Category — writing

Spontaneous Prose method, the most concise would be Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, a list of 30 “essentials”.
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes ahh…”
“
”
On the Road
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 the 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. Don’t 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. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Jamaican poet, Kwame Dawes, writes about AIDs for The Virginia Quarterly Review. His moving poem, “Home’s Hospice” is paired with visuals of the people involved. It is featured on the
LiveHopeLove .com .

“We used the poems because the poems also handed to the photographers and designers an emotional and visual series of ideas and images that they could vamp on and expand on in their work,” Dawes explains.

Excerpt from Home’s Hospice:

” These days, the language of death

is a dialect of betrayals; the bodies

broken, placid as saints, hobble

along the tiled corridors, from room

to room. Below the dormitories

is a white squat bungalow, a chapel

from which the handclaps and choruses

rise and reach us like the scent

of a more innocent time.”

Kwame Dawes