USA Africa Dialogue Series - Tim Hunt: The Textuality of Soulwork

Tim Hunt: The Textuality of Soulwork: Jack Kerouac's Quest for Spontaneous Prose

It's an exciting study, of relevance to those of us trying to lift the immediacy of my grandmother's oral tradition to the written/ printed page (please be patient), the oral tradition transmissions , my most immediate blackground, my beloved Yoruba grandmother, the greatest story teller.

Reminiscing a little: I first read Kerouac's On the Road in the first form of secondary school, lifted him off the pile of my stepfather's usually pile - after he was done with it – the same year as I read Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover .  Kerouac's the Dharma Bums  and Desolation Angels and all of Hesse ( the pacifist) came a lot later  - circa 1971 at the beginning of my sojourn in Sweden ( the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied poetics – promoting Buddhism  - American Buddhism  as essentially a literary art  - in those days everybody ( including me) was composing haikus ; Trungpa Rinpoche etc.  also came a little later … Otherwise I was reasonably familiar with the Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso, Burroughs  crew before arriving in Stockholm for the first time, on honey-moon in July, 1970. Through George Crowell discovered  Rilke in Ghana….and Gary Snyder on my second arrival in Stockholm through contacts with the younger literary Stockholm generation,  some of whom (millionaire kids) used to hang out at the Restaurant Prinsen, (Jimi Hendrix's good friend King George Clemons – we saw Dirty Harry together- lived just round the corner) some of them – the young literary crowd inspired by people like songster Tuli Kupferberg were already waving their own poetic manifestoes , whilst as far as poetic manifestoes go, for lack of originality- neither Pound nor Eliot, I was still lingering with Wordsworth and Coleridge's preface to the lyrical ballads ( smile)

I'll shut up for now, quit the reminiscing about long long ago. the above was never meant to be a book review, the intro should whet your appetite: "The Textuality of soulwork" is a MUST READ – even for the Achebe fans, maybe some good will come out of it - it raises interesting language questions and thinkings about poetry/ prose poe  as a performing art….

And how do you like this?

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