Read Online Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg by Jack Kerouac - Free Book Online Page A

Divine Comedy during the term, and am reading books including The Vita Nuova (New Life) [by Dante Alighieri]. I dreamed up an enormous tentative plan tonight, which I will tell you about. My interest in reading is the profit by other men’s experience. I sometimes find (only lately) authors talking directly to me, from the bottom of their minds. I think I am going to write a sonnet sequence. I want to read Petrarch and Shakespeare, Spencer and Sidney, etc. and learn about sonnets from beginning to end, and write a series on love, perfectly, newly conceived. I conceived the whole idea all at once seeing the first word in a title embedded in a page of the Vita Nuova : my poems have always been prophesied by their titles. That is, a poem often has a single “transcendent, personal, and serious idea” behind it, as a novel—a single image. I want to celebrate my “lovers” in all various manners, intellectually, wittily, passionately, raptly, nostalgically, pensively, beautifully, realistically, “soberly,” enthusiastically, etc., every possible perception fitted out in inwrought, clear, complex stanzas—including the one as yet undefined or un-stated mood, or better, knowledge, that I have and that at times you are aware that I have, no matter how silly I get. The title of this is: “The Fantasy of the Fair.” Just repeat it aloud, it carries the whole idea in it. One of the major ideas is the dynamic sense of “Lucien’s Face” which you once propounded to me and which I half understood at the time. I want to formulate it poetically, if possible as the end of the poem, but without any private or subjective, or N.Y. idea of L.I. [Long Island] use the name to bridge at the moment. I am talking about humanity, and beginning to try to write in eternity.
    I have been enduring a series of troublesome dreams lately about Neal [Cassady]. Your notice comes at about the crisis of them, though it is not a passional crisis and is accompanied by no tempests of intellect. I wonder what he is doing in his eternity. I feel so far away from people, without loneliness, that I am rather happy now. [ . . . ]
    I’m not worried about the theory of writing, I am only just vering the practice. The Doldrums are antiquated. For that reason I am sending poetry out for the first time. I got my first rejection slip from Kenyon ; a note from J.C. Ransom, editor and poet: “I like very much this slow, iterative, organized and reflective poem. At times it’s like a sestina. Thank you for sending it. But still I think it’s not for us exactly. I guess we need a more compacted thing.”
    I had sent them “Denver D. [Doldrums]” but, as luck would have it, I have some compacted things around that he will get next week.
    Your season sounds beautiful. I particularly wish I had seen Lucien so drunk. Make what you want out of that.
    No, it sounded like you. (Some one is singing a ditty “So please pass a little piece of pizza”) and it makes me wish I were alive, that’s why I can’t say any more.
    Everybody’s fine, but it’s sweet, beautiful, but not so dumb, this world. Lucien means dumb because we don’t know what we know. I mean, won’t admit how much we know.
    White 19 said that Scribner’s rejected you, too, just like the goil. Can I see the novel [ The Town and the City ]? But don’t worry, it really don’t mean a thing. That’s my opinion.
    Grebsnig
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    Allen Ginsberg [East Harlem, New York] to
Jack Kerouac [Ozone Park, New York]
    July 3, 1948
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    Dear Jack:
    [ . . . ]
    Yes, daddio I am in Harlem, reading Huckleberry Finn . I have a radio and I listen to everything when I like it, Durgin 6 comes in and out all hours of the night drunk giggling over silly absurdities, we have short and long mad, even gleeful conversations, and I sit and write, and he sits and writes on T. Aquinas and Martin Buber and Shakespeare, and