Kerouac's Belief and Technique for Modern Prose

List of Essentials
Jack Kerouac

* 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 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
* Don't 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

As ever,
Jack

Jack Kerouac "Belief & Technique For Modern Prose: List of Essentials" from a 1958 letter to Don Allen, in Heaven & Other Poems, copyright ? 1958, 1977, 1983. Grey Fox Press.

From Language Is A Virus