Sunflower Sutra, poem by Allen Ginsberg

SUNFLOWER SUTRA (Excerpt)
by Allen Ginsberg

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hung-over like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust—
—I rushed up enchanted—it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake—my visions—Harlem . . .

MORE: Read “Sunflower Sutra” by Alllen Ginsberg in its entirety at poetryfoundation.org.

SOURCE: “Sunflower Sutra” appears in Allen Ginsberg‘s Collected Poems, 1947-1980 (HarperCollins, 1984), available at Amazon.com.

IMAGE: “Sunshine Railroad” by Emily Stauring. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation of the 1950s. He is best known for his epic poem “Howl” (1955).

A Poem For Dada Day At The Place . . . by Jack Spicer

A POEM FOR DADA DAY AT THE PLACE APRIL 1, 1958
by Jack Spicer

I
The bartender
Has eyes the color of ripe apricots
Easy to please as a cash register he
Enjoys art and good jokes.
Squish
Goes the painting
Squirt
Goes the poem
He
We
Laugh.

II
It is not easy to remember that other people died
besides Dylan Thomas and Charlie Parker
Died looking for beauty in the world of the
bartender
This person, that person, this person, that person
died looking for beauty
Even the bartender died

III
Dante blew his nose
And his nose came off in his hand
Rimbaud broke his throat
Trying to cough
Dada is not funny
It is a serious assault
On art
Because art
Can be enjoyed by the bartender.

IV
The bartender is not the United States
Or the intellectual
Or the bartender
He is every bastard that does not cry
When he reads this poem.

SOURCE: Poetry (July/August 2008)

PHOTO: “Blabbermouth Night, an open reading and forum, at The Place” by C.R. Snyder, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jack Spicer (1925–1965) was a poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance — the name given to the emergence of writers and artists in the Bay Area at the end of WWII. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry.

ABOUT DADA: Dada is a movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire. Its founders struck upon this essentially nonsense word to embody a playful and nihilistic spirit alive among European visual artists and writers during and immediately after World War I. They salvaged a sense of freedom from the cultural and moral instability that followed the war, and embraced both “everything and nothing” in their desire to “sweep, sweep clean,” as Tristan Tzara wrote in his Dadaist Manifesto in 1920. In visual arts, this enterprise took the form of collage and juxtaposition of unrelated objects, as in the work of French artist Marcel Duchamp. T.S. Eliot’s and Ezra Pound’s allusive, often syntactically and imagistically fractured poems of this era reflect a Dadaist influence. Dadaism gave rise to surrealism. (SOURCE: poetryfoundation.org.) To read more about Dadaism, visit wikipedia.org.

ABOUT THE PLACE: Between 1955 and 1959, The Place at 1564 Grant Street was at the center of San Francisco’s Beat culture — a bohemian bar managed by Knute Stiles and Leo Krekorian. In a 1986 interview published in North Beach Magazine, Krekorian, known as the “Grandfather of the Beats,” explained some of what was special about The Place: “When Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road people started hitchhiking to San Francisco from all over the country, even from foreign countries, and their first stop was The Place. They walked in with the luggage and I usually let them park their stuff a few days until they got squared away.” (Read more of this essay by Mark Schwartz & Art Peterson, originally published in The Semaphore #181, Fall 2007 at foundsf.org.)

one 1, Beat Erasure Poem by Thomas R. Thomas

one 1
by Thomas R. Thomas

I met
my life
my life
on the road
to Los Angeles

I was
sweetly
intellectual

Then
for the first time
there was
Marylou

I
had arrived

SOURCE: “one 1*” is based on the first page of Chapter 1o in the novel On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Thomas R. Thomas was born in Los Angeles and grew up in the San Gabriel Valley west of LA. Currently, he lives in Long Beach, California. For his day job, he is a software QA Analyst. He volunteers for Tebot Bach, a community poetry organization, in Huntington Beach. Thomas has been published in Don’t Blame the Ugly Mug: 10 Years of 2 Idiots Peddling Poetry, Creepy Gnome, Carnival, Pipe Dream, Bank Heavy Press, Conceit Magazine, Electric Windmill & Marco Polo, and the Silver Birch Press Summer Anthology. In November 2012, Carnival released his eChapbook, Scorpio, and Washing Machine Press released a chapbooklette called Tanka. In October 2013, World Parade Books published a book of his poetry, Five Lines. Visit the author’s website at thomasrthomas.org.

Beat Poet, Magnet Poetry Kit

The makers of the original Magnetic Poetry Kit present Beat Poet, a magnetic poetry kit with over 200 hep cat word magnets. This box of words really zings, daddy-o, and celebrates one of America’s best known literary movements. The kit includes words like jazz, generation, road, bohemian, freedom . . . and many more! Find a complete list of words here. Kit contains over 200 themed magnetic word tiles — all for just $11.95. To order, visit magneticpoetry.com. To create a poem online from the original kit, visit this link. If you do, please send a copy to silver@silverbirchpress.com.

The Changing Light, poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

THE CHANGING LIGHT
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The changing light
at San Francisco
is none of your East Coast light
none of your
pearly light of Paris
The light of San Francisco
is a sea light
an island light
And the light of fog
blanketing the hills
drifting in at night
through the Golden Gate
to lie on the city at dawn
And then the halcyon late mornings
after the  fog burns off
and the sun paints white houses
with the sea light of Greece
with sharp clean shadows
making the town look like
it had just been painted

But the wind comes up at four o’clock
sweeping the hills

And then the veil of light of early evening

And then another scrim
when the new night fog
floats in
And in that vale of light
the city drifts
anchorless upon the ocean

SOURCE: “The Changing Light” appears in Lawrence Ferlinghetti‘s collection How to Paint Sunlight: Lyric Poems & Others (1997-2000) (New Directions Publishing, 2001), available at Amazon.com.

PHOTO: TheBrockenInAGlory

Jack Kerouac reads “San Francisco Scene”

Jack Kerouac reads his poem “San Francisco Scene” from the CD Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation, available at Amazon.com.

shadowed, Beat Erasure Poem by Alexis Rhone Fancher

shadowed
by Alexis Rhone Fancher

I am ice
I am water
I am frost
cut by glass
I am a
whistle thru my teeth
 
I lose my hat
 
My eyes are locked
my bones are soup
I am stone
I am mad
I stare out. broken.

SOURCE: “shadowed” by Alexis Rhone Fancher is based on “I Am a Shadow” by Diane di Prima.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alexis Rhone Fancher is an L.A. based poet/photographer whose work can or soon will be found in Rattle, Fjords Review, The MacGuffin, Deep Water Literary Journal, BoySlut, Carnival Lit Magazine, Luciferous, HighCoupe, H_NGM_N, Gutter Eloquence, GoodMen Project, Bare Hands, Poetry Super Highway, The Juice Bar, Poeticdiversity, Little Raven, Bukowski On Wry, numerous anthologies, and elsewhere. Her photographs, published worldwide, include a spread in HEArt Online, and the covers of Witness and The Mas Tequila Review. A member of Jack Grapes’ L.A.Poets and Writers Collective, Alexis was nominated for two Pushcart Prizes in 2013. She is poetry editor of Cultural Weekly. www.lapoetrix.com

Night Song of Los Angeles Basin, poem by Gary Snyder

NIGHT SONG OF THE LOS ANGELES BASIN
by Gary Snyder

      Owl
                        calls,
                        pollen dust blows
               Swirl of light strokes writhing
               knot-tying light paths,
 
               calligraphy of cars.
 
Los Angeles basin and hill slopes
Checkered with streetways. Floral loops
Of the freeway express and exchange.
 
                  Dragons of light in the dark
                  sweep going both ways
                  in the night city belly.
                  The passage of light end to end and rebound,
                  —ride drivers all heading somewhere—
                  etch in their traces to night’s eye-mind
 
                  calligraphy of cars.
 
Vole paths. Mouse trails worn in
On meadow grass;
Winding pocket-gopher tunnels,
Marmot lookout rocks.
Houses with green watered gardens
Slip under the ghost of the dry chaparral,
 
                  Ghost
                  shrine to the L. A. River
                  The jinja that never was there
                  is there.
                  Where the river debouches
                  the place of the moment
                  of trembling and gathering and giving
                  so that lizards clap hands there
                  —just lizards
                  come pray, saying
                  “please give us health and long life.”
 
                            A hawk,
                            a mouse.
 
Slash of calligraphy of freeways of cars.
 
                  Into the pools of the channelized river
                  the Goddess in tall rain dress
                  tosses a handful of meal.
 
                  Gold bellies roil
                  mouth-bubbles, frenzy of feeding,
                  the common ones, the bright-colored rare ones
                  show up, they tangle and tumble,
                  godlings ride by in Rolls Royce
                  wide-eyed in brokers’ halls
                  lifted in hotels
                  being presented to, platters
                  of tidbit and wine,
                  snatch of fame,
 
                           churn and roil,
 
                  meal gone   the water subsides.
 
                           A mouse,
                           a hawk.
 
The calligraphy of lights on the night
                   freeways of Los Angeles
 
                   will long be remembered.
 
                           Owl
                   calls;
                            late-rising moon.
***
“Night Song of the Los Angeles Basin” appears  in Gary Snyder’s collection Mountains and Rivers Without End (Counterpoint Press, 2008).

Photo: View of Los Angeles Basin from Mulholland Drive at night by Eino Mustonen, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

NOTE: The Los Angeles Basin is the coastal sediment-filled plain located at the north end of the Peninsular Ranges province in southern California, and contains the central part of the city of Los Angeles as well as its southern and southeastern suburbs. It is approximately 50 miles long and 25 miles  wide, bounded on the north by the Santa Monica Mountains and San Gabriel Mountains, on the east by the Santa Ana Mountains, and on the south by the Pacific Ocean and the Palos Verdes Hills, along the coast. The confluence of the Los Angeles and Rio Hondo rivers is the center of the basin. (Source: wikipedia.org.)

Kerouac dreams, art by TatiDuarte

“All human beings are also dream beings.”

JACK KEROUAC

ART: “Dreaming ties all mankind together” by TatiDuarte. Prints available at redbubble.com

Christmas essay by Jack Kerouac

NOT LONG AGO JOY ABOUNDED AT CHRISTMAS (Excerpt)

by Jack Kerouac

…Christmas was observed all-out in my Catholic French-Canadian environment in the 1930s much as it is today in Mexico…When we were old enough it was thrilling to be allowed to stay up late on Christmas Eve and put on best suits and dresses and overshoes and earmuffs and walk with adults through crunching dried snow to the bell-ringing church. Parties of people laughing down the street, bright throbbing stars of New England winter bending over rooftops sometimes causing long rows of icicles to shimmer. As we passed near the church you could hear the opening choruses of Bach being sung by child choirs mingled with the grownup choirs usually led by a tenor who inspired laughter more than anything else. But from the wide-open door of the church poured golden light, and inside the little girls were lined up for their trumpet choruses caroling Handel…

Note: “Not long ago joy abounded at Christmas” was first published in the New York World Telegram on Dec. 5, 1957. Read a longer excerpt at richardhowe.com.

Photo: Jack Kerouac as a boy during the 1930s.