Beliefs & Technique for Modern Prose List of Essentials. Jack Kerouac.

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Erika reminded me again of these today.  They live on my desktop and my wall.  And now also fresh in my mind.

Click here for printable version.

Carrot Quinn. I AM NOT AFRAID OF WINTER.

Ah, god, once I flew to Oregon and used the beater pick-up truck of a wild woman friend to drive all over the state for almost a full month.  It was my first time really travelling alone.  At a hot spring tucked in fairyland deep in the Cascade mountained woods I randomly met a woman whose blog I'd been following for years! Later, we ran out of gas together on the 5 outside Portland.  SHE'S MY SUPER HELLA FAVE.  Here's why...so touchingly, tenderly, eloquently GOOD

I AM NOT AFRAID OF WINTER

by Carrot Quinn

Traffic. Feelin Alright.

Man what a day. Poetry said yo is this thing on so I yawned deep in bed and said yes please. The serendipity of course today therefor has been unreal.... In the Gypsy Den right now jamming to this song feeling that enlivened rush from within~

The Submarines. 1940 Amplive Remix.

I lived in the coast mountains of Northern California for a minute last fall.  Tucked up under the redwoods the magic that happened there is far too surreal for words.  Which is why me and most my spirit fam from up there speak in songs to one another.  I heard this today and it reminded me so, so much of them.  Harmony and hearts and belief in spirit and especially dance and laughter.  This one's for them.

Gravity Rides Everything

I love this song so much.  Erika and I start our writing exchange again on Tuesday, I write with confidence that this is the final draft of my book, finally, that we are to begin.  This song feels prophetic, as it plays in the coffee shop as I ready to write.  Not in the cliff-jump big illustrious way, but the subtle soft flow of opening.  As it goes...

Homesick. Atomic Books.

Dada's Pics is changing, bc I need a place other than my non-fiction blog to put the little whimsies that are the source of all my musings.

Like this, reprinted from the Atomic Books blog.  It makes me miss the days of teaching poetry to gangbanger federal inmates.  Getting love notes from them pasted together by deodorant glue.  It makes the grit and edge inside me lonely and long for riot grrrl boots and pink hair.  For back then, back home...

We sometimes get odd and interesting letters sent to us at Atomic Books. It isn't always easy to determine the intent of the sender. But we thought it might be interesting to share these letters from time to time.

This letter was sent to us from an inmate at the Maryland Correctional Facility in Hagerstown, MD.

This Is Not An Idle Threat
by Jed P. 

I'm going to hunt down,
I'm going to find and kill William Blake.
He had no right
To do like he done to me -
But he'll get his due.

And if that Byron happens to be there,
I'm gonna take out that son of a bitch too.

After that I'm heading straight
For you Rimbaud
You know that you were dead wrong
To be messing around with my baby girl.
I'll never understand,
I'll never see what she was doing
With a cocksucker like you!

On and I'm finally going to get back
The money that Walt Whitman owes me.
He'll pay that seven twenty-five, 
He'll pay one way or the other,
After I'm through.

And if that Byron happens to be there, 
I'm gonna take out that son of a bitch too.

The New York Sessions, 1967. Van Morrison.

This morning I was in the mood for "backroom" music.  Low, guitar blues, folksy, smokey lyrics.  The late night after the party just a couple people drinking whiskey in the backroom music.  Van Morrison popped in my head, I searched Spotify, found the New York 1967 Sessions, chose it because the name reminded me of the Band (Basement Sessions) which produced some great, dirty backroom material.

I could not have guessed better.  What an album.  Give the whole thing a listen, I am on listen number two right now and luxuriously feeling the way music pulls it all out when sometimes your words just wont...

This is Beside You.  Poetry.