love poetry. I think I would rather be known as a "poet" than a "writer." It just sounds more . . . beat. Yet I guess poets are writers, and of course Jack Kerouac and his compadres blurred the line between prose and poetry. Proesy?

Google brings up no definition for "proesy." But see Proesy. (This will drive some traffic to a fellow blogger's blog, a beat thing to do. Quid pro quo anyone?)

I especially love certain poets. Emily Dickinson (ever since high school). e e cummings (ever since high school). Edwin Arlington Robinson (ever since high school and by the way I've journaled about him - see EAR.

Hmmm . . . . It would seem I had a kick-ass high school English teacher who exposed me to some good stuff. His name was (is) Brian Stahler. Any kudos to me about my writing are due him. Thanks, Mr. Stahler. Best teacher I ever had. Hardest, too. Probably a correlation there. Had one of his teachers at Lock Haven State College. Learned that the acorn doesn't fall far from the oak.

Who have I appreciated lately? Charles Bukowski for one. Check him out.

How does one "become" a poet? Well, first of all, one cannot become anything. One just is. So let's rephrase. How does one "be" a poet?

One is a poet when one writes poetry. Daily. Which reminds me of my beat poet friend, Charlie, for whom I am serving as compiler/editor of a collection of his poems. He writes every day. Not all of it is "worthy." But it's about the discipline of the craft!

Seems simple enough. But it is hard, my fellow prisoners, damn hard. One has to go mad to write good poetry.

Let the madness begin . . . .

A beat haiku

Trying to write zen
But you say I am foolish
Haiku you say that?