All sorts of short pieces, including sketches, parodies, plus poems by this famous American writer.

A luminous, intimate, and transcendental glimpse into the mind of Jack Kerouac, one of the most original voices of the twentieth century “Sketching . . . Everything activates in front of you in myriad profusion, you just have to purify your mind and let it pour the words and write with 100% personal honesty.” In 1951, it was suggested to Jack Kerouac by his friend Ed White that he “sketch in the streets like a painter but with words.” In August of the following year, Kerouac began writing down prose poem “sketches” in small notebooks that he kept in the breast pockets of his shirts. For two years he recorded travels, observations, and meditations on art and life as he moved across America and down to Mexico and back. The poems are often strung together so that over the course of several of them, a little story—or travelogue—appears, complete in itself. In 1957, Kerouac sat down with the fifteen handwritten sketch notebooks he had accumulated and typed them into a manuscript called Book of Sketches. Published for the first time, this work offers a detailed portrait of Kerouac at a key period of his literary career.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1874 Edition.

Art and Artists: Poems is a sumptuous collection of visions in verse—the work of centuries of poets who have used their own art form to illuminate art created by others. A wide variety of visual art forms have inspired great poetry, from painting, sculpture, and photography to tapestry, folk art, and calligraphy. Included here are poems that celebrate Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Claude Monet’s Water Lilies, and Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Here are such well-known poems as John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” Homer’s immortal account of the forging of the shield of Achilles, and Federico García Lorca’s breathtaking ode to the surreal paintings of Salvador Dalí. Allen Ginsberg writes about Cezanne, Anne Sexton about van Gogh, Billy Collins about Hieronymus Bosch, and Kevin Young about Jean-Michel Basquiat. Here too are poems that take on the artists themselves, from Michelangelo and Rembrandt to Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe. Altogether, this brilliantly curated anthology proves that a picture can be worth a thousand words—or a few very well-chosen ones.

An unexpected collection from Norman Mailer—a book of his selected poems and more than one hundred of his drawings, most of them never before published. Modest Gifts is full of what the author calls “casual pleasures”—witty, naughty, and surprisingly tender verse and art. Lust, seduction, betrayal, jealousy, and even the banality of cocktail party chatter are depicted with humor, affection, and, above all, honesty. Here is an aspect of Norman Mailer unknown to many: lighthearted, prankish, whimsical, and often gentle, playfully sketching the intimate urban world that surrounds us. Modest, funny, and true, each poem and drawing shows a new side of one of the greatest writers of our time.

In Writing Poetry from the Inside Out, poet and national poetry workshop leader, Sandford Lyne, offers the writing exercises, guidance, and encouragement you need to find the poet inside you. Lyne's techniques, which he developed through twenty years of teaching poetry workshops, flow from an understanding that poetry is an art form open to everyone. We all can-and should-write poetry. In this enchanting and inspiring volume, Lyne will introduce you to the pleasures and surprises of writing poetry, and his methods and insights will help you tap into your own unique voice and perspective to compose poems of your own in as little as a few minutes. Whether you are an experienced writer looking for new techniques and sources of inspiration or a novice poet who has never written a poem in your life, Writing Poetry from the Inside Out will help you to craft the poems you've always longed to write.

Poetry. Spanning more than forty years of writing, UNION RIVER takes us across the national landscape and mindscape with poems and sketches that delve into our common experience. This lyrical Americana address combines memory work, ecstatic reports from the field, invented scenes, street voices, blog posts, daily news, and representations of life in these states. Writing in closed and open forms, Marion works the language for the best it can give. He shows us the difference between looking and seeing, between hearing and listening, between knowing and understanding. Our nation is a place of grandeur, pain, constant churn, and regular renewal. Every person makes the democratic republic new each day, for good or bad. Paul Marion wants us to use "America" as a verb, an action word.