I always wrote poems when I was a little girl, and I loved hip hop music, and I kind of just started writing poems over beats, and that's when I started rapping.
Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.
I've been a total Tom Waits dork for a long, long time.
I was a beatnik in the '50s before the hippies came along.
Anybody in the next centuries wanting to know what it was like to be a poet in the middle of the 20th century should read Kaddish.
Look at Allen Ginsberg. In poems like 'Kaddish' and 'Howl,' you can hear a cantor between the lines. It's fully alive, and I think that's what's missing in modern poetry. It's too dry and cerebral.
Black musicians were imitating speech cadences, and Kerouac was imitating the black musicians' breath cadences on their horns and brought it back to speech. It always was speech rhythms or cadences as far as the ear that Kerouac was developing. All passed through black music.
From it's inception Beat poetry was hailed as "something NEW" and "like all good spontaneous jazz, newness is acceptable and expected - by hip people who listen." But the newness of jazz has in it the echoes of J. S. Bach.
I'm doing research for a large comic book on the Beat Generation guys - Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and those guys.
I never really liked "cool" books. I plowed through as much Borges and Joyce as possible, read the first half of V. and spent whole Bar Mitzvah checks on Beat poetry.
I've listened to and know Allen Ginsberg music and met him a couple of times, but I don't have any strong statements to make.
I've got feathers in my hair, I get down to beat poetry.
Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics.
A lot of our earlier material was freestyle tunes.
Jack Kerouac, like a sick refrigerator, worked too hard at keeping cool and died on his mama's lap from alcohol and infantilism.
When I was a kid in the '50s, I was very enamored of beatniks and... a kind of dark sensibility.
I used to take 'Visions of Cody' by Jack Kerouac on tour all the time. I don't really love Kerouac, but that book, you could just open at any page and find something incredible for that day.
Tom Waits is someone who has really struck me, ever since I was a kid. He's really a big deal for me.
When I began, poetry was very academic. You published little pamphlets from fancy presses. It was rather... chaste. There wasn't much public reading. Then there was poetry and jazz, which I don't think worked, though I love jazz.
My father shared the ethos of many of the beat writers and was a friend of Allen Ginsberg. Probably for 25 years of my father's life, He had been an itinerant piano player and so traveled the road with bands and that sort of thing.
To be able to play Jack Kerouac or Sal Paradise, it's mad to me.
