Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.
This is all very nice, because the ideas that Jack and the Beat generation stood for are needed today more than ever. But I’m not so interested in nostalgia. I’m interested in the future.
Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.
Well, I didn’t know how to draw very well back then, in the ’40s and ’50s.
Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today.
My country tears of thee.
They were looking for a stable, but we didn’t have one. In fact, we weren’t very stable ourselves.
I’d ban all automobiles from the central part of the city. You see, the automobile was just a passing fad. It’s got to go. It’s got to go a long way from here.
It’s much easier to consume the visual image than to read something.
We were just a one-room bookstore; we didn’t have any money for lawyers.
The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don’t mind some people dying all the time or maybe only starving some of the time which isn’t half so bad if it isn’t you.
I didn’t know that painters and writers retired. They’re like soldiers – they just fade away.
When I was a boy I was my father.
I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy.
As I get older I perceive Life has its tail in its mouth.
Paperbacks weren’t considered real books in the book trade. Up till then it was just murder mysteries, potboilers, 25-cent pocket books sold in newsstands. When the New York publishers started publishing quality paperbacks, there was no place to buy them.
I have a feeling I’m falling on rare occasions but most of the time I have my feet on the ground I can’t help it if the ground itself is falling.
For even bad poetry has relevance for what it does not say for what it leaves out.
The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.
A lot of manuscripts that come in, you wonder by what outrageous fantasy the author believes that this should be pressed into print.
Make your mind learn its way around the heart.