How to Live Like a Poet According to Jack Kerouac
It’s fair to say I’ve been deep in writing mode. After taking a brain break at the end of last term, I finally had to buckle down to work, and I’ve been scribbling away like a fiend ever since. I just sent a few chapters of my nonfiction Charles Dickens and Queen Victoria book to a history publisher in England (fingers crossed for that one). I’m also deep into finishing my dissertation (just a bit left to finish before I begin revising) as well as finishing the current draft of Down Salem Way.
I’ve been getting a lot of writing done, but I’ve also been doing my fair share of procrastinating, as is my way. I was checking out my Twitter feed and I saw this list from Jack Kerouac about how to live like a poet. This is just what I needed right now.
Enjoy.
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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
