i just found out that ken kesey died last month...you'd think it would have been on the news at some point; i guess he was overshadowed by september 11th and the war and everything. but still. so i'm in belated mourning now, for another hero. it's still so strange to me, that people who are so much bigger than life can still be mortal; that they can die of natural causes.

i discovered kesey in high school, when i read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. it took me a little longer to meet the rest of the Beats, until college i think. and once i discovered allen ginsberg and gary snyder and the rest, ken got pushed to the background. then i read Demon Box, and the way he tells his stories are so direct, so honest, i felt like i was really meeting the characters of the Beats for the first time. i understood neal cassidy a lot better, and the reasons he inspired so many other artists just by being present. and i realized that kesey was trying to figure out where the momentum of the 60s had gone, which was what i was trying to do at the time, when i wasn't wishing that i'd been there.

i never met him, i don't have any interesting stories of what he said and when he said it. i never came any closer to him than reading his books. but from what i read, from the character that shines right off the page, i know this: he was a good man, a kind man. he believed in peace and love and merry-making. his writing is amazing, even simply for the absence of irony, the sincerety of his groping toward some understanding.

sometimes it feels like we're losing everyone important all at the same time. as if these people are the last of the heroes. the Beat Generation took over for the Lost Generation in many ways; they came in at the right time, they made their own revolution in writing. the Lost Generation took over paris and made it their own. the Beats took over harlem, and shook up a literary tradition that had grown stale. they came around at the right time to take over; the Lost Generation would have been getting rather old and feeble.

but it feels as if no one is really taking over for the Beats. it feels like this whole society has grown dumb and numb on pop music and pop culture, and writing poems feels like trying to sell things that nobody wants. because you can get everything you need from television, except what is real. because jewel has a book of (incredibly bad) poetry published, just because she's a pop star. the best seller list is a bunch of self-help books and the latest thriller novel. if that's what people want, then why do i keep trying to give them something different? what's the sense?

except that i have to. that there's nothing else i can do. and because i can still dream; i can see that i know people who might, in their own ways, be the new generation of heroes. if they don't die, or get bogged down, or lost in the pack. if they don't let themselves settle for what's safe and easy and cheap. and i'm lucky, really, that i met such amazing people. brilliant philosophers, dazzling artists, visionary wordplay poets (i think you all know who you are. at least i hope you do, because i really do think you're all brilliant.)

"What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose."
-Willa Cather

that sums it up for me. -beatpoetgrrl

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