Finding Your Voice with Kerouac

I keep coming back to Jack Kerouac for inspiration. He was kind of a Buddha for the Beat Generation (except that he, uh, drank himself to death at an early age... oops). He cultivated both spontaneity and craft. He became an icon to thousands of young people with road fever but could have equally been a role model for the serious pursuit of any skill (pile of notebooks, endless revisions -- except for the, uh, methamphetamine part).

"Jack Kerouac: Writing Lesson" was based on the radio production below.

Radio version. I don't know how this will work as audio. But I figure if young people (the :Vocalo audience) can tolerate endless hip-hop raps, they can listen to 4 mysterious minutes of Kerouac's advice on how to find your voice.

The text of Kerouac's Belief and Technique for Modern Prose:

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy Submissive to everything, open, listening Try never get drunk outside your own house Be in love with your 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 yrself 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

3.2.2008

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Other Mad pages on Kerouac:

Kerouac's Craft

Reading "On the Road"

Kerouac Craft (earlier entry)