I
maggie peered down at the scuffed black cement in the library parking lot.  loud boys with bikes and skateboards
rode past her and she felt scared.
she wondered if all boys were like that.  she wondered if she could ever love a boy; if a boy could ever love her.

anya was supposed to be here by now, thought maggie.  i hate waiting.  i hate looking alone and idle,
like i don't have a home.  like i don't have any thoughts running through my head right now.  i must look so
crazy and lost.
she got up from the ledge she was sitting on and walked over to the payphone.
one quarter, two quarters, punch in the numbers, wait for an answer even though you know anya won't answer.
make it known that you are waiting for someone.
look at your reflection in the skewed bent metal on the side of the phone.
what a mess, thought maggie.  what a horrid, unkempt mess.

take a deep breath, close your eyes and go sit back down.
let the water well up and don't release it all at once.  you'll look crazy then.

watery eyes were something maggie had lived with for years.  they were something she couldn't control.

control, control, control,
control yourself, girl.

she felt the looks and glances of every being that passed in and out,
that walked across the street.

they're all looking at me.
they think i'm ugly.  they think i'm lost.

control, control, control
this is the word she taught herself to repeat in her head.  it calmed her.  it focused all her insecurities on this
one command, this one hollow word.

"MAAAAgggieeee!"

"huh?" maggie's head rose from her hands slowly, like the air had been replaced with honey.  a sparkly green car
stood before her and anya was smiling through the window.

fnally.  finally.  she darted in, clutching her insecurities like it would save her.

anya had on huge dark sunglasses and looked so fresh and happy.  maggie often felt scraped and bruised in comparison to her.

"where were you?" maggie quietly demanded, looking dreamily out the window as every building and person met her eye for less than five seconds.

"mags, i'm only five minutes late..." 

maggie knew anya could not at all relate to her neuroticism.  life was a dream for anya.  she floated effortlessly through each moment, clinging to nothing and choosing positivity.  it was all so simple for her.


II
after some time of estranged silence in the car, anya switched on the radio and sang along with the sunshine.  maggie sat there silent, lost in space.

as they arrived to their little home in encino, anya parked the car in a narrow strip surrounded by trees behind their house.  maggie hopped out and went straight inside her room.  instantly relaxed, she looked up at the fan and the thoughts began.  thoughts of the future and the past and alternate universes and lives but never the present and never reality.  it was in these thoughts that maggie found happiness.


III
just as maggie was on the verge of being entirely immersed in thought, anya opened up the old white creaky door.

"maggie!"

"oh...anya," maggie quickly came down.

"maggie, brit and i are going on a walk...you should come.  sunshine would do you good."  anya's smile was so pearly and sweet.  it was so inviting and pure, she could've convinced nazis to hide jews from hitler.

"well, okay."  she really did love people.


IV
the two sisters strolled down the quiet streets of encino until they came to brit's house.  brit was sitting on the porch, smoking cigarettes.  she was wearing light blue jean shorts, a white ratty tank top and white ratty flip flops.  her thick brown hair was carelessly braided into two long pigtails.  she appeared unaware of her beauty that was magnified on sunny afternoons.

"so what are you two up to today?" brit asked as she lit up another cigarette.

"well, mags and i were just hanging around home.  i'm up for anything."

"me too, " brit puffed, "how bout we go to the pier?"

"sounds good.  how about you, mags?  want to go to the ocean?"

"okay, " maggie slightly smiled.


V

TED BERRIGAN
from THE BUSINESS OF WRITING POETRY

I’ll tell you a story, actually, which you may know already. The Argentine writer Borgés tells a story about a man whose ambition in life was to write Don Quixote. What was that guy’s name? Pierre Menard. And his ambition was to write Don Quixote. And Don Quixote had already been written. See. So there was a difficulty there. Not an insurmountable difficulty perhaps, but a difficulty. So he thought that what he would do would be to live . . . if I don’t get the details of this right, if I get some details wrong, and you know better, don’t correct me, please—I mean it’s how I’m telling it that’s important, not the story, I mean, for the purposes of this class. Pierre Menard thought that first the best thing that he could do in order to write Don Quixote would be to live the life of Cervantes. Now Cervantes was born in a certain place, so you know he couldn’t really do that, but there were other things he could do. Cervantes had lived in a certain part of the world, he had been a soldier, he had been in prison, he had been on voyages across the seas and so on. Now this guy thought he would do all of these things. He would live as much of Cervantes’ life as possible, literally all of Cervantes’ life except for actual birth and babyhood, and then he would of course be able to write Don Quixote.
But, of course, he soon realized, as one must realize it, that that would take too long. He didn’t really have 40 years to spare, or 50 years to spare, to get ready to write Don Quixote. He wanted to write it right now. So, and there’s more to that, but the point is that he then decided that he would not do all that, he would simply write Don Quixote. Just sit down and write it. So, he wrote Don Quixote. Well, he wrote at least the first twenty pages. He may have written the whole thing. But, he wrote Don Quixote, and Cervantes wrote Don Quixote. And if I remember correctly, the rest of the story by Borgés consists of a word by word comparison & analysis to these two Don Quixotes. And now, they are exactly the same. The exact same words. Because they both wrote Don Quixote. But the point is, Borgés makes this clear in the critical analysis of the two Don Quixotes, that while the two books contain exactly the same story, in the same words, that Pierre Menard’s Don Quixote is vastly superior to Cervantes’ Don Quixote, when one realizes how ‘I difficult it was to write Don Quixote after the telephone, the airplane, trains, electricity had come into being. As opposed to how much easier it had been to write Don Quixote before the existence of these things. It is a point well taken. But it’s not a very interesting point, otherwise. What’s more interesting is that Pierre Menard did write Don Quixote.

* * *

When you begin writing, you don’t know how to write. Presumably most of you have already begun, but it’s never too late to begin over. I mean it’s necessary to begin over constantly. And the best thing to do when you begin is to pick some poet whose poems you like, and imitate some. And then find other poets & other poems and imitate them. The worst thing you can do is to tell anyone who you are imitating. Because then everyone will think that all the good parts in your poems come out of being a good imitation. When, in fact, the exact opposite will be true. The good parts will come out of where you misunderstand entirely what the poet you are imitating is doing. & so write something that is completely dumb, but that turns out to be very good. Misunderstanding is one of the truly creative procedures in writing.
In 1960 & 61 I wrote a bunch of poems saying "it’s 5:15 a.m. in New York City & I’m doing this & that & now I think this & this & this, & next this happens, that happens, & in conclusion I can say blank blank & blank." I thought I was blatantly imitating Frank O’Hara. But I was wonderfully dumb, and thank god! It turns out that when Frank was writing his poem and saying it is 4:16 a.m. in New York City, he meant that it wasn’t 4:16 a.m. at all. It was a flashback. Whereas when I wrote my poems, whatever time I said it was, that’s what time it was. So, I wrote an entirely different kind of poem than he did, and not only that, but in the language of the critical periodicals, I actually extended a formal idea of his into another area, actually extended his formal idea into another place. And my poems were pretty good too. And in fact they’re not very much like Frank’s at all, because I was too dumb to be like Frank. But I wasn’t too dumb to be like somebody. So I did that actually. All right. I want to read you a few poems that I think are amusing. The trouble with these two books is—I have two books that I’m going to read from. One is called The New American Poetry, edited by Donald Allen, this book is out of date, generally, it was also better than 50% crap when it came out anyway, and a lot of it was out of date already then, too. But there’s enough in it that’s really great, that you should want to have it anyway. There are poems in here that will just survive, you know, and that are really very good. But if you discover this book newly and freshly and read through it, you’re liable to fall into the error of liking imitating all the poets in here that are horrible. Don’t do that. Now it’s important when you write poems, to write good poems. Better yet, it’s not so important to write good poems, because, that’s what academics do; what it’s important to do is write terrific poems. And there’s no reason why you can’t do that. All you have to do is look at lots of poems by poets that are terrific, whose poems are terrific, and see what makes up a terrific poem, and then write some terrific poems yourself. You’ll have to use parts of the way that they did it, but you will think of some ways yourself. One way, for example, to write a terrific poem, is to have every line be terrific. As has been pointed out here I think, by some of the teachers, if you can’t think of any terrific lines, just take them from other poets. I wrote a couple of poems by taking some translations of John Ashbery’s and typing them up double-spaced, so that there was room between every line for another line. and then I wrote a line between every line, making my Line run into his next line. So that I was literally interrupting him. And then I retyped them and left out all his lines, and then I tidied up what I had, and what I had wasn’t very good, but I was able to take some of it and put it in some other poems, some of it did come out very good. What I’m saying is that there are a lot of ways to write terrific poems, but there’s only one way essentially to write poems that are no good. And that’s to be not very amusing. And so don’t do that, don’t be unamusing. Don’t write poems about how much you love your dog. Unless you can make a terrific poem. On the other hand, don’t write poems about the death of your father unless the death of your father and how you feel seems much more important than how terrific the poem is. The only way you can make that be is by having the poem be so terrific that it’s not noticed.


[July 9, 1976]
Ted Berrigan "The Business Of Writing Poetry" from Talking Poetics From Naropa Institute: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Volume One, Anne Waldman & Marilyn Webb, eds., Shambhala, 1978.

JACK KEROUAC
BELIEF & TECHNIQUE FOR MODERN PROSE
LIST OF ESSENTIALS

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10.No time for poetry but exactly what is
11.Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12.In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13.Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14.Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15.Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16.The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17.Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18.Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19.Accept loss forever
20.Believe in the holy contour of life
21.Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22.Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23.Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24.No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25.Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26.Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27.In Praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28.Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29.Youre a Genius all the time
30.Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
As ever,
Jack [Kerouac]

Jack Kerouac "Belief & Technique For Modern Prose: List of Essentials" from a 1958 letter to Don Allen, in Heaven & Other Poems, copyright © 1958, 1977, 1983. Grey Fox Press.

I dabble in so much insanity and none of it ever seems to last.  One day I hope to choose just one personality and stick with it.  For purposes of bettering myself I hope this personality is one which can express feelings towards people.

I'm a space cadet