1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

The list was allegedly tacked on the wall of Allen Ginsberg’s hotel room in North Beach a year before his iconic poem “Howl” was written — and I found it via the former Brainpickings website, now The Marginalian.

I love the combination of #19 and #20 – accept loss forever, believe in the holy contour of life.

And I love how random and private the list is – like you can tell that he scribbled out things as they came to him, an inopportune times, like, while out walking, or in the shower, or dreaming some wild dream…

I saw another list last week, that also tickled me: from Courtney Martin, called Fragments of a Year, a practice inspired by another poet, Ocean Vuong, that basically involves skimming through your phone’s notes, and selecting a handful.

This is the first part of hers:

2021

Give me the baffled.

Every family is fucked up. White people mostly have ways of privatizing and hiding their pain that money affords.

shoshito peppers, cherry tomatoes, salt & vinegar potato chips 

No new adds til we get the ground beneath us again, some momentum. 

The hardest party of activism is often personal sustainability and internal politics. 

Butter (no additional text)

Haha. The sheer number of orphan notes on my phone! This delights me, the idea of casting back through and pulling out little threads and tying them into some kind of weave or knot or something…

What if, instead of berating yourself with a to-do list or a list of resolutions, you tried something more playful and messy like this… something looser, more free-form, more collage-like… What might emerge? What might surprise and delight you?

Find those notes to self that you scribbled out over the past year, excavate them, and make some kind of collage.