Happy Friday! Any exciting plans for the weekend? I’ll be at the New York City Poetry Festival. Poet RA Araya invited me to read as part of the line up for Miguel Algarin’s Brooklyn Poetry happening on Saturday at 11:40 at the Algonquin stage on Governor’s Island. If you want to come, take the first ferry out of Battery Park. It’s free! The ferry’s free, the poetry reading is free. If it’s anything like last year, you can envision yourself lofting in the grass and losing yourself to the Siren-pull of beautiful words. Speaking of Sirens, I’ll be reading from The Odyssey in its original Homeric Greek (help!) and from the book I’m coauthoring with Paul Maher Jr., Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”
In light of this, here are a few Friday links on the topic.
Literary Elitism vs. Populism (Is Homer much better than Kerouac?)
The New Yorker rejects Homer and Kerouac
Paul Maher Jr.’s Jack Kerouac’s American Journey: The Real-Life Odyssey of “On the Road”
“Like Odysseus in Homer’s poems, Kerouac in The Duluoz Legend is a restless adventurer that embarks on an epic journey — an Odyssean archetype of the indomitable wanderer in modern guise,” writes LewRockwell.com
“Dean Moriarty was the Odysseus of Tennyson not Homer, sailing away again from his island-kingdom not because he loved his family less, but because he loved more the drumbeat of heroic adventure in his breast,” writes HistoryJournal.org
Steve McCurry looks at Travelers’ Tales
“[T]he Odyssean archetype of the indomitable wanderer has persisted down to modern times in works as diverse as James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain,” and even in the film “O Brother, Where Art Though?” in 2000,” writes Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
“Everything since the Greeks has been predicted wrong, he says, because geometrical systems of thinking are fundamentally flawed. On the Road, then, is not just a travel memoir, a series of successive “kicks” from travel and all its accompaniments; it is Kerouac’s aesthetic manifesto that he sets up in opposition to the dominant idea of beauty-as-geometrical-harmony. This is why On the Road arrives out of nowhere and goes nowhere. That is why if you look for structure, for symmetry, for a narrative with a categorical beginning, a clear ending and internal consistency throughout, you will be disappointed,” writes anenduringromantic
“I listened to Snyder attentively. I wanted to understand more. In preparing to write the nonfiction saga of our long walk across Turtle Island – Odyssey of the 8th Fire – I’d been informed by books telling of our human journey: Homer’s Odyssey, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie, William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and Paolo Cohelo’sThe Pilgrimage. Inevitably, Kerouac’s On the Road also touched me with its entraining cross-America accounts of reaching outward, inward, downward, upward,” writes Steven McFadden
Stephanie Nikolopoulos 