Advice from Kerouac (What a Romantic)

I've stolen this from a site on the beats, thinking it would be good to have in the lineup for my upcoming advanced fiction workshop.

Belief & Technique
For Modern Prose
by Jack Kerouac
List of Essentials

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

Also Against Revision

William Blake Comes Out Against Revision

(Sort of.)

First thought is best in Art, second in other matters.

Against Revision

As a teacher of creative writing (and what writing isn't?), I often tell students that writing is all about revision. I find a lot of evidence to back me up and I deliver it to them with gusto. However, I also have to admit that this is not actually true. Many writers, good ones, disagree with me vehemently on the topic of revision.

Allen Ginsberg, for one. I often recall his line "First thought, best thought." And his pal Kerouac had a "No revision" policy that was, he believed, influenced by Buddhism. Fine.

This evening I'm reading an interview with Nikki Giovanni in The Writer's Chronicle (Vol 43, No 5) and she also comes out "against" revision.

"I don't revise. I start all over again. And I say that to my students too. To say revise is to say, 'Oh my goodness, line fourteen needs some, you know.' So, you just start the poem all over again."

from "Mothers" by Nikki Giovanni

the last time i was home
to see my mother we kissed
exchanged pleasantries
and unpleasantries pulled a warm
comforting silence around
us and read separate books

Blogging about Revision

I am asking my students to blog about revision, as if it were interesting or important. I wonder if they think it is. I admire people who believe, with Ginsburg, "First thought, best thought," but I've very rarely seen it in a student (though several have tried to adhere to it) and never in myself. For me, the first thought is the beginning. From there, the next thought, and the edit, and another thought, another edit, and so on.

It can be dangerous.

On the other hand (oh yes!) I believe the first concept is the crucial concept. If something is awry with the initial impetus, no edit or revision will turn that dreck to gold. Here, I go with T. E. Lawrence:

All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!

And you? How do you see it?

Revision Pointer from a Pro

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

--Anton Chekhov

The amazing human and poet Frank O'Hara

Thanks to Selina for posting one O'Hara poem, which reminded me of this one which I love sharing with friends:

Autobiographia Literaria

When I was a child
I played by myself in a
corner of the schoolyard
all alone.

I hated dolls and I
hated games, animals were
not friendly and birds
flew away.

If anyone was looking
for me I hid behind a
tree and cried out "I am
an orphan."

And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!