Katie Schwartz

One of the poems I fell madly, wildly and desperately in love with is in the pages of one of the books I'm reading at the minee, " Women of the Beat Generation ". So in love, I can't put it down. Apartment on Twin Peaks , Written by Helen Adam : I remember, when the moon shines clear How I'd whisper in my husband's ear Like a dentist saying "Open wider" "Don't you want to be a good provider?" "Don't you want to be the gracious host In a lovely home of which you're proud to boast? When my girl friends come to call We've got to have carpeting from wall to wall." After the carpeting he fought and bled Trapped in the jaws of the Davenport bed! He screamed as he vanished up the vacuum spout. In triple-sealed bags it spat him out. We chased his skull across the Twin Peaks stones. Maud's pet Chihuahuas ate the rest of his bones. Another gnawed ghost, another gone man, Another mild husband in the garbage can Served up...

By way of Guthy , I found Lauren Cerand 's very New-York-literary-fabulous blog and an interview about her , and that's how I found the paragraph in : Women of the Beat Generation , a book I'd never read, though something I have been searching for. Today, it arrived and I am devouring it. I'm 50 pages into it and can't put it down. I'm savoring every word. It's all brilliant, one of the paragraphs is without a doubt the most brilliant I've ever read: "In many ways, women of the Beat were cut from the same cloth as the men: fearless, angry, high risk, too smart, restless, highly irregular. They took chances, made mistakes, made poetry, made love, made history. Women of the Beat weren't afraid to get dirty. They were compassionate, careless, charismatic, marching to a different drummer, out of step. Muses who birthed a poetry so raw and new and full of power that it changed the world. Writers whose words weave spells, whose stories bind, whose vi...