Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Reading the Hump Week Time It Is


I thought I had all my homework, then my Mom reminded me I have a major English essay that I should start on. So, at somepoint I'm going to settle down and bang out an outline. I'm really hoping I can do something on the poetic speaker in the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, since the poems of Ginsberg are a) an interest of mine and b) come from a very personal place in Ginsberg so it would be interesting to examine the nature of the poetic speaker in Howl and America, which are the Ginsberg poems that I read in this class, and also before this class. If I had the chance, I'd write a comparison with poetic speaker and narrator in Kerouac and Burroughs as well. I'm thinking that personal experience is a very important factor in the works of the Beats. This is pretty odvious with Kerouac and Ginsberg, as they're work is based on their lives. This is also applicable to Burroughs, but for the most part Burroughs uses more symbolic aspects then Kerouac and Ginsberg. Burroughs also wrote about personal experiences in some things in Interzone, like the time he cut of his little finger to impress a guy but in the story it was a girl.

Other then the fact I should have completed much more work then I have at the moment, things are going pretty well. I'm sleeping int till 11, I'm hanging out at my favorite cafe and it looks like poetry nights are starting up again here sometime. Things are pretty good. I'm also working on a short story, that I have a really good feeling about. I've looked into various publishing houses and plan on sending out Godot is Dead to somewhere soon. I'm also thinking about sending out my poetry to the New Quarterly. Things are looking well.

I'm also starting to wonder if Kerouac didn't have something when he was going on about spontaneous writing. Now, I'm not going to start applying this to my novels, but I think that maybe writing stream-of-conciousness poetry may be something to try out. I'll look into applying stream of conciousness poetry in my work and show you the results. As a beginning writer I should be experimenting with as many methods as possible.

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