Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
A Prefatory Note 1
Part 1 Engagement
1 How to Writer an Essay 7
2 The Writer as Peeping John: On the Nature of Biographical Inquiry 15
3 Hemlock or Ambrosia: Writing and Editorial Process 34
4 Notes of a Peripatetic Lecturer 45
5 Senator Tripletalk and the American Dream 54
6 Passing Through: Fifty Years @ the Mind Factory 67
Part 2 Reconsidering the Beats
7 Two Notes on Beat Origins 81
8 The Traveling Writer: Beat Mexico 88
9 Kerouac's Music 112
10 Ginsberg Today 130
11 The Oppositional Writer 149
12 The Editor as Midwife: Writers and Little Magazines 179
Part 3 The Metaphysics of Writing
13 Bombing with Words 195
14 A Writer's Retreat 204
15 Poetic Faith: Religion and the Writer 213
16 A Writer's Passage 222
17 The Donkey and the Written Word 231