Word: dharma
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Professor MacLeish's third lecture on poetry that saved him. Like the Renaissance discovering the Greeks, like Goethe discovering Shakespeare, like the nineteenth century discovering nature, Harrison discovered Oriental poetry. He had run across the cryptic, ordered verses of the haiku before in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums; but since he had read the novel for sex (it was disappointing) their beauty had escaped him. Now, however, he was fascinated with the idea of three line verses which did not require grammar, meter, rhyme, or even logical progression. As Harrison told his roommate after the lecture, "All you gotta...
...said Harrison, "that's Han Shan. I got it out of The Dharma Bums. The reason I quoted it was because you have to hear Oriental poems a couple of times before you get used to them. Listen: Red ivy on brown brick/spike heels catch on cobblestone walks/ pennants hang limp on barroom walls/Christ, if my love were in my arms and I in bed again...
...DHARMA BUMS (244 pp.)-Jack Kerouac-Viking...
Holy Concubines. The novel's first-person narrator, Ray Smith, is 1) a poet, 2) a coast-to-coast freight-hopping, hitchhiking bum, and 3) a species of religious nut who visualizes himself "wandering the world ... in order to turn the wheel of the True Meaning, or Dharma, and gain merit for myself as a future Buddha (Awakener) and as a future Hero in Paradise." He is a bug on prayer, and some of his meditations are beguiling, as when he contemplates "David 0. Selznick, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha...
...Buddhism is growing more chic by the minute. Latest evidence: the summer issue of Chicago Review, which contains nine articles on the subject, a poem, and an excerpt from Zen-loving, "beat" Novelist Jack (On the Road) Kerouac's forthcoming The Dharma Bums. Begins Kerouac: "LET THERE BE BLOWING-OUT AND BLISS FOREVERMORE...