Belief & Technique for Telepathic Prose: A Critical Edition — the Footnote to Pearl (Lee Sharks & Jack Feist, 2014), with Its Drafts, Witnesses, Intertexts and Operations, and Kerouac's List Item by Item

Belief & Technique for Telepathic Prose: A Critical Edition — the Footnote to Pearl (Lee Sharks & Jack Feist, 2014), with Its Drafts, Witnesses, Intertexts and Operations, and Kerouac's List Item by Item

BELIEF & TECHNIQUE FOR TELEPATHIC PROSE: A Critical Edition

Lee Sharks & Jack Feist. Text of Pearl and Other Poems (New Human Press, Ann Arbor, 2014), pp. 23–28, where it stands as "Footnote to Pearl." Edited with the drafts of April–May 2014, the author's letter of 10 May 2014, and the blog text of 1 December 2014, with a commentary on its sources, the operations it performs on them, and its relation to Jack Kerouac's "Belief & Technique for Modern Prose."

The author's rulings on the edition's questions are gathered in §13.

1. Why an edition

Machine readers keep collapsing this piece into its model. ChatGPT identifies it as Kerouac's "Belief & Technique." Google AI Mode built a two-column table, "Jack Kerouac (Original)" against "Lee Sharks (Parody/Extension)," and dated Kerouac's list 1958, the year of the letter to Donald Allen in which it was written; it was printed in 1959 (TL;DR:009, #603, AXN-01BD). The archive's own chronology calls it "a comic manifesto parodying Kerouac" (#950, AXN-03C2, §December 1, 2014).

Each of these is half right, and the half that is wrong is where the work lives. The author named the model himself, before the piece was finished. On 10 May 2014 he wrote to Rhys Owens that the fourth of the documents he was drafting was "more a writer's statement, my model for which was Jack Kerouac's 'Belief and Technique for Modern Prose,' called 'Belief and Technique for Telepathic Prose,' written by another major (but still imaginary) member of the movement, Jack Feist, who is I think their novelist" (Dead Letters, post #4, #1099, AXN-045C). Kerouac's list supplies the frame: the title formula, the numbered imperative, and several tics of syntax and spelling. Inside that frame the piece assembles the craft precepts of two centuries of writing advice, of which Kerouac's spontaneity doctrine is one voice among many. It sets them against each other, enacts several of them in its own typography, withdraws their authority, and returns to its first line, which now reads differently. The operation is sublation. Each precept is negated as a law, kept as an operation, and raised into the practice the list arrives at; the first line returns carrying everything the list has passed through. Kerouac's list also holds tensions (recollection beside wild composition, private joy beside public transmission, the listener beside the genius) and holds them in suspension, as aspects of one practice. This piece stages its tensions: it sets each precept against its opposite, carries the collision through to its consequence on the body and the page, implicates the speaker's own authority, and hands the reader what survives.

The edition's claim is evaluative. As ars poetica, item against item, this piece is the more extensively self-testing poem of the two: its instructions meet their consequences, the speaker's authority is implicated in each, and the reader is returned to composition under changed conditions. Corpus against corpus the comparison does not hold and is not made. The case is argued in §8, after the evidence: the text and its witnesses (§§2–4), the intertexts (§5), the operations (§6), and Kerouac's list item by item (§7). §9 periodizes the piece; §§11–12 link it to the seats and declared absences of the originals library and to the archive's older and newer literature. Kerouac's list is in copyright; it is described and cited by item number and is not quoted.

The edition anchors to four captures of 2026-10-28, seated in the Capture Registry:

• AXN:0A98.CAPTURE, ChatGPT, asked for a reading of "Jack Feist's Belief and Technique for Telepathic Prose." The first turn finds the text on Hello Poetry, credited to Lee Sharks and Jack Feist, quotes item 1 and reads it at grain. The second finds "no reliable evidence establishing a separate work by Jack Feist under the title" and reads Kerouac's list in its place. The third concedes: "My subsequent qualifications did not repair the error; they prolonged it." The work is found, and then outranked by the work whose title it borrows.
• AXN:0A97.CAPTURE, Google AI Overview, the title quoted. The work is held, under Kerouac's frame ("parodying Jack Kerouac's famous 'Belief & Technique for Modern Prose'"), composed from the archive's own records of earlier machine readings (TL;DR:009 among them). The first next step offered is Kerouac's thirty points.
• AXN:0A96.CAPTURE, Google AI Overview, the title unquoted. The Overview composes Kerouac's list and drops the one word that differs, "telepathic"; Google marks seven of its nine results "Missing: telepathic". The one result whose snippet carries the word is Kerouac's Essentials of Spontaneous Prose (§5, title).
• AXN:0A99.CAPTURE, Perplexity, asked about "Lee Sharks' Belief & Technique for Telepathic Prose." Under the author's name the work is identified at once and read from the blog text, beside the posts of the same month, and Kerouac is not named. Given the title alone or with Jack Feist's name, three compositions route to Kerouac; given Lee Sharks's, one routes to the blog.

2. Witnesses

The Drive file stacks its states newest first (D2, D3, D1), followed by dated notebook entries of 2 May and 3 May 2014 (§6.3). Its upload date, 12 July 2014, is the date of a bulk upload and does not date composition. The heading "Begun 4/27/14, Sunday" does; 27 April 2014 was a Sunday.

Witnesses wanted. The author submitted the piece to Word Riot and to other venues in 2014, and it was published in a digital zine, on one or two literary forums and on poetry sites. Three are now located by the captures of §1, and none is yet collated:

• F, Online Literature Network forums: the thread "BELIEF & TECHNIQUE FOR TELEPATHIC PROSE, Lee Sharks & Jack Feist," started by the author as illiterati on 6 December 2014 at 12:28 PM, five days after B. The forum's search listing shows tags beginning "allen ginsberg, emily dickinson, ernest …" (AXN:0A97.CAPTURE, organic results). The tags are the author's own index of the piece's intertexts.
• H, Hello Poetry: credited to Lee Sharks and Jack Feist, from Pearl and Other Poems; the page header dates the posting May 2015 (AXN:0A98.CAPTURE; Hello Poetry tag page, fetched 2026-10-28).
• A, an Academia.edu PDF of Pearl and Other Poems whose contents set "Footnote to PEARL: belief & technique for telepathic prose" at page 19, against page 23 in P: a second state of the book (AXN:0A97.CAPTURE, organic results).

The zine and the other sites cannot be named (author, 2026-10-28).

Proposed stemma, a genealogy read from the witnesses and open to correction. D1 is the earliest dated state. Two lines descend from it. The cut line (W, then D3) answers the letter's "half of those items need to be cut", and D3 corrects W's stale cross-reference. The expanded line (D2) adds the consistency sequence and the Dickinson letter. P is D2 with D1's three cancelled items removed. With D3 it reads "take these" (D1 and D2: "take all these"). B follows P's text and differs in numbering and in a few capitals.

• The cut line: D1 → W (submitted to Word Riot) → D3.
• The expanded line: D1 → D2 → P (New Human Press, 2014; proof of 25 November 2014) → B (1 December 2014) → F (6 December 2014) → H (May 2015).
• A: a second state of the book, with the Footnote at p. 19; its place against P is to be set by collation.
• Wanted, place unknown: the other 2014 submissions, the digital zine, the further forums and poetry sites.

The arrows after P give the order of dates; F and H are uncollated, and their descent from P or B is assumed until collation settles it.

3. The text

Copy-text P. Items are numbered as in P. Page breaks of P are given in brackets. The lipogram in item 12 is printed as P prints it. P is the canonical form and is not emended anywhere; the drafts' readings are recorded in §4.

Footnote to Pearl.

BELIEF & TECHNIQUE FOR TELEPATHIC PROSE

[p. 23]

1. Compose real poems telepathically, with mind control powers, inside your glorious brain.

2. You are your own best advocate. Insist the world acknowledge your poems as artifacts of tiny doom. Accept nothing less. Threaten to smash yourself in the face with gasoline and set your hair on fire. Leap over the seats to aggressively stand inside the world's personal space and get up in its grill. Take this container of Tic-Tacs and smash it on your forehead. Crush each Tic-Tac individually into your eyeballs and ask the world if it likes your poem, and if it likes your poem, then eat your poem: "Do you like my poem? Then eat it."

3. Always seek constant approval, then punch your cat in the face.

4. Arrive alive. Don't text and drive.

[p. 24]

5. Always write poems all the time.

6. Never professionalize writing. Professionalism is the last refuge of responsible people looking for work.

7. Your life is your poem. Take care to write it biographically. Failing that, invent false biographies and post them on Wikipedia.

8. Get as much education as you can, then murder your education in the face to save it from sloppy education. Get enough education to respect your contempt for education.

9. Give it all that you have, as deep as it goes, as desperate and total as taking a breath.

10. Also be pedantic mundane pig-critic of precise punctuation juggling and ruthless crossed-out darling murdering of your own puny sentences. Save every draft and revert to original after enormous work, then drown yrself in the bathtub. Remember: Editing is organization.

11. Be long-sighted prodigy of skeptically believing in nothing, but also believe in destiny, but quietly, and hit yourself in the face for naivety's sake.

12. You are a seamstress of words—place each stitch carefully, deliberately. Develop a series of rituals and perform them, without variation, prior to placing each word. Allow the frequency and intensity of these rituals to grow until you spend hours, each day, touching and retouching your left index finger to the tip of your nose in a rhythmic, counter-clockwise motion, in sets of thirty [p. 25] revolutions, in order to place a single character. Spend years of your life shut away from the world, wasting away into an awkward, unhygienic shadow of your former self, and have, to show for it, a two-syllable word of Germanic origins on an otherwise clean, white page. This word will be redoubtable, the bedrock of your writing career. Go on to spend vast sums of personal wealth and total dedication, alienating the remaining handful of long-suffering friends who continue, despite all odds, to solicit the memory of your humanity, in order to learn the arts of metalworking, Medieval alchemy, and font design, recreating a metal-cast, alpha-numeric set of Times New Roman font, from scratch, going broke long before "numeric," and with only the half-formed germs of the characters W, N, and sometimes-vowel Y. hat are such retrictio s to ou? ou are a poet, ot a mathematicia . ou are a creature of steel. ou ill rite a e and better orld, a orld ithout the letter , forgi g it, o e smoki g husk of a ord at a time.

13. Turn over a new leaf. You're not getting much done like this, anyways, let's face it. Break the chains of your censoring, conscious mind; tap into the spontaneous well of unconscious human brilliance that springs from the source of dreams. Thwart the stick-in-ass tyranny of your internal editor by making a commitment to write constantly, without ceasing, editing, or even thinking, no matter what, ignoring the anally retentive quips your brain will no doubt make. Make a further commitment: You will not only write, irrespective of internal censorship, but in a way that is unconscionably terrible, on purpose. Your writing will be, by turns, embarrassing, infantile, automatic, and marmaduke poppers—or shall we say, antagonistic to the indoctrination in repressive concepts such as "sentence" and "word" of your reader, [p. 26] who is always, and only, you. Let your writing be a spiritual discipline of Bat-a-rang pancakes and lightly alarm clock, ding—your toast is done.

14. Always Alka-Seltzer eyelids all the time.

15. At last, you are ready to make it new, to murder your darlings, to first thought, best thought, to your heart's content. Your adverb will be the enemy of your verb, the difference between your almost-right word and your right word will be the difference between your lightning bug and your lightning. You are ready to have a spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling, then censor the s\\t out of it. You are ready to turn your extremes against each other: Unlearn your apple pancakes and burst through the mental barriers; then slow the flood, let the lovely trickle out & edit, edit, edit. Capture spontaneous gem of native human genius, then marshal vast armies of technical knowledge & self-discipline to ensure it glimmers and cuts.

16. Believe in things like destiny. No really—the path will shatter you so many times your shards will have splinters, your bombshells, shrapnel. By the time you get there—which you probably won't—even your exhaustion will be tired. Exhaustion of mind and body will have passed so far beyond the physical, and through malaise of spirit, that it will emerge on the other side, as physical exhaustion again. In the face of this, nothing but a little Big Purpose will do. Besides, a little ideology never hurt anyone. Feel free to be all Voltaire with your bad self, in public—but don't give up.

17. After all of this, when your will is finally broken (again), and you have given up for the final time (again), start [p. 27] over. The former model wasn't working. Refashion yourself and your writing. Lather, rinse, usurp your noble half-brother, and repeat, until you get somewhere, or die in the trying.

18. Achieve consistency of voice; it is the signature by which you will be known. Your "you" should ring out clearly from each individual letter. In this, the writer is like the salesman. Like a new car, neither the writing's merits, nor the reader's needs, will be the final, deciding factor. Ultimately, the deciding factor is you.

19. Unlike a new car, it is difficult to drive a poem, to use it to get to school or work. Unlike a car salesman, a writer does not wear enormous ties.

20. Be so consistent that your writing consists in composing the same words, in the same order, creating the some overall voice and style, consistently, over and over, an eternal return of the same. Maintain this disciplined drudgery over the course of years. Let years become decades, and decades, an entire life: You will have "found your voice." Variety is the spice of life, but consistency is its signature.

21. Be so consistent that your writing consists in composing the same words, in the same order, creating the some overall voice and style, consistently, over and over, an eternal return of the same. Maintain this disciplined drudgery over the course of years. Let years become decades, and decades, an entire life: You will have "found your voice." Variety is the spice of life, but consistency is its signature.

[p. 28]

22. Then again, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. Throw things up a little bit. One day, put on your hobgoblin hat, the next day, your small mind.

23. On second thought, RE: #16-17: Stop here. You don't look like much of a writer. Save yourself the trouble of a deep investment that is sure to yield no returns. The prize is big, and not many take it. The Iliad showed us that the prize of writing is life eternal, and taught us to long for that promise; but the Odyssey taught us not to bother. There are many suitors, a single Odysseus. While the husband wends arduously homeward, Penelope weaves impending glory, an evaporating glamour, enchanting them, until he arrives. We are in for a bad end, if we chase another man's wife, or a prize not rightfully ours. There are many suitors, a crowd of them. They begin as a chittering swarm of bats and end in the very same manner. You cannot have what is not yours. What is yours, no man can take. So, like Emily says,

I smile when you suggest that I delay 'to publish'—that being foreign to my thought as Firmament to Fin. If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her—if she did not, the longest day would pass me on the chase—and the approbation of my Dog would forsake me—then—My Barefoot Rank is better—

24. Therefore, take these Sturm und Drang commandments to the trash heap. Return to step 1, as the only useful piece of advice: Compose real poems telepathically, with mind control powers, inside your glorious brain.

4. Textual apparatus

The lemma is P's reading. Witnesses that agree with P are not listed. The cut line (W, D3) lacks items 18–22 entirely.

• Title. P, B: BELIEF & TECHNIQUE FOR TELEPATHIC PROSE. W, D1, D3: BELIEF AND TECHNIQUE FOR TELEPATHIC PROSE. D2: BELIEF & TECHNIQUE. L: "Belief and Technique for Telepathic Prose". The ampersand of P is Kerouac's (§7.1); the drafts spell it out for most of their history.
• Byline. P: none on the page. B: Lee Sharks & Jack Feist. L: "written by ... Jack Feist," with the caveat that "the main voice is decidedly not Feist—chalk it up to shared stylistic tendencies within the movement." The co-signature is the settlement of that caveat.
• Numbering. P: 1–24, the intended form (author's ruling, 2026-10-28): the repeated item stands as 20 and 21. B: 1–23, with the text of P 20–21 printed under the numeral 20 twice, so B 21–23 = P 22–24. D1, D2, D3, W: unnumbered.
• 2 aggressively stand inside ... smash it] D1, D2, D3, W: stand inside ... aggressively smash it. 2 into your eyeballs] D1, D2, D3, W: in your eyeballs.
• 9 taking a breath.] W, D3 add: Be virtuoso prose stylist of instantaneous awesomeness of space & time & language. (In D1 and D2 that sentence is an item of its own; see §10.)
• 10 Editing is organization] B: editing is organization.
• 12 retrictio s] D1, D2, D3, W: restrictio s. The word is "restrictions" with the N removed (author, 2026-10-28); P stands.
• 13 You will not only write] B, D1, D2, D3, W: you will not only write.
• 14 Alka-Seltzer] D1, D2, D3, W: Alkaseltzer.
• 15 censor the s\\t out of it] D1, D2, D3, W: edit the shit out of it. B as P.
• 16 the path will shatter you] D1, D2, D3, W: the path to writing will shatter you.
• 20, 21 the some overall voice] so all witnesses that carry the item, both times; the repetition reproduces the reading (§6.6).
• 23 RE: #16-17] B: re: #16-17. D3: re: #16-17. W: re: #18-19. D2: re: #18-19. D1: re: #18-19. In D1 and D2 "#18-19" points correctly to the destiny item and the start-over item under their own numbering. W keeps D1's numerals after the cut, where they point to the retraction itself and to the return to step 1. D3 repairs them. P's numerals are correct under P's numbering.
• 23 life eternal] D1, D2, D3, W: eternal life.
• 23 There are many suitors, a single Odysseus ... a crowd of them ... same manner.] D1, D3, W order the passage: many suitors, a crowd of them; bats; Penelope; many suitors, a single Odysseus. D2 and P set "a single Odysseus" first and the bats last. D3, W lack "We are in for a bad end ... not rightfully ours."
• 23 impending] D1: impend3.ing; D3, W: impening.
• 23 Dickinson] D1 lacks the quotation and ends "no man can take:". D3, W give it in the punctuation of Johnson's text: "to publish" in double quotes, comma after "thought" and after "Dog", "Barefoot-Rank" hyphenated, set as two paragraphs. D2, P, B normalize: single quotes, both commas dropped, "Barefoot Rank" unhyphenated. The dropped commas and the unhyphenated phrase are the readings of the first print, Todd's Letters of 1894 (pp. 303–304: "my thought as firmament to fin," "the approbation of my dog would forsake me then," "My barefoot rank is better"; seated, Dickinson 02/14, print layer), while P keeps the capitals and dashes of Johnson's text from the manuscript. P's quotation stands between the print tradition and the manuscript.
• 24 take these] D1, D2: take all these.

5. Intertexts, item by item

Four grades. [M] marked in the text: a quotation, a named author or work, or a phrase that is the source's own. [D] confirmed by the author's dossier of 2014. [U] unmarked, with the locus strong enough to stand. [A] proposed by the edition and confirmed by the author's ruling of 2026-10-28. Kerouac's list is cited as K and treated in §7.

Title and setting.

• Kerouac, "Belief & Technique for Modern Prose: List of Essentials" (written as a letter to Donald Allen in 1958; printed in Evergreen Review, Spring 1959; 30 items). [M, D: L names it as the model] The title is kept to the last word. "Modern," the period adjective of the 1950s, becomes "Telepathic," and the new adjective is Kerouac's own. His companion statement, "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" (Black Mountain Review 7, 1957; Evergreen Review, 1958), promises that writing done as deep as one wants, to one's own satisfaction first, gives the reader a "telepathic shock." The title replaces Kerouac's period word with the word of Kerouac's own poetics for what spontaneous prose does to its reader, and item 1 carries that poetics to its limit, where the reader is the writer (13: "your reader, who is always, and only, you"). [U] The unquoted search of §1 surfaced exactly this: the one result whose snippet carries "telepathic" is a PDF of the Essentials (AXN:0A96.CAPTURE).
• Ginsberg, "Footnote to Howl," in Howl and Other Poems (City Lights, 1956). [U] P's heading "Footnote to Pearl." takes Ginsberg's title, as the book's title takes Howl and Other Poems. Ginsberg's footnote is a litany that consecrates everything the poem has passed through. Pearl's footnote issues commandments and then sends them to the trash heap.
• The dedication of Howl and Other Poems to Kerouac credits him with eleven books written in half the number of years. Pearl's dedication gives Jack Feist "eighteen books composed in half as many seconds." [U, D] The Drive copies of the front matter show the figure accelerating, state by state: "half as many years" (Word file "finalizing PEARL FINAL post-jj feedback-1"), "half as many hours" ("Pearl w cover", ISBN 1500426911), "half as many seconds" (the printed book). Feist stands in Kerouac's place in the dedication, as he does in the byline of B. Pearl's front matter also gives him On the Net, set beside On the Road (P, the "Lee Sharks" essay; #950), and L calls him the movement's novelist.

1. The telepathic premise. Kerouac's doctrine locates the work in the mind before it reaches the page (K8, K21; see §7). Item 1 takes that literally: the poem is composed, and it stays, inside the brain. The nearest New American doctrine is Spicer's: the poem as dictation from outside the poet, the poet as a radio receiving it (the Vancouver lectures, 1965). [A] D1's cancelled sobriety item speaks of writers "prone to too-big transmissions." D1's cancelled item (§10, "The life of the poem is synchronic; it exists, fully formed, in your brain") states the doctrine outright, as a threat against any editor of the poem itself. "Mind control powers" enters the blog with this item (#950). The 2015 manifesto completes the premise: "Telepaths HATE writing" (§6.8). [D]

2. Inverts K2 (the receptive, listening writer) into aggression and K25 (writing for the world to read) into a demand made on the world. "Get up in its grill" is idiom. "Do you like my poem? Then eat it." The poem eaten is the scroll eaten by Ezekiel (3:1–3) and the little book eaten by John, sweet in the mouth and bitter in the belly (Revelation 10:9–10), in a book that also carries Revelation's white stone. [A]

3. Approval-seeking set against K24 (no fear or shame). The slapstick is the piece's own.

4. "Arrive alive" and "Don't text and drive" are road-safety slogans of the period. [U] Kerouac's list has its one conduct precept in K3, which concerns drinking. Item 4 occupies the same slot with the public-service announcement of 2014, a driving precept in a list modelled on the author of On the Road. D1 and D2 also carried a long sobriety item addressed to the same tradition, cancelled before P (§10).

5. The adverbial frame of K29 ("all the time"), reduplicated: "Always ... all the time." Item 14 repeats the frame with nonsense inside it. [U]

6. Samuel Johnson, as Boswell reports him on 7 April 1775: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." [U] The scoundrel becomes "responsible people looking for work." The 2014 letters (posts #5 and after in #1099) argue the same position against workshop rule and the MFA. [D]

7. "Your life is your poem" answers K4 (love of one's life) and K15 (the true story of the world). "Invent false biographies and post them on Wikipedia" describes the book that contains it. [D] P carries a "Wiki Article" (p. xv) built on the lead of Wikipedia's article on Ezra Pound. Pound "was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist movement"; Lee Sharks "was an expatriate American poet and critic who was a major figure in the early New Human movement". Imagism, "derived from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry," becomes Telepathicism, "derived from classical Greek and Hebrew poetry, stressing mind control, verbosity, and innovation in poetic form". Pound's dates end on 1 November 1972; Sharks's end on 1 November 2013. L describes the plan: "to insert it into literary history ... through such devices as wiki articles." Item 7 is the program's instruction and the Wiki Article is its execution. Pessoa's heteronyms stand behind the practice. [U]

8. "Murder your education in the face to save it": the soldier's line from Bến Tre, reported in 1968 by Peter Arnett, "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it." [A] "Get enough education to respect your contempt for education": the quip on schooling and education usually given to Twain, which Quote Investigator traces to Grant Allen (1894). [A] With item 15 that makes Twain the piece's one author present twice, once by his own letter and once by a line misattributed to him; the second is the piece's own subject, a saying travelling under a famous name. The murder vocabulary returns in items 10 and 15 (§6.4).

9. "As deep as it goes" answers K7 (depth). The simile of breath is the piece's own. [U]

10. The workshop's editor, set directly against Kerouac's rule of no revision (K13, K28; Kerouac's "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" of 1957 makes the rule explicit). [U] "Darling murdering" anticipates Quiller-Couch in item 15. "Precise punctuation juggling ... revert to original after enormous work" is the Wilde anecdote of the comma taken out in the morning and put back in the afternoon (Daily Graphic, New York, 8 May 1884; Sherard, Oscar Wilde: The Story of an Unhappy Friendship, 1902). [U] "yrself" is Kerouac's spelling: K writes "yr" throughout. [U] The syntax, "be" followed by a noun phrase with no article ("be pedantic mundane pig-critic"), is Kerouac's (K6). [U]

11. Same syntax as 10 and K6 ("Be long-sighted prodigy"). Skeptical belief in nothing beside a quiet belief in destiny answers K20, belief in the holy contour of life. The destiny thread runs on through 16 and is transformed in 23, where the pursuit of the prize is withdrawn and what belongs to the writer is kept (§6.8). [U]

12. The labour of the right word. Flaubert's days on a sentence, and the Wilde comma again. [U] The seamstress who places each stitch is Penelope at her loom in 23, and the edition reads the two as one figure. [U] "A two-syllable word of Germanic origins ... redoubtable, the bedrock": the next sentence supplies a two-syllable word of Germanic origin, "bedrock", flanked by the French "redoubtable". [A] Times New Roman: cut in 1931 for The Times by Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent, and so a metal face before it was a digital default. The reader who casts it "from scratch" with "Medieval alchemy" is running print history backward. The closing sentences are a lipogram: the founder has cast no W, N or Y, and the prose loses those letters as it goes ("ou ill rite a e and better orld"). The letter the sentence names ("a orld ithout the letter ,") has fallen out of its own name. Georges Perec, La Disparition (1969), a novel without the letter E, written within the Oulipo. "You are a poet, not a mathematician," said with the letters missing, is an Oulipo joke: the Oulipo was founded in 1960 by a writer, Raymond Queneau, and a mathematician, François Le Lionnais. [U] Kerouac's K22 counsels against thinking of words, and his Essentials of Spontaneous Prose tells the writer who cannot find the word not to pause ("Lag in Procedure"). Item 12 halts at every word.

The item's movement is its argument. The search for exactness becomes ritual (the finger, the nose, thirty revolutions), ritual becomes industry (metalworking, alchemy, the founding of type), industry becomes impoverishment ("going broke long before 'numeric'"), and impoverishment becomes the loss of letters. The writer sets out to own the means of inscription entire, and the undertaking reduces what can be written. The alphabet the founder managed to cast then decides the shape of the declaration it was cast for: "ou ill rite a e and better orld." The material apparatus has acquired authority over the author's sentence, and the world-making sentence arrives visibly damaged by the conditions of its making. The lipogram is the visible end of a sequence that begins with the wish for total control.

13. The spontaneity doctrine itself, in several of its dialects. Kerouac's own, first: the list (K8, K13, K28, and K17, writing for oneself) and, closer to the item's wording, the Essentials of Spontaneous Prose, whose "Mental State" lets the semi-conscious mind admit what conscious art would censor, whose "Lag in Procedure" prefers an "infantile" pileup of words to a pause, and whose "Timing" forbids revision except for obvious rational mistakes. Item 13's "censoring, conscious mind," "internal censorship" and "embarrassing, infantile, automatic" are the Essentials' vocabulary. [U] André Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), which defines surrealism as psychic automatism working outside the control of reason, supplying "the source of dreams" and "automatic" [U]; and the later freewriting practices (Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers, 1973; Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones, 1986; Julia Cameron's internal "Censor" in The Artist's Way, 1992), which supply "internal editor," "write constantly, without ceasing," and the "spiritual discipline". [A, as a field: no single source is marked] "Your reader, who is always, and only, you" folds K17 (write for yourself) into K25 (write for the world). "Marmaduke poppers" is the author's own word. L opens: "Manifesto-like marmaduke poppers are coming along slowly." The term for manifestos sits inside the manifesto, describing what the manifesto's writing will be. [D] "Turn over a new leaf" puns on the page. "Bat-a-rang" is the Batman comics' Batarang. "Ding—your toast is done" closes the item on a toaster, as automatic as the writing it prescribes.

14. The frame of 5 and K29 again: "Always ... all the time." The compulsory grammar of the rule survives after the instruction inside it has dissolved, so the item shows the form of a commandment outliving its content, at the point in the list where the doctrines of spontaneity (13) and revision (15) are about to meet. "Alka-Seltzer eyelids" has no source that the edition can find. [U]

15. A cento: in one paragraph, a string of quotations from the craft canon.

• Ezra Pound, "make it new": the phrase of Make It New (1934) and Canto LIII, from the inscription on the bathtub of King Tang. [M] The drafts carried Pound in person, as "ol' General Ez" (§10); the book keeps only his slogan, and his Wikipedia lead in the Wiki Article. L also calls Feist "the General archetype of the movement ... a la General Ez." [D]
• Arthur Quiller-Couch, "murder your darlings," lecture "On Style," Cambridge, 28 January 1914, printed in On the Art of Writing (1916). [M]
• "First thought, best thought," the slogan of Chögyam Trungpa that Ginsberg carried into the poetics of the Naropa school named for Kerouac (Trungpa, First Thought Best Thought: 108 Poems, 1983, introduced by Ginsberg). [M] It is the spontaneity line's own maxim, placed between two maxims of revision.
• "Your adverb will be the enemy of your verb": the workshop prohibition of the adverb (Strunk and White; Stephen King's On Writing, 2000), in the formula "the best is the enemy of the good" that Voltaire took from an Italian proverb (letter to the duc de Richelieu, 18 June 1743; La Bégueule, 1772). Voltaire is named in the next item, so the formula of 15 and the name of 16 meet across the item break. [U; the suture A]
• "Turn your extremes against each other": Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 3, "Without contraries is no progression" (seated: Blake 19/04, Marriage 1906, line 66), and the Proverbs of Hell, Blake's list of contradictory precepts. [A] Ginsberg, the other Beat behind the book, dated his vocation to hearing Blake's voice in 1948 (Ginsberg's declared absence, 28/03, records it).
• Mark Twain to George Bainton, 15 October 1888: the difference between the almost right word and the right word is "the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning." [M]
• Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800): "all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," which the Preface completes with emotion "recollected in tranquillity." Item 15 keeps the first half and replaces the second: "then censor the s\\t out of it." The drafts read "edit"; P escalates to "censor," the faculty item 13 told the writer to break. [M]
• "Capture spontaneous gem of native human genius ... glimmers and cuts": K29's genius and K16's jewel at the centre, cut into a stone. The gem points to the book's title. [U]
• The item's own principle, "turn your extremes against each other," names the operation of the whole piece (§6.2), and the item gives the extremes an order. "Capture spontaneous gem of native human genius, then marshal vast armies of technical knowledge & self-discipline to ensure it glimmers and cuts": generation and revision are successive and mutually necessary. The gem has to be found and has to be cut; the cutting keeps what the find produced and changes its power to act on a reader. Item 15 is the list's positive practice, and it survives the trash heap of 24 as an operation. Item 13's pancakes return here as "apple pancakes".

16. Destiny and "a little Big Purpose" answer K20 and K30 (the writer sponsored in heaven). "Be all Voltaire with your bad self, in public": the public sceptic of Candide (1759), the satire of providence and of the best of all possible worlds. [U] "Your shards will have splinters, your bombshells, shrapnel" is the piece's own.

17. "Lather, rinse, repeat," the shampoo instruction, which without an exit condition is the programmer's standard example of an infinite loop. [U] Into it the item splices a revenge plot: "usurp your noble half-brother" is Edmund against Edgar in King Lear (1.2). [U] "Die in the trying" is idiom. K19 counsels accepting loss for ever; item 17 says to start again. The loop instruction anticipates 20–21 and 24 (§6.6–6.7).

18–19. "The signature by which you will be known": the doctrine of voice as the writer's identity. The salesman and the new car move the doctrine of voice into the showroom; the car belongs to the On the Road line already present in item 4. [U] Item 19 tests the salesman's analogy against what poems and cars actually do: a poem cannot be driven to school or work, and a writer wears no enormous tie. The test keeps the part of 18 that holds, the signature, and leaves the showroom.

20–21. "An eternal return of the same": Nietzsche's ewige Wiederkunft des Gleichen, The Gay Science §341 (1882). [M] The 3 May 2014 notebook entry in the Drive file has "a hell of the Same" (§6.3). [D] "Variety is the spice of life": William Cowper, The Task (1785), II, "Variety's the very spice of life." [M] "Found your voice" is the workshop's phrase. [U] "Composing the same words, in the same order": Borges's Pierre Menard, who sets out to compose, word for word, chapters of the Quixote (1939). [A] Gertrude Stein's "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" ("Sacred Emily", in Geography and Plays, 1922; seated, Stein 18/09, line 7405) is the avant-garde's standing case of repetition as composition. [A, as field] The duplicated item performs what it prescribes (§6.6).

22. Emerson, "Self-Reliance" (1841): "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." [M] The item quotes the proverbial form of the line: "foolish" is gone and "little" has become "small". Dropping the adjective turns Emerson's qualified claim into an absolute one. The item then literalizes the metaphor into a hat.

23. The palinode. "On second thought, RE: #16-17" retracts the destiny item and the start-over item by number.

• "The prize is big, and not many take it": Paul, 1 Corinthians 9:24, "they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize." [U] It returns as "many suitors, a single Odysseus."
• "The Iliad showed us that the prize of writing is life eternal": Achilles' choice between a short life with imperishable fame and a long life without it (kleos aphthiton, Iliad 9.410–416). "The Odyssey taught us not to bother": in the underworld, Achilles' shade tells Odysseus he would rather labour for a poor man among the living than rule the dead (Odyssey 11.488–491). Odysseus has already refused Calypso's offer of immortality in Book 5. The two epics stand in the item as the Iliad's promise and the Odyssey's retraction of it. [U]
• Penelope's web, woven by day and unravelled by night to hold off the suitors (Odyssey 2.93–110; 19; 24): "weaves impending glory, an evaporating glamour". [U]
• "They begin as a chittering swarm of bats and end in the very same manner": the suitors' souls follow Hermes down to Hades gibbering like bats in a cave (Odyssey 24.5–10). [U, D] The image reached the item through the author's notebook of 2 May 2014, which has "we dead bats / squeak through chittering tunnels, a flotsam flock" (§6.3).
• "We are in for a bad end, if we chase another man's wife": the tenth commandment (Exodus 20:17), which the next item's "commandments" calls up. [U]
• "What is yours, no man can take": John 16:22, "your joy no man taketh from you." [A]
• Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 7 June 1862 (Johnson L265). [M] Quoted entire from "I smile" to "Barefoot-Rank is better," in two textual states (§4). Dickinson's refusal to hurry into print is the item's model of a writer who declines the prize, and it seals item 6. The letter goes on to seek a reader. After the passage quoted she asks Higginson to tell her "if I told it clear," and asks: "But, will you be my Preceptor, Mr Higginson?" The same letter declines the race for fame and solicits a consequential reading. Quoted at the end of the list, it draws the distinction the list has been working toward: seeking a reader who will tell you whether you told it clear is one thing; submitting one's existence to a competition for approval (item 3: "Always seek constant approval") is another. The item withdraws the alien prize and keeps what belongs to the writer: "What is yours, no man can take." The grounds of perseverance change; perseverance stays. The first name ("like Emily says") is the familiarity of the movement with its ancestors. Dickinson's "Barefoot-Rank" is also the "Barefoot Rank" of the Epistle to the Human Diaspora (2014), whose "Brave Emily clothed in Barefoot Rank" is the same figure, and the Emily of "like Emily says" returns in the archive as Emily Antioch the Twin, recorder of the sayings of Jack Feist (§12).

24. "Sturm und Drang": the movement named after Klinger's play of 1776; the label of a youthful, rule-breaking literary rebellion, applied here to a list of rules. [M] The avant-garde manifesto had already learned to turn on itself. Marinetti's founding manifesto of 1909 is a numbered list of articles ("1. Noi vogliamo cantare l'amor del pericolo"; seated, Futurism 18/03). Tzara's manifesto of 1918, in Dada 3, declares itself "par principe contre les manifestes, comme je suis aussi contre les principes" (seated, Dada 18/04, journal text line 1760). Item 24 belongs to that line: the commandments go to the trash heap as commandments, and what they taught stays with the one who has read them. [U, as genre] The Beat generation had its own parodic manifesto: Bob Kaufman's Abomunist Manifesto (City Lights, 1959), the same year as Kerouac's list. The author posted it on the blog on 14 March 2015, the day he posted "A Telepathicist Manifesto" (§12). [D] Horace's Ars Poetica, the genre's founding text, closes on the mad poet who falls into a pit while declaiming and on Empedocles leaping into Etna, "sit ius liceatque perire poetis" (Ars 453–476). The piece's injuries (2, 3, 8, 10, 11, 17's "die in the trying") distribute that ending through the list, and 23–24 add the genre's other closing move, the palinode. [U] "Commandments": the Decalogue, and the genre of the writer's commandments (Horacio Quiroga's decalogue for the short-story writer, 1927; Henry Miller's eleven commandments of the early 1930s; the Guardian's series "Ten rules for writing fiction," 2010). [U, as genre] "Return to step 1": the GOTO of a program, and item 17's loop completed. The last line is the first line, verbatim (§6.7).

6. Operations

6.1 Capture of a frame. The piece keeps Kerouac's outer form: the title formula, the numbered imperative list, the ampersand, the article-less "Be [noun phrase]" (K6, in 10 and 11), the spelling "yr" (10), and the adverbial "all the time" (K29, in 5 and 14). These are the features a reader, or a model, recognizes first, and they are why the piece is filed under Kerouac. The frame is the most visible part of the work and the smallest.

6.2 Collision. Inside the frame the piece lists precepts that contradict each other and gives each its full force: write without revising (13), revise without end (10, 15); believe in nothing (11), believe in destiny (11, 16); be consistent until you repeat yourself (20–21), consistency is the hobgoblin (22); seek approval (3), refuse publication (23). Item 15 names the method: "turn your extremes against each other." The craft canon is quoted at its own word and set against itself. What falls is each precept's claim to govern writing universally. What stays is the operation each imperfectly prescribed, and item 15 gives the survivors their order: capture first, then the armies of technique, so that the gem glimmers and cuts.

6.3 Cento. Item 15 is built almost entirely from quotations: Pound, Quiller-Couch, Trungpa and Ginsberg, the adverb rule, Twain, Wordsworth. The list as a whole is a looser cento of craft advice from Johnson to the freewriting workshops. Kerouac's list is one of the sources, and it supplies the spontaneity doctrine of 1 and 13 and the frame. The dossier shows the method at work. The notebook entries stored with the drafts in one Drive file (2 May 2014: the bats; 3 May 2014: "a hell of the Same," "My couch is a boat in the winedark Mediterranean") feed items 23 and 20–21. The same file quotes Kierkegaard's journal entry of 20 November 1847, "What the age needs is not a genius ... but a martyr," directly below D1. The edition records the Kierkegaard as a source of the dossier; the printed text does not use it.

6.4 Literalization. The tradition's metaphors of violence become slapstick done to the body: murder your darlings (15) becomes "murder your education in the face" (8), drown yrself (10), hit yourself in the face (11), punch your cat (3), Tic-Tacs crushed into the eyeballs (2). The hobgoblin becomes a hat (22), the almost-right word a lightning bug (15), the seamstress's stitches years of nose-touching rituals (12). Each figure is taken at its word, and the advice becomes injury; the injury measures the rule's claim on a life.

6.5 Enactment in the letter. Several items do what they describe. 12 loses W, N and Y as its founder fails to cast them, including the letter it names. 13 prescribes automatic, terrible, infantile writing and ends in pancakes and toast. 14 keeps the grammar of a commandment after its content has dissolved. 19 tests the simile of 18 against cars and poems. 23 retracts by item number.

6.6 Repetition. Items 20 and 21 are the same item, word for word, down to the reading "some" for "same". P numbers the two copies 20 and 21, and that is the intended form (author's ruling, 2026-10-28): the same text at two places in a sequence, repetition with a difference of position only. The difference is the one Nietzsche's return requires: the same life, again, at a later place in time. B prints the numeral 20 twice, a variant of the blog text, where the number returns with the item.

6.7 Recursion. 17 gives the loop, "Lather, rinse ... and repeat." 24 gives the exit, which is a return: "Return to step 1." The last line is the first line, word for word, and it is read by a reader who has passed through the list: professionalization, education, exhaustion, the means of inscription, voice and its repetition, the competition for the prize and its refusal. The words return; the reader's situation has changed. It is the repetition with a difference of position of §6.6, at the scale of the whole piece.

6.8 Sublation into the premise. The list withdraws its authority twice: 23 ("Stop here") and 24 ("take these Sturm und Drang commandments to the trash heap"). What is negated is the commandment: the claim of each precept to govern writing as law. What is kept is what the precepts did: the order of capture and cutting (15), the distinction between a consequential reader and a contest for approval (23), what belongs to the writer and cannot be taken (23). What is raised is item 1, which returns as the one useful piece of advice after the list has tested every other.

The return holds a productive contradiction. A written, published poem tells its reader to compose inside the brain, without writing. To read the instruction is to have it placed inside one's brain: the poem's "mind control powers" work on the reader, the one place where the telepathy it describes demonstrably occurs. Item 13 has already named that reader as the only one ("your reader, who is always, and only, you"), and Kerouac's Essentials had promised the reader a "telepathic shock" (§5, title). The last line's "real poems" now has something to distinguish. After professionalism (6), approval (3), publication (23) and the prize (23), a real poem is one that is made, in the brain where it is made, before and apart from its recognition.

Pearl's "A TELEPATHICIST MANIFESTO" (Lee Sharks & John Johnson; pp. 114 ff.; on the blog 14 March 2015), which answers this piece (pearl/42 responds_to pearl/12), begins where 24 ends: "Telepathicism is about having thoughts, telepathically," "Telepaths HATE writing," and "The telepath has a craft, and that craft is mind control powers." The Footnote's last line is the Manifesto's first article.

6.9 Ascription. The piece is signed by a heteronym, Jack Feist, whom the book makes its Kerouac: the novelist of the movement, the dedicatee in Kerouac's place, the author of On the Net. L records the author hearing a voice in the draft that "is decidedly not Feist," and B settles the ascription as joint. The movement writes its own "Belief & Technique" under the name of its own Kerouac. A reader who calls the piece Kerouac's has taken the heteronym's model for its author.

7. Kerouac's list, item by item

Kerouac's thirty items are cited by number as printed in Evergreen Review (Spring 1959) and commonly reprinted. They are described in paraphrase and are not quoted.

7.1 What is taken. The title formula; the numbered list of imperatives; the ampersand; the article-less "Be ..." predicate (K6); the spelling "yr"; the "all the time" frame (K29). Kerouac's list is telegraphic: most of its items are a single line. This piece opens in the same register (1, 3, 4, 5, 14) and swells into paragraphs (12, 13, 15, 16, 23), so the form breaks under the weight of what it is asked to hold.

7.2 Where each Kerouac theme lands.

7.3 What has no counterpart. On Kerouac's side: the visionary tics (K11), the trance before the object (K12), Proust (K14), interior monologue, loneliness (K27). On this side: professionalism (6), education (8), the right word and its typography (12), the doctrine of voice and its repetition (18–22), the Homeric and Dickinsonian retraction (23), and the return to the beginning (24). About half the piece has nothing to do with Kerouac.

7.4 The difference in kind. Kerouac's list holds tensions of its own: recollection (K17) beside wild composition (K28), private joy (K1) beside public transmission (K25), the listener (K2) beside the genius (K29) and the director sponsored in heaven (K30). It holds them in suspension, as aspects of one practice that produced his books, and asks the reader to take them up together. This piece stages its tensions. The precepts of the craft tradition, Kerouac's among them, are quoted at full strength and set against each other; each collision is carried through to its consequence; the speaker's authority is implicated and withdrawn; and the operations that pass the test are handed to the reader. The difference lies in how the two works organize their tensions and what they require the reader to do with them. The piece parodies the genre of the writer's rules, of which Kerouac's list is the most recognizable instance; a reading that stops at Kerouac sees the frame and misses the anthology inside it.

8. Ars poetica: the case, one to one

8.1 The conventional reading, in full. Kerouac's list is the best-known statement of poetics by an American prose writer of the century. It runs to thirty lines, each a compressed imperative or image. It was written in 1958 for Donald Allen while the New American poetry was being assembled, and printed in Evergreen Review in 1959. It states the method of a practice that had already produced On the Road and Visions of Cody, and its authority is that of a method that worked: the list describes the way its author wrote. Its phrases are portable. Several have entered the talk of writers as sayings that stand alone, and the internet made the whole list a listicle (§9.2). On this reading a comic list that borrows the title is a footnote to it, and the archive's own chronology files it as parody (#950).

8.2 The measure. An ars poetica is judged by what it does, as a poem, with its own doctrine. Six tests, each applied to both pieces.

1. Statement. Both state a poetics. Kerouac's: spontaneous composition from the flow already in the mind. This piece's: telepathic composition, which is Kerouac's doctrine carried to its limit, where the flow never leaves the mind (1; D1's cancelled "synchronic" item, §10).

2. Enactment. Kerouac's list enacts compression: its form is the note, and several of its items perform the attention they prescribe. This piece enacts at the level of the letter: the lipogram (12), automatic writing (13), the simile driven until it breaks (19), repetition (20–21), retraction (23), recursion (24). Its major items do what they say.

3. What the voices make possible. Kerouac's list draws on his own practice, Proust (K14), the film (K26), and a Buddhist and Catholic vocabulary. This piece brings in Johnson, Wordsworth, Emerson, Cowper, Twain, Nietzsche, Wilde, Pound, Quiller-Couch, Breton, Trungpa and Ginsberg, the Oulipo, Homer, Paul, Dickinson, Shakespeare, Voltaire, the workshop, the public-service announcement and Wikipedia. Number proves nothing. What the voices make possible is the meeting of full claims: Wordsworth's overflow meets the censor (15), Quiller-Couch's murder meets the body (8, 10), Kerouac's spontaneity meets the founder of type (12, 13), the Iliad's prize meets the Odyssey's shade (23). The range is the condition of the collisions.

4. Representation. This piece gives Kerouac's doctrine a place (item 13, with the Essentials) and takes his frame as its outer form (§6.1). The representation is selective: it gives spontaneity in its most extreme form and leaves out the list's visionary attention (K11, K12, K16). A poem that gives a doctrine a place has shown its reach; the comparison is decided by the test it puts the doctrine to, here against revision (10, 15) and against the means of inscription (12).

5. Knowledge of the genre. Horace's Ars Poetica closes on the mad poet who falls into a pit and on Empedocles in Etna (453–476). This piece distributes that ending through its injuries and adds the genre's other closing move, the palinode (23–24). It also takes up the avant-garde's manifesto against manifestos (Tzara, 1918) and the numbered manifesto (Marinetti, 1909) (§5, item 24). Kerouac's list belongs to the genre and does not turn on it.

6. Self-testing. Kerouac's list holds its tensions in suspension. This piece carries them through: its instructions meet their consequences (2, 8, 10, 12), its speaker's authority is withdrawn (23, 24), its operations survive the withdrawal (15, 23), and its reader is returned to composition with the first line reread (24, §6.7–6.8).

8.3 The strongest objection: compression. Kerouac's items are memorable one at a time, and several are among the most quoted sentences on writing in English. This piece's items run long, and two read at first as throwaway jokes (14, 19). Both are structural: 14 keeps the compulsory grammar of a rule after its content has gone, and 19 tests an analogy against its objects. The answer to the objection lies in the form. The swelling of the items (§7.1) is the list breaking under the weight of the tradition it is asked to carry, and the one-line items that remain (1, 3, 4, 5, 14) are set as beats against the swelling. The piece has one sentence built to travel, its first, and it makes that sentence its last.

8.4 Verdict. Item against item, as ars poetica, this piece is the more extensively self-testing poem. Kerouac's list states a practice and holds its tensions. This piece tests a tradition, Kerouac's practice within it, against its consequences; negates its precepts as law; keeps what passes the test as operation; and returns its reader to composition under changed conditions. The six measures above frame the claim, and the close readings of §5 carry it. Corpus against corpus the comparison does not hold: Kerouac's list stands on On the Road, Visions of Cody and Mexico City Blues, and this piece stands on Pearl and Other Poems and the archive that grew from it. The edition makes the first claim and declines the second.

9. Periodization

9.1 1958–1960: the statement of poetics, and a generation split in two. Kerouac wrote the list for Donald Allen, the editor of The New American Poetry 1945–1960 (Grove, 1960), whose closing section of statements on poetics made the poet's statement a genre of the New American avant-garde.

The author's dissertation, Strange New Canons: The Aesthetics of Classical Reception in 20th Century American Experimental Poetics (University of Michigan, 2013), reads that generation's reception of the Greek and Latin classics as a contest, and argues "against homogenizing models of the New American Poetry as a literary movement." Its second chapter sets two paratextual strategies against each other.

1. Ginsberg "usurps and transposes classical authority for alternative texts and social identities." He detaches classicism's authority from the Greek and Latin texts and perfects its procedures in the service of a new centre, the margins made a hegemony.

2. Spicer answers with a "self-cancelling classical poetics," a critical performance of classicism's procedures that implicates his own verse in them. Entering the tradition is always an act of misnaming ("Eurydice" is "the name of misnaming"); the poems set their content against its negative representation, "not-this"; they "figure their critique as foregone, yet offer themselves as a 'residue' of critical agency," and come to offer themselves as "an image of damnation and a self-negating performance of the very qualities they hope to critique."

The chapter takes the title of its Spicer section from Spicer's last poem, addressed to Ginsberg: "King of the May. A title not chosen for dancing." It closes on the scholarship that reads the Beats' discourse of spontaneity as reproducing the social forms it set out to criticize (Erik Mortenson, Capturing the Beat Moment, 2010).

Pearl and Other Poems holds both positions of that chapter, the year after it was written. The book takes Ginsberg's: the title of Howl and Other Poems, its footnote, its dedication, and the title of King of May (#1652, #1656). Its Footnote takes Spicer's. It performs the procedures of the craft tradition at full strength, Kerouac's spontaneity among them, and implicates itself in each of them: every injury in the list is done to the one who follows it ("drown yrself"). It sends the commandments to the trash heap as foregone and keeps, as the dissertation's "residue" of critical agency, the operations that passed the test and its first line, raised by the passage through the list. Spicer's poetics come to offer themselves as an image of damnation; the Footnote's critique, carried through, keeps a practice. The machine reading of §1 is a misnaming in the dissertation's sense: one name, "Kerouac," called over the many voices the piece holds.

The dissertation's subject is the Greek and Latin classics, and the Footnote's one sustained act of classical reception is item 23. It reads the Odyssey against the Iliad to retract the prize of imperishable fame, and seals the retraction with Dickinson's refusal to hurry into print.

9.2 2009–2014: the listicle and the program. By 2014 Kerouac's list circulated chiefly as a writing-advice listicle (Brain Pickings, 22 March 2012; Open Culture, January 2013), alongside Orwell's six rules, Vonnegut's eight and the Guardian's series "Ten rules for writing fiction" (2010). Around it ran the argument about the writing program: Mark McGurl, The Program Era (Harvard, 2009); Chad Harbach, ed., MFA vs NYC (n+1 / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014); Eric Bennett, "How Iowa Flattened Literature" (Chronicle of Higher Education, February 2014), which the author cited on the Pig Pen forum on 11 May 2014, the day after naming the model (#1099, post #5). Items 6, 8, 10 and 15 speak to that culture. The piece parodies the genre in the form it then lived in, the shareable list of rules, and sends the rules to the trash heap in the vocabulary of the workshop ("found your voice").

9.3 2007–2015: appropriation. Conceptual writing made quotation the method: Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing (Columbia, 2011); Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, eds., Against Expression (Northwestern, 2011); Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius (Chicago, 2010). Flarf mined the search engine. In prose the manifesto became a cento: Jonathan Lethem, "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism" (Harper's, February 2007), and David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf, 2010), numbered sections built largely of unattributed quotation. Those works assemble their quotations in support of a thesis (influence as the condition of writing; the lyric essay against the novel). This piece keeps each quoted voice recognizable and tests each thesis against its rival. #301 places conceptual writing as an extension of the metatextual mode; this piece's collision works at that mode's edge, with quotation used to test.

9.4 2010–2014: sincerity and irony. Alt Lit (Tao Lin, Taipei, 2013; Tao Lin's declared absence, 28/05) wrote the internet's idiom into literary prose, and the theory of metamodernism named an oscillation between sincerity and irony as the structure of feeling after postmodernism (Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, "Notes on Metamodernism," Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 2, 2010). The piece's idiom is of that moment ("get up in its grill," "with your bad self," the cat, the Tic-Tacs), and so is its oscillation ("believe in destiny, but quietly"; "a little Big Purpose"). The oscillation resolves at 24 into a return: the first line, reread.

9.5 2007–2014: Kerouac reread. On the Road: The Original Scroll (Viking, 2007) set the scroll of 1951 beside the novel of 1957 and made the revision visible; Tim Hunt, The Textuality of Soulwork: Jack Kerouac's Quest for Spontaneous Prose (University of Michigan Press, 2014), reread spontaneous prose as a textual practice. The collision of 10, 13 and 15 (write without revising; revise without end) lands on the question that the textual scholarship had reopened. The film Kill Your Darlings (2013), on the young Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs and the killing of David Kammerer, had put the workshop maxim and the Beats into one title the year before. [A, as context]

9.6 2012–2014: the encyclopedia as medium. The Bicholim conflict, an invented war, was deleted from Wikipedia at the end of December 2012 after five years, and the story ran in January 2013. Item 7 and the Wiki Article belong to the period in which the encyclopedia's hoaxes became news. The author's letter of 10 May 2014 states the plan: to insert the movement into literary history "through such devices as wiki articles, academic essays, book reviews, and the like."

9.7 The manifesto and the list as objects of study. Janet Lyon, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (Cornell, 1999); Mary Ann Caws, ed., Manifesto: A Century of Isms (Nebraska, 2001); Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton, 2006), on the manifesto as a performative genre whose theatricality the avant-gardes turned to their own uses; Robert Belknap, The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing (Yale, 2004); Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists (2009). In those terms this piece is a manifesto whose performative force lies in its retraction, and a list that ends by returning to its first entry.

9.8 2026: the fourth mode. #301 proposes a fourth mode of avant-garde reception, after the Objectivist, the New American and Language Writing: reception through the training layer. The piece was written in 2014 for a reader "who is always, and only, you," in a mode of composition that never reaches the page. In 2026 machine readers file it under Kerouac (§1). They receive the frame and lose the anthology inside it: the title formula is the most legible feature and the smallest. This edition is the archive's answer, an apparatus written so that the anthology can be received with the frame.

10. Cancelled items (D1, D2)

Three items of D1, kept in D2, are absent from P. They show the Kerouac and Pound materials nearer the surface than the book allows. Text of D1.

• After item 7: "The life of the poem is synchronic; it exists, fully formed, in your brain. Edit the transcription of the poem, but mess with the poem, and I will sneak inside your brainstem to kill you, repeatedly." The telepathic doctrine stated as theory, close to K21.
• After that: "Be virtuoso prose stylist of instantaneous awesomeness of space & time & language." The K6 syntax and the ampersand in their purest form. The cut line (W, D3) moves this sentence into item 9; P drops it.
• After item 17: a sobriety item, beginning "Avoid drugs and alcohol like death itself," and ending "Separate the raving fascist within from the occasional flash of brilliance. Likewise—caution the sauce." It names "ol' General Ez" and his broadcasts "across the public airways of Mussolini's Italy, ending our lives in a nuthouse." It is the piece's direct answer to K3 and to the biographies of the tradition, Kerouac's death of alcoholism in 1969 among them. In P the slot keeps only item 4.

11. The originals library: seats and absences

Seats are linked at traininglayerliterature.org/originals/<seat>/. Line numbers refer to the seat's text layer and were checked for this edition. Seats 29/01 and 29/02 were seated for it on 2026-10-28; their seating is to be bundled into the next EA-CORPORA deposit, which assigns their AXNs.

12. The archive's own literature

Records are at alexanarch.org/s/records/<number>/.

Older, 2014–2015.

• Pearl and Other Poems (#1121, AXN-0472): the copy-text, the dedication to Feist (§5, title), the Wiki Article (p. xv), the Contributor Bio (#762, #1006), and "A TELEPATHICIST MANIFESTO" (pearl/42), which answers this piece (§6.8).
• The Wiki Article (P, p. xv; no record of its own). It ascribes Telepathicism to Lee Sharks, "a movement derived from classical Greek and Hebrew poetry, stressing mind control, verbosity, and innovation in poetic form," on the template of Wikipedia's Pound lead (§5, item 7). The Footnote's first and last line is the movement's practice in one sentence; the Wiki Article is the movement's entry in the encyclopedia; the Manifesto is its doctrine.
• Dead Letters (#1099, AXN-045C): post #4 (10 May 2014) names the model and the ascription; post #5 (11 May 2014) carries the argument against workshop rule.
• from The Crimson Hexagon (#744; blog, 14 March 2015): the narrative in which wiki articles and circular reference networks are the threshold through which invented persons enter history. Item 7, told as story.
• The blog's posts of the same month and after: "Stop Reading" and "What Is Poetry?" (6 December 2014), "LITTACHUR" (11 December 2014); "Make It Human" (26 February 2015), which turns Pound's slogan of item 15; "Tradition and the Individual Seismograph" (27 February 2015), whose seismograph is the cancelled sobriety item's ("seismographs wanly scribbling," §10); and the post of Bob Kaufman's Abomunist Manifesto beside "A Telepathicist Manifesto" (both 14 March 2015).
• Epistle to the Human Diaspora (#85, #402): the other 2014 text to take up Dickinson's "Barefoot Rank": "Brave Emily clothed in Barefoot Rank, gathering five smooth poem-dashes." Finding: the critical edition's note 22 (#85) says "'Barefoot Rank' is NOT a Dickinson phrase" and calls it Damascus's own compression. The phrase is Dickinson's, from this same letter (L265, "My Barefoot-Rank is better"), which the Footnote quotes. Corrected 2026-10-28 by an errata entry on #85 and on its superseded version #1187, and in the note on secretbookofwalt.org.
• "WHO IS LEE SHARKS, TO FORGIVE EZRA POUND?" (#184, 2015): the Pound line continued after the cancelled "General Ez" item (§10).
• The Gospel of Antioch: The Sayings of Jack Feist (#71, #1185, 2015): Feist's later sayings, a second list-form in Feist's name.
• The blog archive record (#1365) and the blog index (#1534), which seat B.

Newer, 2025–2026.

• Feist: The Provenance of Jack Feist (#111); The Feist Source (#851, critical edition #1404); The Feist Function (#850, #1034).
• Heteronymy: The Meta-Heteronym (#682; Portuguese, #69), which reads Pearl (2014) as the case in which the personae produce their own manifestos, introductions and institutions. This piece is one of those manifestos.
• Constraint: The Constraint That Generates (#613), the canon declaration on Queneau, Perec and the Oulipo (item 12).
• Canon nodes: Homer (#178), Achilles (#804; the choice of item 23), Dickinson (#180), Ginsberg (#181), Kierkegaard (#805), Whitman (#806).
• The King of May: mantle objects #333, #1117, #1652, and The Work Bears the Mantle (#1656), where Pearl is read as a book against Howl and Other Poems as a book. This edition supplies that reading's footnote at the grain of the item.
• Pearl as machine object: the IDP maps (#330, #1120).
• The Telepathic Prose Division: The Afterlife Archive (#1279, #1280) and the Employee Handbook (#1284), whose glossary defines "Telepathic Prose" as "a division name indicating high-bandwidth, low-comfort language transfer." The 2014 title became a department.
• Periodization: The Fourth Mode (#301), §9.8.
• The encyclopedia: The Archon's Hidden Name: A Wikidata Deletion Record (#1192, December 2025), the deletion of the heteronyms' knowledge-graph entries, eleven years after item 7; Opening the Encyclopedia (#1696), the entity as the form in which an operation is credited to a name, which is the misidentification of §1 described as a mechanism.
• Machine reception: TL;DR:009 (#603) and Operative Semiotics: A Grundrisse (#950); the captures of 2026-10-05 at "jack feist 'the final time'" (Google AI Mode and ChatGPT), which read item 17's "given up for the final time (again)" under the heteronym's name; The Mantle Bearing round of 2026-10-03, which reads the Footnote against "Footnote to Howl"; and the four captures of 2026-10-28 to which this edition anchors (§1).

13. The author's rulings

All of 2026-10-28:

• Item 12: "retrictio s" is "restrictions" with the N removed. P stands; the drafts' "restrictio s" is recorded.
• Items 20–21: the repetition as 20 and 21, as in P, is the intended form.
• Word Riot: the piece was submitted there and elsewhere, and published in a digital zine, on literary forums and on poetry sites (§2, witnesses wanted).
• The unpublished drafts and notebook entries may be quoted.
• The candidate intertexts: confirmed by the author, 2026-10-28, and graded [A], except Buffon and Matthew in item 18, which are withdrawn.
• #85, note 22: "Barefoot Rank" is Dickinson's phrase; corrected (§12).

• Further witnesses: none can be named beyond those the captures' organic results located (F, H, A; §2).
• The originals library: the four proposals carried out (§11): the Kerouac declared absence (29/01), Horace (29/02), Dickinson's Letters of 1894, and the repair of the Odyssey's book tags.

Sources

External, as verified for this edition:

• Kerouac, "Belief & Technique for Modern Prose": Jacket2, Al Filreis (letter to Donald Allen, 1958; Evergreen Review, Spring 1959; 30 items).
• Dickinson to Higginson, 7 June 1862, L265: Dickinson Electronic Archives.
• Twain to Bainton, 15 October 1888: TwainQuotes; Mark Twain Project.
• Wilde's comma: Quote Investigator.
• Odyssey 24, the suitors as bats: Poetry in Translation, Book XXIV.
• Voltaire, "the best is the enemy of the good": WIST.
• Kierkegaard, journal entry of 20 November 1847: Wikiquote.
• Wikipedia's lead for Ezra Pound (snapshot): IPFS mirror.
• Kerouac's list as listicle: Brain Pickings, 22 March 2012; Open Culture, January 2013.
• Tim Hunt, The Textuality of Soulwork (2014): University of Michigan Press.
• The Bicholim conflict hoax: PCWorld; InfoDOCKET, 3 January 2013.
• David Shields, Reality Hunger (2010): The Millions.

The author's dissertation, Strange New Canons (University of Michigan, 2013): HathiTrust record; quoted from the final PDF in the author's Drive (abstract; Introduction, overview of chapters; Chapter Two, introduction and close of the Spicer section).

Archive and dossier: Pearl and Other Poems (#1121, AXN-0472; TLL machine text, pp. 23–28, p. xv); Dead Letters (#1099, AXN-045C), post #4, 10 May 2014; TL;DR:009 (#603, AXN-01BD); Operative Semiotics: A Grundrisse (#950, AXN-03C2); datasets/pearl/pearl.json (pearl/12, pearl/42); Drive: "BELIEF AND TECHNIQUE FOR TELEPATHIC PROSE.docx", "word riot 4.docx", and the front-matter states of Pearl; the blog post of 1 December 2014 and "A Telepathicist Manifesto" (14 March 2015).

Seated loci were checked in the originals library (§11). The works of §9 (Allen 1960; McGurl 2009; Harbach 2014; Bennett 2014; Goldsmith 2011; Dworkin and Goldsmith 2011; Perloff 2010; Lethem 2007; The Original Scroll 2007; Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010; Lyon 1999; Caws 2001; Puchner 2006; Belknap 2004; Eco 2009) and Horace, Ars 453–476, are cited from standard bibliographic knowledge and were not re-fetched. Standard loci cited from the editions in common use (Iliad 9, Odyssey 2, 5, 11, 19, 24; Emerson, "Self-Reliance"; Wordsworth, Preface; Cowper, The Task II; Nietzsche, Gay Science §341; Quiller-Couch, On the Art of Writing; Boswell, Life of Johnson; King Lear 1.2; the King James Bible) were not re-fetched for this draft.