Heaven and Other Poems

When I think of the beats Ginsburg, Whalen, Snyder, DiPrima, Ferlinghetti, Burroughs and Kerouac are the names that come to mind. This book pulls these and many other literary figures of the era together. For example, the title poem "Heaven" includes the lines "Phil Whalen will be / a blue cloud / anytime he wants".The poems in this volume include poems including a series of his blues poems - San Francisco Blues; MacDougal Street Blues; Orizaba Blues; Orlando Blues - and a letter on his theory of jazz poetry. It includes two short autobiographies and a series of letters between Kerouac and a publisher.The latter gives real insight into his writing: "I would like everybody in the world to tell his full life confession and tell it HIS OWN WAY" from a letter; or his essentials for modern prose which includes "telling the true story of the world in interior monologue" and " remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition".The poems themselves show an interesting mixture of Catholic childhood, exposure to Buddhism, and an "in your face" telling it like it is. They are very much a product of their time which don't survive time well except as icons of their time - and some interesting seeds for era-specific equivalents for our time.I highly recommend the book as a reminder of the beats and what they stood for (and against).