Posted by Atticus on September 27, 2004, at 20:02:11
In reply to Re: poem ... Sitting in a Full-Throttle Plastic Pew, posted by Jai Narayan on September 27, 2004, at 18:51:39
Hi Jai,
This poem was sparked by a post card I have tacked up on my bulletin board at work. It's a reproduction of a photograph of Kerouac, as described in the poem, taken by Allen Ginsberg about three months before "On the Road" was released and Kerouac became the next big thing. I bought it at a really cool museum show of photos taken by Ginsberg of his fellow Beats in the '50s. What really makes these pictures cool is that Ginsberg scribbled poetic little notes about what was going on in each picture on the prints. You even see cross-outs where he rethought a word. What really made this particular picture poignant for Ginsberg is that his friend, who looks just so unassuming on top of that New York tenement, has no idea he's about to become a literary superstar. Kerouac just has no idea how good the book he's written is, and what a long shadow it will cast. "On the Road" is, of course, about a spiritual journey as much as a literal one. It sparks the notion that the life journeys that we're all undertaking in our heads are the result of an undercurrent of discontent with a consumerist, conformist America, and that the automobile becomes a metaphor for seeking out something better, something brighter, something indefinable, that lies just around the next bend in the road or over the next hill. I see a lot of parallels with punk thinking in this, so Kerouac has always been a highly romanticized figure for me. He captures a longing amid lives of quiet desperation that is difficult to articulate. ;) Atticus
poster:Atticus
thread:395953
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20040925/msgs/396032.html