belief and technique posted by imani , Sunday, January 3, 2010 at 8:21 PM, in Labels: something else

Jack Kerouac’s Belief and Technique for Modern Prose

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy.
2. Submissive to everything, open and listening.
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life.
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from the bottom of the mind.
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual.
10. No time for poetry but exactly what it is.
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you.
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition.
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time.
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monologue.
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement of yourself.
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in a language sea.
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life.
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in the mind
22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see the picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language and knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In Praise of Character in the Bleak Inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored and Angeled in Heaven

As ever,

Jack

Jack Kerouac “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose: List of Essentials” from a 1958 letter to Don Allen, in Heaven & Other Poems