[scpot]

Kerouac is one of my heroes and this clip quite honestly makes my heart all bleedy if you know what I mean. Check this guy out... during the interview he's nervous and awkward and can't even look Steve Allen in the eye. But... the second he starts reading from his book he's a completely different person, incredibly confident.

I also trip out on how he typed "On the Road" on a roll of paper so that he wouldn't have to stop between pages. Kind of like a computer huh?

[HighgradeWilly562]

Damn it, I thought this thread was about masturbation.

[scpot]

Originally Posted by HighgradeWilly562

Damn it, I thought this thread was about masturbation.

You Philistine

[ShiningSkull]

One time Jack said:

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!”

[scpot]

Originally Posted by ShiningSkull

One time Jack said:

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!”

That's my favorite quote of his. Here's a poem by my favorite poet of the period.

[ShiningSkull]

I've always loved the way Ferlinghetti read this"

[shecky7]

I never really felt the pull into the 'young rebel' beat writers but was always a big fan of William Burroughs. His last three finishing with 'western lands' are pure genius imo.

death needs time for what it kills to grow in for ah pooks sweet sake you stupid ugly vulgar greedy american death sucker.

I will add I noticed I have a kitchen magnet of that kerouak quote about the mad people... funny that.

[Jeffster]

Great thread. Thanks. I read On The Road way back in 1968, and need to re-read it. Then re-read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, read Sometimes A Great Notion by Ken Kesey...

[ShiningSkull]

OBITUARY
Harold Norse dies at 92;
Beat poet was a literary beacon in the gay community


Allen Ginsberg Estate
Harold Norse never attained the recognition that he and others felt was his due.
His mentor, poet William Carlos Williams, called him “the best poet of your generation.”

A pioneer of poetry written in plain American English,
Norse was mentor or peer to great talents in 20th century American literature,
including Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin and Allen Ginsberg.

By Elaine Woo
June 13, 2009

Harold Norse, a San Francisco poet often associated with the Beats,
who was mentor or peer to many of the greatest talents in 20th century
American literature, including Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin,
Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski, has died. He was 92.

Norse died of natural causes Monday at an assisted-living facility in San Francisco,
according to his conservator, attorney Mark Vermeulen.

A pioneer of poetry written in plain American English who was called
"the best poet of your generation" by William Carlos Williams, Norse
never attained the recognition that he and others felt was his due. A literary beacon
in the gay community who risked ostracism by writing openly of his sexual
adventures in the 1940s and '50s, Norse exiled himself to Europe for
15 years before returning to the United States and publishing such volumes as
"Hotel Nirvana" (1974), which was nominated for a National Book Award,
"Carnivorous Saint" (1977) and "In the Hub of the Fiery Force: Collected Poems" (2003).

"He was essentially an expatriate voice in American poetry," said Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
the poet and bookseller who published a volume of Norse's poems in the mid-1970s.
"He had an original voice because he ventriloquized what a lot of other poets were saying. . . .
He could sound in one poem like T.S. Eliot . . . or in another poem like William Burroughs."

Norse's life reads like a history of modern American literature. At a reading in 1939,
he flirted with W.H. Auden and became his personal secretary, a job he held until
Auden took up with Norse's lover. He met Ginsberg riding a New York subway in 1944,
more than a decade before Ginsberg attained international notoriety with the Beat classic "Howl."
Later, Norse caroused with Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Brion Gysin at the Parisian flophouse
that became famous as the Beat Hotel.

Norse was born out of wedlock on July 6, 1916, in New York City and raised by his mother
after his father disappeared. He earned a bachelor's degree at Brooklyn College
in 1938 and a master's from New York University in 1951. The following year,
his mentor, William Carlos Williams, arranged a reading for Norse at the Museum of Modern Art.
His work appeared in prestigious publications, including Poetry magazine, the Paris Review
and Saturday Review.

He was halfway to a doctorate in 1953 when he moved to Italy, where he discovered
the 19th century Roman poet G.G. Belli and translated a volume of Belli's bawdy sonnets.

By then, Norse, heeding Williams' advice, had abandoned traditional verse for
"my own free style" that drew on the rhythms of everyday speech.

"He was an absolute pioneer in the use of American language," said Gerald Nicosia,
a poet and biographer of Jack Kerouac, who knew Norse for more than 30 years.
"He was writing good, strong poetry before the Beats were."

At the Beat Hotel, where Norse lived from 1959 to 1963, he found himself experimenting
with Gysin and Burroughs in what they called "cut-up writing," in which
they cut up pages of writing and randomly pasted the pieces together to form a new text.
He wrote "Beat Hotel," a novella, in the cut-up style. Burroughs wrote "Naked Lunch,"
the nonlinear, obscenity-laced postwar classic.

Norse returned to the United States in 1968, settling for a few years in Venice,
not far from Bukowski's Hollywood bungalow. Bukowski, whom Time magazine
would later dub the "laureate of American lowlife," revered Norse, who returned
the admiration when he included the younger poet in a volume of Penguin Modern Poets
he edited that also featured his own work and that of Philip Lamantia, another Beat poet.
The 1969 Penguin anthology was Bukowski's first major introduction to the literary establishment.

After its publication, Bukowski wrote to Norse: "Whenever I read you my own writing gets better --
you teach me how to run through glaciers and dump siffed-up whores.
This is not saying it well, but you know what I mean.
God damn you, Norse, I've just burnt a tray full of french fries while WRITING about you!"

Bukowski, like Ginsberg and other Norse associates, eclipsed him in fame.
"I had a big ego," Norse told the San Francisco Weekly in 2000, "but I always said --
and it was a stupid thing that I lived by -- 'I won't lift a finger to publicize my work.
It has to come from the outside.' So in a way I buried myself."

He moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s and became a mentor to younger writers,
including poet and Beat historian Neeli Cherkovski. In 1977, he helped put on a seminal reading
at Glide Memorial Church featuring gay writers such as Ginsberg, Cherkovski and John Rechy
that Cherkovski said "helped open up the idea of the identity of the gay poet in San Francisco."

Norse was unabashed about being homosexual and poured his experiences --
what Ferlinghetti once teasingly described as his "horizontal history" --
into poems that reflected anger, sadness and pride.

I'm not a man. I write poetry.

I'm not a man. I meditate on peace and love.

I'm not a man. I don't want to destroy you.

In 1990, he published his correspondence with William Carlos Williams. But he died before
he could claim a larger place in the literary firmament, alongside Ginsberg and Burroughs,
both of whom died in 1997. In his later years, he believed he could put himself
back on the map if he could publish his 20-year correspondence with Bukowski,
who died in 1994. Those letters remain unpublished.

"He used to talk about Norse's luck," recalled Cherkovski. "I said, 'Look, you outlived everybody.' "

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituari...,7672432.story


Poem by Harold Norse:
Carnivorous Saint

we dig up ancient shards
clicking cameras
among the dying cypresses
choked by Athenian smog.

yet cats continue basking
in the hazy sun
the chained goat sways in ecstasy
the Parthenon looks down from creamy heights
lichen and rust nibble the pediments
and tourist feet break the spell
of antiquity's vibrations

the grass hits
as I look at rusty orangeade caps
thinking Who needs nuclear Apollo?
thermonuclear Minerva?
Nike crashing to grand finale?

we need the anti-Christ
who is probably playing football around the corner
the sweet boy who used to be called Eros
and wants us to be happy.

bring back the carnivorous saint
whose mother is no virgin
she's Our Lady of Peace Movements
to ban the bomb and clean up the air
she'll wave her umbrella and change the world.

ah yes, when the grass hits
old worlds burn down and new worlds form
in clouds of brown monoxide morning.

Athens, Jan. 1964

[Jeffster]

So sad that he missed out on on the accolades which his peers and those whom he mentored received, but that is a good point by Cherkovski, that he outlived so many of them. 92 seems like a good run to me.

[ShiningSkull]

Neeli Cherkovski was a friend of Charles Bukowski and Harold Norse.
In the early days, Cherkovski and Bukowski published Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns,
a literary magazine run off on a mimeograph machine.

He still writes and lives in San Francisco.

This poem of his about the Abu Ghraib is very affecting.



A PRISON POEM
by Neeli Cherkovski

I wrote this for America where I wept
In America where I could not sleep
I wrote this in my homeland where I keep counsel
with the founding fathers and the founding mothers
and the dreams Chief Joseph wrought
when he threw down his arms
before shock and awe

I wrote this in America where I find myself
being born day in and day out

I thought this poem up in America on the day they showed
a soldier treat a naked Iraqi man as if he were a dog
simply because she had weapons of mass destruction
trained on his body in a prison near Babylon

I made this poem in America
on an assembly line of anger and disgust

I wrote this while the Secretary of Defense
sat before the Congress, the lights were bright
and he could not open his eyes

I wrote for love
but love was lost
I wrote for freedom
but it is just a word
I wrote for dignity
but it belongs only to the rich and powerful
I wrote for God
but he was not home

God bless the other God
the good God who does not die
in a bath of blood
perpetually
on a wide screen

I am trapped, trapped like the President
trapped in the death of language
feeling lonely there

I'm the Secretary of Another War
a Deep War of Words

when I testify
bison stir the prairies
the grassland weeps:
"Give my country back to me"

America cannot hide from the world
as the chambers of torture reveal
just how anxious we've been
to seek an empire

I cry for American words
that slip out of pure street lingo gone wild
they were sweet in the farmland, clearheaded
when Jack Kerouac crossed the Rockies
sublimely joyous citizens covered their eyes in clouds
that folded-in on the folklore of hope
Give me the strength of President Lincoln and Martin Luther King
two voices who sang, two eagles who soared

I cry for American eyes

I cry-out for Iraqi poetry
for Iraqi pride, for their desire
for their lives, for their deep history

"simple eyes" see everything

where has our America gone?

who is innocent, anyway?

I want to cover the President with buddha
and free the prison guards
from their angry empty lives
and bring them language
as they have brought us
a landscape of fear

May 6/7 2004
San Francisco



http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/feat...ki-prison.html

[scpot]

Here is some more from Kerouac from his session with Steve Allen. Probably my favorite spoken word piece ever. It's called Lucien Midnight. The video going along with it was made by a fan. Enjoy!

[VooDoo Chile]

I'm a big fan of all things Beat. I've even visited the lil house Kerouac bought just outside of Denver where he penned (or typed) On the Road. :ohmy: Yea, I know, I'm a Beat geek.