Jack Kerouac and Friend
The following is an itemized list in its entirety of how to write modern prose like a beatnik by Jack Kerouac. It was published in The Evergreen Review, Volume 2, No. 8, in 1959. As usual, Jack varies between the profound and the mundane, all mixed up like:
- Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
- Submissive to everything, open, listening
- Try never get drunk outside yr own house [a rule often violated by Jack]
- Be in love with yr life
- Something that you feel will find its own form
- Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
- Blow as deep as you want to blow
- Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
- The unspeakable visions of the individual
- No time for poetry, but exactly what is
- Visionary tics shivering in the chest
- In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
- Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
- Like Proust be an old teahead of time
- Telling the story of the world in interior monolog
- The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
- Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
- Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
- Accept loss forever
- Believe in the holy contour of life
- Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
- Dont [sic] think of words when you stop but to see the picture better
- Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning [eh?]
- No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
- Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
- Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
- In Praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
- Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
- You’re a Genius all the time
- Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
The above is reprinted in Fred W. McDarrah’s book Kerouac & Friends: A Beat Generation Album, a not bad introduction to the movement together with photos of its main characters.
If there is a lot of unevenness in the whole beat vision, I think you can see why.
Tarnmoor 
I can’t recall off hand what irving rosenthal teaches about this: one is/ was first thought best thought
That was certainly Jack’s belief.
irving is a one book wonder. I can’t imagine though that he didnt re-write many many times his book sheeper. it’s an undergroiind classic in the gay world, but when asked irving admonished people mot to read it
i tried reading “On The Road” once; got into it about two pages and had to quit; it was like shoveling cement with a teaspoon…
Kerouac never corrected his work. He typed On the Road on one continuous roll of white paper and submitted it as it was.