Irish poets 101

If you are unable to name this poet in five seconds, the you need to enroll In Irish Poets 101.

Use comments section below.

Mexico City Blues

Jack Kerouac from Mexico City Blues
211th Chorus

The wheel of the quivering meat conception
Turns in the void expelling human beings,
Pigs, turtles, frogs, insects, nits
Mice, lice, lizards, rats, roan
Racinghorses, poxy bucolic pigtics,
Horrible unnameable lice of vultures
Murderous attacking dog-armies
Of Africa, Rhinos roaming in the jungle,

Vast boars and huge gigantic bull
Elephants, rams, eagles, condors,
Pones and Porcupines and Pills –
All the endless conception of living beings
Gnashing everywhere in Consciousness
Throughout the ten directions of space
Occupying all the quarters in & out,
From supermicroscopic no-bug
To huge Galaxy Lightyear Bowell
Illuminating the sky of one Mind –
Poor! I wish I was free
Of that slaving meat wheel
And safe in heaven dead

Don Quixote - The Finest Road Novel of Them All

Now young Howlers, have you been reading your classics?

Shame if you haven't? Who wrote the first road novel?

No, not Kerouac, you illiterate wanna bes, Cervantes did of course.

Who Howl? I hear you cry. And truthfully it makes me want to cry.

Read your classics. Read the finest road novel of them all - Don Quixote

Enlightening the Dalai Lama

Synder was never really one of the Beats - he just hung out with them a while nevertheless The Beatiest of them all, Jack Kerouac, wrote this in his novel The Dharma Bums describing Snyders decision to move to Japan:
:
"...His business was with the Dharma. And the freighter sailed away out the Golden Gate and out to the deep swells of the gray Pacific, westward across. Psyche cried, Sean cried, everybody felt sad.

Warren Coughlin said "Too bad, he'll probably disappear into Central Asia marching about on a quiet but steady round from Kahgar to Lanchow via Lhasa with a string of yaks selling popcorn, safety-pins, and assorted colors of sewing-thread and occasionally climb a Himalaya and end up enlightening the Dalai Lama and all the gang for miles around and never be heard of again."

Don't you just love it? - Howl does anyway.

Keep track of the names - it's all in your education

Literature and Wilderness Thought

Okay so who is the Stray Cat Gary Snyder and why am I posting his poetry. Well Glyn Maxwell has a few words that put him in perspective. Read on my fellow cat lovers:

"Snyder was born in San Francisco, and brought up in Oregon and Washington State. He received his BA in anthropology at Reed College, Portland, in 1951. His subsequent career has been a remarkable combination of the academic and the contemplative, spiritual study and physical labour. Between working as a logger, a trail-crew member, and a seaman on a Pacific tanker, he studied Oriental languages at Berkeley (1953-6), was associated with Beat writers such as Ginsberg and Kerouac, lived in Japan (1956-64), later studied Buddhism there, and won numerous literary prizes, including a Guggenheim fellowship (1968) and the Pulitzer Prize (1975). He now teaches literature and 'wilderness thought' at the University of California at Davis.
The shapes and strengths of Gary Snyder's craft were established at the outset of his career. His first book, Riprap (Kyoto, 1959), demonstrates the clarity of his seeing, his desire to crystalize moments, his striking ability to convey the physical nature of an instant: 'I cannot remember things I once read / A few friends, but they are in cities. / Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup / Looking down for miles / Through high still air' ('Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout'). Simplicity, distance, accuracy of atmosphere: these are hallmarks of the work throughout. The laid-back, jotted-down tone masks an acute sensitivity to rhythm and, in particular, assonance. Though his formal spectrum is narrow, from terse, rhythmic observation with a resonant conclusion ('I feel ancient, as though I had / Lived many lives', 'An Autumn Morning in Shokoku-ji') to lengthy, free-associative odysseys through the American 'back country’, his territory is vast, and his resources of phrase and juxtaposition seemingly endless. Such a ranging strategy does not always pan gold from the water, but when it does Snyder comes face to face with a wide, gladdening openness, or touches wellsprings of healing profundity."

A course on Wilderness Thought - sign Howl up.

The Edge of Light

Another from the wise one, Mr Snyder.

How Poetry comes To Me

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light

Another Stray Cat

Another one of those alley cats. Although he soon cleaned up his act swapping Sand Francisco for Japan and a zen way of life.

This is Hay for the Horses by Gary Snyder.






He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous Mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
---The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds---
"I'm sixty-eight" he said,
"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that's just what
I've gone and done."

The Art of Lacing Your Shoes

With all this talk on big things and little things, it’s good to keep something straightforward in mind. The big thing is usually made up of a group of smaller things, and if you can’t manage the small things there is little likelihood of the big thing succeeding.

Let me put it more simply. Make sure you know how to write a short story before you attempt the novel. I really mean this. It is a rare exception that someone can sit down and write a novel without having learned the techniques necessary through first writing shorter pieces of fiction. It would be like going out to run a marathon without ever having run before. Something’s got to rupture. Aghs and ughs to follow.

It makes sense doesn’t it? The correct answer, by the way, is, “Yes, Mr. Howl.”
So master the short story first. And this is going to take some time. But there is no rush. People run marathons into their eighties. So get your running shoes on, and I’ll teach you how to lace them up.

Howlagrams #1

Howlagrams are useful pieces of writing advice which need to be solved. Please forward your solutions in the comments section.


#1. There is no such thing as a born-writer. This misconception grew from a missing ‘I’ and ‘g’.

The Big Thing With Far More Pages

So have you been wonderful? Remember James’…oops…I mean Rowlings great quote. Big things, little things and all that (The Little Thing that Rubs Up Against the Big Thing) So what makes the novel the big thing. Well pick it up in your hand and you will find out. Yeah it weighs heavier than the short story. Why? It’s got more pages.

Oh for Heaven’s sake, Howl, what do you think we are, imbeciles? You think we couldn’t have figured that out on our own?

Don’t be so touchy. And by the way, Mr. Howl to you.

Sure it’s obvious, but a lot of writers forget this important fact - that good writing is created from very obvious steps. Sometimes there is an illusion that ‘important’ writing is complicated, perhaps even hard to understand. Think Ulysses for instance, Old Mr. Joyce ( a fine Irish countryman by the way) - stream of consciousness and all that, you know one sentence following the other in a sort of random chaotic order linked by tenuous thoughts - the way our mind flicks from one idea to another - or more to the point think one of Howl’s old friends, that infamous beat writer Jack Kerouac and his cult novel On The Road - written in three days on a continuous sheet of paper - hmm!

Howl goes “Hmm”.

James and Jack, can’t you hear them yakking it up in a bar together? Anyway, you can bet your ipod that Mr. Joyce did not churn it out in three days or that there was no logic to his great work. And likewise I don’t believe the myth of Kerouac either. There is a sincere logic at work.
Their books while rich with complexity are not complicated.

Aren’t you getting a little confused her, Mr. Howl?

Not at all. These books have a clear logic and follow some basic guidelines. It is the logic that allows us entry to the story. But we are getting to far ahead of ourselves. I will try and simplify that another day.

The point is that there is no excuse for putting any old sentences together in some incomprehensible way and saying to the confused reader, “well you just don’t get it, that’s not my fault.” It is your fault and nothing short of it.

Back to the novel. Its large number of pages is of great importance. This means we have more room for each of the main elements of fiction: Characters, setting, plot. We can have more characters in a novel than in a short story. We can have a wider range of settings or locations that the story takes place in. We can have more events taking place (plot=sequence of events) since we have more time. The short story is limited. Less time, less events, less characters, less settings. In the novel therefore we gain complesity from having space for sub plots, from secondary characters and more actions/events to occurr to learn more about the character’s reactions.

Whew! A lot to absorb in all of that. I’ll break it down in future posts, make the logic clear and it all should become quite simple to understand.

The Little Thing that Rubs Up Against the Big Thing

I’ve been a way a while. Sartori, let’s call it. But that being said, you don’t get away from writing, and so I am going to return to a question from Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction and Other Blunt Objects. What is the difference between a short story and a novel? You were supposed to be thinking about it already. Even if you hadn’t read my post (shame on you) if you want to be a writer, you need to be posing these questions to yourself.

So what is the difference between a short story and a novel?

I think this one is accredited to Henry James (but then which literary quote is not?). By the way you are familiar with James are you not, or has contemporary life left him far behind? In case it has, why don’t I just say this quote is accredited to Douglas Copeland. Oh for heavens sake, J.K. Rowling. Now are you happy?

Anyway here it goes: “The novel is the big thing and the short story is the little thing that rubs up against the big thing.”

Ponder on it, and I will return.