The other week Rob mentioned something about Michael McClure, one of the prominent beat poets, reading and roaring at lions. So, I looked it up. While McClure comes off as fairly pretentious, he has this to say about his work:
"I want a writing of the emotions, intellect, and physiology. A direct emotional statement from the body, from the organs, and from the energy of movement."
This concept, through various means of expression, has been a standard treatise throughout the Beat movement, from Kerouac's long sessions of writing out an entire book over three weeks on telegraph paper to Ginsberg's 'first thought best thought' mantra and auto-poesis, to Gary Snyder's search through Zen Buddhism for a more meaningful account of life, and his spontaneous poetry about what he directly observed.
-Karl
Poetry with, "no logic, just sequences of feeling." Very cool. I would've like to have seen one of those cats get free during his reading though (talk about animal cruelty).
ReplyDeleteTrey
Haha yeah. If anybody would like to get together to read this at the San Francisco Zoo (and likely get kicked out immediately after) I'm completely down.
ReplyDelete- Karl