Literary Lunch

Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819 in Huntington, Long Island. He was the second child of nine. Whitman left school at the age of 11 to help support his family. He started working as an office boy and later became a printer’s apprentice.  Whitman held several positions, including teacher before he decided to found his own newspaper, The Long Islander in 1838. However, he sold the newspaper after less than a year. After that he worked as an editor for several publications. In the 1860s, Whitman volunteered as a nurse during the Civil War. He also worked as a clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Attorney General’s office.

In 1842, Walt Whitman published a novel called Franklin Evans .  He first published his poetry collection, Leaves of Grass in 1855 with his own money. He released several editions of this collection. It is the work he became most famous for.

Walt Whitman died on March 26, 1892.

Halcyon Days by Walt Whitman

Not from successful love alone,
Nor wealth, nor honor’d middle age, nor victories of politics or war;
But as life wanes, and all the turbulent passions calm,
As gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky,
As softness, fulness, rest, suffuse the frame, like freshier, balmier air,
As the days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs
really finish’d and indolent-ripe on the tree,
Then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all!
The brooding and blissful halcyon days!

Jack Kerouac’s poetry is so immediate, so visceral. It touches parts of you you didn’t realise existed before.

Bowery Blues

by Jack Kerouac

The story of man
Makes me sick
Inside, outside,
I don’t know why
Something so conditional
And all talk
Should hurt me so.

I am hurt
I am scared
I want to live
I want to die
I don’t know
Where to turn
In the Void
And when
To cut
Out

For no Church told me
No Guru holds me
No advice
Just stone
Of New York
And on the cafeteria
We hear
The saxophone
O dead Ruby
Died of Shot
In Thirty Two,
Sounding like old times
And de bombed
Empty decapitated
Murder by the clock.

And I see Shadows
Dancing into Doom
In love, holding
TIght the lovely asses
Of the little girls
In love with sex
Showing themselves
In white undergarments
At elevated windows
Hoping for the Worst.

I can’t take it
Anymore
If I can’t hold
My little behind
To me in my room

Then it’s goodbye
Sangsara
For me
Besides
Girls aren’t as good
As they look
And Samadhi
Is better
Than you think
When it starts in
Hitting your head
In with Buzz
Of glittergold
Heaven’s Angels
Wailing

Saying

We’ve been waiting for you
Since Morning, Jack
Why were you so long
Dallying in the sooty room?
This transcendental Brilliance
Is the better part
(of Nothingness
I sing)

Okay.
Quit.
Mad.
Stop.

Gregory Corso was a member of the literary movement known as the Beat Generation .  The group, which included such authors as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, were highly influenced by the Romantic poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley.

I Held a Shelley Manuscript

by Gregory Corso

My hands did numb to beauty
as they reached into Death and tightened!

O sovereign was my touch
upon the tan-inks’s fragile page!

Quickly, my eyes moved quickly,
sought for smell for dust for lace
for dry hair!

I would have taken the page
breathing in the crime!
For no evidence have I wrung from dreams–
yet what triumph is there in private credence?

Often, in some steep ancestral book,
when I find myself entangled with leopard-apples
and torched-skin mushrooms,
my cypressean skein outreaches the recorded age
and I, as though tipping a pitcher of milk,
pour secrecy upon the dying page.