Poets, what music accompanies your process of composition?

[Bigtitsbitch1000x]

Five examples I have employed:

This of course, is a bit of a cliché:

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[butters]

i don't depend on music as a support in my creative process. i have written in silence, with noisy, children's shows on in the background, and with all manner of other sound from Queen to wordless instrumentals; i prefer no other words to distract my train of thought, since i want to hear the musicality of what i'm writing in my head and if i'm listening to songs then my poetry doesn't have my full attention.

if anything, if i'm really looking to engender a certain flavour or mood, then i'd choose to play the music before the writing, not use it during.

 

[ericalauren]

I once wrote an awesome poem while listening to Handstand by Miley Cyrus.

 

[Angeline]

I write a lot about jazz and listen to it to inspire me and when I write. Sometimes I'll listen to classical or opera. Usually anything with lyrics I'll listen to (sometimes over and over) before writing, but during it's almost always jazz.

(And FYI I'm moving this thread to the Hangout cause we try to keep the main forum for just poems.)

 

[Bigtitsbitch1000x]

Yes on jazz.

I have always experienced a difference between the psychological states that allow me to write journalistic and other expository prose and that which produces poetry and fiction.

I write poetry by accumulating figures and images through automatic writing and then bringing them together in a single text. The actual compositional activity is typically brief.

Sometimes a figure or image will carry a whole short poem. External stimuli don't matter, although I approach the moment fetishistically, with a special notebook and fountain pen.

I write short expository pieces mechanically. I was a propagandist and a news reporter, both requiring the ability to quickly formulate a usable narrative. I like to listen to my favorite rock songs when writing opinion pieces. They stir my spirit to create starker, more direct, more affecting arguments. Example:

When I write a long text, e.g. a long poem, an extended essay, a short story -- long in terms of attention to the task, or a book, whether poetical, political, historical, or spiritual, I need to turn off the main mental computer.

I set aside several days, during which I stay alone in a separate place with no distractions, do tons of edible cannabis, drink rum or mezcal, plus coffee, and listen to ecstatic music, e.g. Bach, Monk, Berber chanting, etc. I often go without sleep and take frequent hot baths. I eat very spicy food. I may go out seeking a risky sexual encounter, wearing nothing but a bra and panties under a leather trenchcoat, and soliciting an anonymous trick for alley sex.

My brain is a burden and to properly use it I have to be a shaman healing myself. That is what literature is: self-healing.

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[Wat_Tyler]

I used to listen to lots of popular rock - now called Classic Rock - when I was working as a freelance housewright doing sometimes complicated bits and solving problems. Renovations and restoration. Creative processes, you see. I switched to classical because I could float away with it while doing the routine things and could tune it out if I had to concentrate more intensely.


Somebody asked Bukowski how he knew what/when to write (or something like that, and his answer was, "you know when you have to shit, don't you?" I identified with that. Not writing routinely is like being constipated in a way, but when I write (not often enough), I don't want any distractions. Oh, something like having the window open while a neighbor cuts the grass is okay, but as a rule, music hinders my ability to focus.


And that may come from my experience that Mom wouldn't allow the radio to be on during homework time.

 

[Bigtitsbitch1000x]

I used to listen to lots of popular rock - now called Classic Rock - when I was working as a freelance housewright doing sometimes complicated bits and solving problems. Renovations and restoration. Creative processes, you see. I switched to classical because I could float away with it while doing the routine things and could tune it out if I had to concentrate more intensely.


Somebody asked Bukowski how he knew what/when to write (or something like that, and his answer was, "you know when you have to shit, don't you?" I identified with that. Not writing routinely is like being constipated in a way, but when I write (not often enough), I don't want any distractions. Oh, something like having the window open while a neighbor cuts the grass is okay, but as a rule, music hinders my ability to focus.


And that may come from my experience that Mom wouldn't allow the radio to be on during homework time.

I discovered at 16, much to the irritation of my folks, that I could do homework better and faster while listening to this:

My life has always had a soundtrack.

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[Angeline]

I discovered at 16, much to the irritation of my folks, that I could do homework better and faster while listening to this:

My life has always had a soundtrack.

( . )( . )

I saw the Velvets in '68 in a tiny club in Philly called The Trauma. Couldn't fit more than about a hundred people in there and you could talk to Lou between songs. No Nico but it was a transcendent experience. I also saw Tim Buckley there. I still get gooseflesh thinking of those nights.

And since y'all are posting your inspo music, this is a good one for me. I can listen to it before or during writing and I think there are a thousand poems in it waiting to happen.

 

[goldytheGoldfish]

Does no one here listen to anything electronic? Progressive, industrial, anything? Only vocal jazz? Come on.

 

[Angeline]

Does no one here listen to anything electronic? Progressive, industrial, anything? Only vocal jazz? Come on.

Moanin is not vocal jazz. It's hard bop. As for the genres you've mentioned, I've seen Yes, ELP, Pink Floyd, King Crimson. A good friend had a progressive band for years. They were in fact the first band to import a mellotron to America. I have some knowledge of industrial, too. That's just not what I usually prefer to listen to when writing or otherwise, really. It's all a matter of preference, not a contest.

 

[goldytheGoldfish]

I would prefer your poetry be personal if you share it here. If music is a part of who you are and you write with music to reflect that, so be it. I generally write when I need to order my thoughts and make a plan. I suppose that has its risks. It's just my opinion.

 

[Angeline]

I would prefer your poetry be personal if you share it here. If music is a part of who you are and you write with music to reflect that, so be it. I generally write when I need to order my thoughts and make a plan. I suppose that has its risks. It's just my opinion.

I have hundreds of poems here between my submissions page and this forum. I write all kinds of poems, many very personal in nature. I don't expect anyone to read anything I write, but just because I said I write about music doesn't mean I don't write other types of poems. People who've read my work know that.

I respect your opinion and your reasons for writing. We all have our own preferences and approaches to what we write. That kind of diversity is a good thing in my opinion.

 

[ToPleaseHim]

I would prefer your poetry be personal if you share it here. If music is a part of who you are and you write with music to reflect that, so be it. I generally write when I need to order my thoughts and make a plan. I suppose that has its risks. It's just my opinion.

Why do you think you can dictate what others write?

 

[goldytheGoldfish]

Your guidelines are a bit pessimistic. I tend to be more permissive and believe in rewarding good behavior. If people don't have examples to emulate, they will... not.

 

[ToPleaseHim]

Your guidelines are a bit pessimistic. I tend to be more permissive and believe in rewarding good behavior. If people don't have examples to emulate, they will... not.

I didn’t state any guidelines. You stated to another writer, in this thread, “I would prefer your poetry be personal if you share it here.”

You have full choice in what you read, but no say in what others write.

 

[butters]

personal preferences are fine, but unless the writer actually states 'this is about me' then the reader should be regarding the poem for its content, form, choices and—above all else—the impact it makes on us.

no writer has to always write 'confessional' type poetry, but most of us put something of ourselves into a piece—even when it is not a personal experience. that's imagination for you and i defy goldythegoldfish to be able to determine which is which.

a writer doesn't have to slice themselves deep every single time... as we mature in our writing, it's often clear to us when we're reading the work of less experienced writers: the angst-factor. we've all been there but it would be futile to remain in that vein rather than continue along our individual paths towards improvement.

 

[Angeline]

personal preferences are fine, but unless the writer actually states 'this is about me' then the reader should be regarding the poem for its content, form, choices and—above all else—the impact it makes on us.

no writer has to always write 'confessional' type poetry, but most of us put something of ourselves into a piece—even when it is not a personal experience. that's imagination for you and i defy goldythegoldfish to be able to determine which is which.

a writer doesn't have to slice themselves deep every single time... as we mature in our writing, it's often clear to us when we're reading the work of less experienced writers: the angst-factor. we've all been there but it would be futile to remain in that vein rather than continue along our individual paths towards improvement.

That last paragraph rings especially true for me. I know a lot of writers find the process cathartic and the result, imo, is often overwrought (or angst ridden as you said). If I'm upset about something maybe I'd want to write a journal entry for myself, but I don't want to write poetry when I'm focused on how I feel. I want to write poetry when I can focus on word choices, end words, line breaks, how I want to use space on the page and so forth. If I'm writing a form poem I need to focus on the rules that define the form. I'm not saying that feelings don't play a part in the mix but that they don't rule it.

 

[Bigtitsbitch1000x]

This discussion is interesting in several ways. I sincerely hope nothing I write below is violative of any rules. About that I know not. Or naught. Either way, I'm naughty.

My query about poets and music was occasioned by recognition that my mental habitus includes a pairing of music and mood.

Specifically, Stravinsky's Agon Ballet evokes a period in my early adulthood when I felt myself growing out of the cocoon of my father's house into a poetic life of my own.

My father was an extreme domestic tyrant who gave me one undeniable gift: an education in classical music.

The constant presence of music in our house seemed to guide my steps into literature.

Stravinsky's Agon stood for determination and the will to go forward from what I now see was a pretty terrible existence.

I survived because of my youthful writerly voice, my good looks -- bordering on openly femme with long, lush hair and a slender body, plus velvet and lace garments -- and my defiance.

Poetry and life are intertwined for me.

My political writings are replete with poetic references. I wrote a labor history with chapters referring to Mandelshtam's "twilight of freedom." I did the same with an institutional history of the National Endowment for the Arts, inserting Chernyshevsky and Lenin's famous question, "What Is To Be Done?"

I could not escape a drive to bring poetry and my daily affairs together. I was hired at NEA by Dana Gioia, a poet appointed Chairman of the agency. He had asked me to send him my latest work. I had just finished an essay on the role of recurrent dreams in my daily life. The Chairman said it was the strangest thing he ever read. But he hired me.

I was a woman imprisoned in a man's body.
I was a poet in chains forged by politics.
I was a Communist whoring for Reagan.
I am a ho ruled by a cruel Domme.

Always and everywhere I encounter the dialectic.
I cannot escape the beauty of my song, or the cage in which I am kept.

I am at risk. As a trans woman and sex worker I face physical aggression daily. As an author I know that regaining my place as a public intellectual may be nearly impossible now that everybody's (least) favorite bank manager (in appearance) revealed huge gynecomastic boobies and walks the streets in lingerie under a black leather trenchcoat.

As a political official I continuously flashed my colleagues with surrealist language. I now flash the world with overt sexuality. One might call it sexualism, using a term thrown in reproach at Henry Miller. I grew up as a Millerite.

I specify that everything about me is based in anxiety over my vulnerability as a weird child, and insist that the community of sex rebels must stand first for protection of the innocent.

For this reason I now hesitate about the topic of public sex. I oppose drag queen readings for kids at public libraries. I object to any behavior that disrupts public tranquility. I'm on a tightrope. I'm conservatively radical, and a libertarian communist. Go ahead: ask what that means.

This is what that means:

I am writing a book on the trans challenge, and nothing is more difficult than sorting out the problem of trans children. Liberalistic rhetoric about protecting trans kids reminds me of how tormented my youth was.

I would have benefited then from trans therapy. But such propaganda, like all ameliorist nonsense, ignores the gravity of the social moment. I will not help lead my trans community to willing martyrdom. I cannot be Celan, or Radnoti.

The women who perished in the Holocaust have no literary legacy except that of the real Saint Anne (Frank). I will not let my trans and ho sisters die in silence. That means resisting oppression with reason, not with promises by the political class.

I cite Malcolm always: trans sister, who taught you to hate what the creator made you to be?

This is a moral imperative in my literary as well as my personal affairs.

This is how it is: I intended to write this about music as a force in my creative and ordinary existence. But I wander... I'm stressed out these days. I stumble. I cry. I cleave to Literotica as a place where I can reveal the struggle I have undergone, and will continue to experience. I am at a difficult turning point.

I posted a poem titled La Vita Nuova. That referred to Dante's magisterial work, which combined verse and commentary. That was always my path. Now I concoct posts mixing text, images, and music.

I'd like to recommend a perusal of this:
https://www.islamicpluralism.org/1084/under-empty-skies-falconers-weep

Here's a poem that expresses where I now find myself, by the Croatian poet Viktor Vida:

I don't know what I am, where I am, where I am going,
only this mysterious body is my witness,
that from Fullness I was torn away, into time
between Nothing and Everything, wandering and alone.

I don't know, where I am, nor if I may be dreaming, I dream
a staircase of Night in the desert of the living, and ivy
winds around my trunk, and from my eyes I clear it, remove it
and lift the eyelid of the dream from the crevice, where "I" falls.

But He through the wall of jasper stares unblinking
in all my motions and rings he gives me a sign,
that for me he conceived the world, the sun's cup, the wing of darkness.
I feel time like sand falling in an hourglass,
as at the doorway of moonlight, an unnoticed ray.

The black bird of Night settles on my shoulder.

***
For me, petty details of my daily life draw forth intentions. A choice of the day's bra, perfume, stro.

Nothing in my literary life is intentional.

There I am only a gleam
Seen on a rushing stream.

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[Bigtitsbitch1000x]

I used to listen to lots of popular rock - now called Classic Rock - when I was working as a freelance housewright doing sometimes complicated bits and solving problems. Renovations and restoration. Creative processes, you see. I switched to classical because I could float away with it while doing the routine things and could tune it out if I had to concentrate more intensely.


Somebody asked Bukowski how he knew what/when to write (or something like that, and his answer was, "you know when you have to shit, don't you?" I identified with that. Not writing routinely is like being constipated in a way, but when I write (not often enough), I don't want any distractions. Oh, something like having the window open while a neighbor cuts the grass is okay, but as a rule, music hinders my ability to focus.


And that may come from my experience that Mom wouldn't allow the radio to be on during homework time.

Just the sort of thing Hank Bukowski, who as I recall often signed himself Buk, would say. Buk as in "puke."

I shouldn't be mean. He was good to people I considered friends, like Nelson Cherry. I launched the career of Cherry in higher literary circles by hiring him to work for Franzy C. Cherry became Cherkovski in imitation of Ferling who became Ferlinghetti.

And the young worship him, and Hunter Thompson, sorry, Hunter S. Thompson. Gotta include the middle initial. Making any mention of him sound like the speaker is William H. Macy in Fargo.

A minority of the New Humans also serve at the shrine of William S. Burroughs. A different matter altogether.

I wish the young would connect more with Bill Burroughs than the other two miscreants. I really wish the young would quit romanticizing literary outlaws.

Rebels are not all outlaws.

Whitman was a true rebel, but never an outlaw.

Ditto Yeats, García Lorca, Mandelshtam, Dylan Thomas, Patchen, Rexroth, Robert Lowell, Robert Duncan, Michael McClure. All men. We need rebel woman poets in the tradition of Rachel Luzzatto Morpurgo, Flora Tristan, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf and Radclyffe Hall.

When I write long verse or sustained prose I need to be relaxed, and that is the role of music for me.

A high compliment to me is to consider my verse musical. I consider to reflect the influence of my musical upbringing -- by a phallocrat who wanted to kill me because of my gynecomastia.

Así es la vida en el pueblecito.

( . )( . )

 

[Bigtitsbitch1000x]

An intersectional note:

My relationship to music is one of several aspects of my life that reflect the intensity of the disparity between male and female.

I posted above: When I write long verse or sustained prose I need to be relaxed, and that is the role of music for me.

Since beginning my transition as a medical reality I have not attempted a sustained work. I am committed to regaining my position in literature, and my transition inspires considerable output.

But it's ALL different but the thinking.

I feel music in my body now, in a total way.

Once I began dancing nightly as a performer that was probably inevitable. Since I began stripping my body is now conditioned to respond to music. Restaurants and coffee houses now have music tracks heavy on classic rock.

If I am in a meeting in such a place and something like this comes on the playlist, I am out of my seat bumping and grinding.

One of my top fantasies, which I have named Rich Ho, involves being an office sex worker; i.e. someone who participants in a business meeting can expect to suck their cocks and get ass fucked while they are pursuing their agenda. And who the rest of the day sits around nearly naked, so that when any employee wants to cum, the ho is there.

A variant is C-E-Ho. I.e. a female CEO who runs business meetings as orgies and who awards contracts on the basis of the contractor's genitals, i.e. size and aesthetics.

But this is about the music. My feminization led me to a completely new relationship between writing and music. Writing remains a mental function, but it is now corporeal. Exploration of the two universes and what my body taught me are now the essential themes of my work.

( . )( . )

 

[Angeline]

Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade is a piece of music i find both inspiring for writing and one I can write to. It's so beautiful and listening while writing can help me translate the mood of the music into the poem. And the story behind it (of the Sultan's wife telling him stories night after night both to seduce him and prolong her life) is fertile ground for all sorts of poems.

I had a really vivid dream some years back, the kind that stays with you, where I was in an ancient souk or market, like in a cave with flickering torches set in the walls. I was being attended to like a queen, being dressed in the most beautiful shining fabrics and jewels, being anointed with perfumed oils...almond and jasmine. All my senses were engaged in this dream. And Scheherazade was playing. I wrote a poem about it for a Poem-a-Week challenge here. It's such a wonderful, evocative piece of music.

 

[Bigtitsbitch1000x]

Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade is a piece of music i find both inspiring for writing and one I can write to. It's so beautiful and listening while writing can help me translate the mood of the music into the poem. And the story behind it (of the Sultan's wife telling him stories night after night both to seduce him and prolong her life) is fertile ground for all sorts of poems.

I had a really vivid dream some years back, the kind that stays with you, where I was in an ancient souk or market, like in a cave with flickering torches set in the walls. I was being attended to like a queen, being dressed in the most beautiful shining fabrics and jewels, being anointed with perfumed oils...almond and jasmine. All my senses were engaged in this dream. And Scheherazade was playing. I wrote a poem about it for a Poem-a-Week challenge here. It's such a wonderful, evocative piece of music.

Very lovely.

Rimsky is one of the late 19th century Russian composers, with, especially, Mussorgsky and Borodin, who developed a national-romantic style based on the idea of music as a form of painting, full of color and evocative of the vitality of the oriental cultures of the Russian Empire.

I am a great admirer of his Capriccio Espagnol. Neither that nor Tchaikovsky's Capriccio Italien seem to have anything to do with Spanish or Italian melodies. They are like studies of Mediterranean architecture.

Here are some other pieces that inspire me as a writer. I would comment further but the Lit software doesn't let me.

Luigi Boccherini / Luciano Berio: Ritirata notturna di Madrid (1975)

Attached: Goya, for Boccherini.

( . )( . )

 

[Angeline]

Very lovely.

Rimsky is one of the late 19th century Russian composers, with, especially, Mussorgsky and Borodin, who developed a national-romantic style based on the idea of music as a form of painting, full of color and evocative of the vitality of the oriental cultures of the Russian Empire.

I am a great admirer of his Capriccio Espagnol. Neither that nor Tchaikovsky's Capriccio Italien seem to have anything to do with Spanish or Italian melodies. They are like studies of Mediterranean architecture.

Here are some other pieces that inspire me as a writer. I would comment further but the Lit software doesn't let me.

Luigi Boccherini / Luciano Berio: Ritirata notturna di Madrid (1975)

( . )( . )

My father adored classical music and opera. His family was so poor that he and his sister were taken from their mother to an orphanage in their native NYC and raised there. Because of this he was exposed to theater, symphonies, the ballet and on and on via grants by wealthy patrons of the orphans. So he had a great cultural education. Ironic huh? I grew up listening to Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Debussy, Stravinsky, Boulanger, Holst, Ravel. Dad was especially into modern symphonic music. I can remember sitting in front of his "hi-fi," Iooking at a scatter of album covers and listening. I made up a dance to this.

Otoh Mom loved Theresa Brewer and Perry Como so we could go from sublime to ridiculous right quick.

Oh and then the Beatles came along and dashed all my dad's highbrow hopes for his kids.

 

[Bigtitsbitch1000x]

Pretty much the same story as mine, with possibly a generational difference.

My father had been taken from a small Nebraska town to an institution in Cleveland, Ohio. He always called it "the orphanage." My mom had visited it and said it looked like a college campus.

https://www.bellefairejcb.org/alert/18/statementonisrael

Much later I learned from a faculty member that it was a home for "troubled Jewish boys." It produced some distinguished alums aside from my father.

One, who I'm glad to memorialize, was Morris Weisberger.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-09-28-mn-6792-story.html

I became a merchant mariner and wrote the volume with cover attached, below.

Morris was an outstanding fighter against Stalinism on the U.S. waterfront.

https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/preis/1947/04/waterfront.htm

Morris was also one of only THREE Virtuous Gaijin who stepped forward to defend ethnic Japanese on the U.S. west coast during World War 2.

Another was the father of my "alleged" attorney, Wayne Mortimer Collins:

THROUGH THE FIRE: Behind the Making of a Film About Attorney Wayne M. Collins - Rafu Shimpo

The eternal teenagers who pullulate on this and other websites bloviating about politics know nothing of such matters.

Enough of that. My father was in Bellefaire with my younger uncle. Both of them, with my elder uncle, enlisted on December 8. All three were awarded the Purple Heart. They were American Jews who wanted to kill Nazis. My younger uncle survived Bataan.

My father ended up on Tinian and served in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The experience was very bad for him. He came out of the war a pacifist. He became a prominent member of the early group of Beat writers, publishing a "little magazine," cover attached, in which the SF cultural maven Lawrence Ferlinghetti had his début.

My father was trained as a classical musician, in the clarinet and percussion. The clarinet reflected the cult of Benny Goodman.

He brought the family to the Bay Area, where he connected with Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, and others.

Stupendously beautiful McClure was my first male crush.

https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/19/michael-mcclure-obituary

In San Francisco my father became the conductor of the Gate Five Ensemble:

Harry Partch Castor & Pollux 1952

I heard this music at 4. It scared me. Partch scared me.

Music and writing were intertwined through my life, and still are. I went to ex-Yugoslavia mainly to research Sephardic Jewish women's music.

I was a woman in my heart and, perceptibly, my body. I pretended to be a man. I walked into a war.

I served in that capacity until I was so close to suicide, really walking on the edge of a cliff, that I had no alternative but to let my ex (my male personality) die.

Now I perform Jewish women's music as a woman.

I have found my home. But I remain lost, a trans woman in a cis country.

Yes, dear sister, Debussy, Ravel, Satie.

Yes, we make up dances.

I am a trans woman of Jewish origin. The world marked a path for me with a violin in my hands. The Death Fugue of Celan is my song.

It's set to music. I haven't listened to it.

Death Fugue

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at dusk

we drink it at noon in mornings we drink it at night

we drink and we drink

we dig a grave in the sky there is plenty of room

A man lives in the house he plays with his snakes he writes

he writes when it darkens in Deutschland your golden hair Margarete

he writes it and steps outside of the house and the strike of the stars he whistles his hounds

he whistles his Jews dig a grave in the ground

he commands us strike up for the dance


Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night

we drink you in mornings and midday we drink you at dusk

we drink and we drink

A man lives in the house he plays with his snakes he writes

he writes when it darkens in Deutschland your golden hair Margarete

your ashen hair Sulamith we dig a grave in the sky there is plenty of room


He shouts you there dig deeper the rest of you sing you others play on

he raises the rod from his belt his eyes are blue

drive the spade deeper the rest of you sing you others play on for the dance


Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night

we drink you at midday and mornings we drink you at dusk

we drink and we drink

a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete

your ashen hair Sulamith he plays with his snakes


He shouts make death sound sweeter death is a Master from Deutschland

he shouts strike the violin darker then rise as smoke in the air

then a grave in the clouds there is so much more room


Black milk of mornings we drink you at night

we drink you at midday death is a Master from Deutschland

we drink you at dusk in mornings we drink and drink

death is a Master from Deutschland his eye is blue

his lead bullets strike you his aim is true

a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete

he whistles his hounds he grants us graves in the sky

he plays with his snakes and he dreams death is a Master aus Deutschland


your golden hair Margarete

your ashen hair Sulamith


That's enough for now. I am glad I could introduce you to Partch. And I included a poem. So the Lit Censor Army should leave me alone on this.

We make up dances; we move; at night in lingerie, a troubled boy dances silently on a balcony. He/she wants to be seen by his/her family; wants a scandal; wants more pain. But is at one with the black night, the moon and stars and meteors, and The Milky Way.

A Boobie Dance for The Way of Milk.

Thanks again. Lit is my only kind-of-safe space.

Full disclosure: I made all this up. I am actually a long-lost nephew of Donald Trump. Nobody writes poetry about the Holocaust. Adorno, fanatic for Schönberg and assassin of Walter Benjamin's memory, said so.

( . )( . )

 

[Bigtitsbitch1000x]

Just the sort of thing Hank Bukowski, who as I recall often signed himself Buk, would say. Buk as in "puke."

I shouldn't be mean. He was good to people I considered friends, like Nelson Cherry. I launched the career of Cherry in higher literary circles by hiring him to work for Franzy C. Cherry became Cherkovski in imitation of Ferling who became Ferlinghetti.

And the young worship him, and Hunter Thompson, sorry, Hunter S. Thompson. Gotta include the middle initial. Making any mention of him sound like the speaker is William H. Macy in Fargo.

A minority of the New Humans also serve at the shrine of William S. Burroughs. A different matter altogether.

I wish the young would connect more with Bill Burroughs than the other two miscreants. I really wish the young would quit romanticizing literary outlaws.

Rebels are not all outlaws.

Whitman was a true rebel, but never an outlaw.

Ditto Yeats, García Lorca, Mandelshtam, Dylan Thomas, Patchen, Rexroth, Robert Lowell, Robert Duncan, Michael McClure. All men. We need rebel woman poets in the tradition of Rachel Luzzatto Morpurgo, Flora Tristan, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf and Radclyffe Hall.

When I write long verse or sustained prose I need to be relaxed, and that is the role of music for me.

A high compliment to me is to consider my verse musical. I consider to reflect the influence of my musical upbringing -- by a phallocrat who wanted to kill me because of my gynecomastia.

Así es la vida en el pueblecito.

In the post above I refer to Neeli Cherkovski, biographer of Bukowski.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/longtime-san-francisco-poet-beatnik-dies-19283714.php

El maleh rachamim

( . )( . )