Warrior Poet Prose

“As I’ve often told Ginsberg, you can’t blame the president for the state of the country, it’s always been the poet’s fault.  You can’t expect politicians to come up with a vision, they don’t have it in them.  Poets have to come up with the vision and they have to turn it on so it sparks and catches hold.”

–Ken Kesey

From wiki: Kenneth Elton Kesey (September 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001) was an American novelist, essayist, and countercultural figure. He considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.

When the publication of his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion in 1964, required his presence in New York, Kesey, Neal Cassady, and others in a group of friends they called the Merry Pranksters took a cross-country trip in a school bus nicknamed Further. This trip, described in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (and later in Kesey’s unproduced screenplay, The Further Inquiry) was the group’s attempt to create art out of everyday life, and to experience roadway America while high on LSD.

In an interview after arriving in New York, Kesey is quoted as saying, “The sense of communication in this country has damn near atrophied. But we found as we went along it got easier to make contact with people.

If people could just understand it is possible to be different without being a threat.”A huge amount of footage was filmed on 16mm cameras during the trip, which remained largely unseen until the release of Alex Gibney’s Magic Trip in 2011.