Everyone was enamored by William because he was famous before anybody else. And he was also famous for all the wrong things. He was the first person who was famous for things you were supposed to hide. He was gay. He was a junkie. He didn’t look handsome. He shot his wife. He wrote poetry about assholes and heroin. He was not easy to like. —  John Waters in William S. Burroughs: A Man Within

I would characterize it as a spiritual liberation movement - like women’s lib, black lib, spirit lib or spiritual lib - that began in the 40s, first took shape as a literary movement with a production of a number of notable utterances. —  Allen Ginsberg on “What was the Beat generation?”

I went into the Maverick Bar
In Farmington, New Mexico.
And drank double shots of bourbon
backed with beer.
My long hair was tucked up under a cap
I’d left the earring in the car.

Two cowboys did horseplay
by the pool tables,
A waitress asked us
where are you from?
a country-and-western band began to play
“We don’t smoke Marijuana in Muskokie”
And with the next song,
a couple began to dance.

They held each other like in High School dances
in the fifties;
I recalled when I worked in the woods
and the bars of Madras, Oregon.
That short-haired joy and roughness—
America—your stupidity.
I could almost love you again.

We left—onto the freeway shoulders—
under the tough old stars—
In the shadow of bluffs
I came back to myself,
To the real work, to
“What is to be done.”

—  Gary Snyder, “I Went into the Maverick Bar”, Turtle Island (1974)

(Source: woodysblues)

orderisdivine:

Lew Welch, “Chicago Poem” (excerpt)

(Source: lovevoltaireusapart)

Neal Cassady & I went upstairs to attic at Millbrook estate Castalia Foundation big house where Timothy Leary and friends were then experimenting with DMT, a half hour trip - here Neal resting eyes closed with Millbrook lady friend (Susan Metzner, wife of Dr Ralph Metzner) in charge of holding the vile of liquid psychedelica. I’d driven upstate from New York City with Ken Kesey & Merry Pranksters in their day glo painted bus recently arrived East crosscountry from California, Neal at the wheel, Fall 1964.

c. Allen Ginsberg Estate

So he drank himself to death. Which is only another way of living, of handling the pain and foolishness of knowing that it’s all a dream, a great, baffling, silly emptiness, after all. —  Allen Ginsberg, on Jack Kerouac (via un-soir)

Ah America, so big, so sad, so black, you’re like the leafs of a dry summer that go crinkly ere August found its end, you’re hopeless, everyone you look on you, there’s nothing but the dry drear hopelessness, the knowledge of impending death, the suffering of present life, lights of Christmas wont save you or anybody, any more you could put Christmas lights on a dead bush in August, at night, and make it look like something, what is this Christmas you profess, in this void? … in this nebulous cloud? —  Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler (via you-are-jeff)

what yr words
cannot say, my tears
do not buy, cuts a swathe
like the hare
in tall grass
under the moon
we totter
aside to leap again
that hedge
or pass thru gate, same flat
plain on either side
but the Laws are different. —  Diane di Prima, from Deer Leap (via inshoeboxes)

Anything that gets your blood racing is probably worth doing. —  Hunter S. Thompson (via hellanne)

(via angry-diamond)

Maybe it is true we have to return
to the black air of ashcan city
because it is there the most life was burned,

as ghosts or criminals return?
But no, the city has no monopoly
of intense life. The dust burned,

golden or violet in the wide land
to which we ran away, images
of passion sprang out of the land

as whirlwinds or red flowers, your hands
opened in anguish or clenched in violence
under that sun, and clasped my hands

in that place to which we will not return
where so much happened that no one else noticed,
where the city’s ashes that we brought with us
flew into the intense sky still burning.

—  obsessions//denise levertov (via sunsetpanic)