It is true, though, that I've been avoiding my responsibilities as owner of this site. I've been going through a sort of dark night of the soul recently, and dealing with some heavy things in my life that I don't want to talk too much about, except to put it in brief: my marriage broke up last year, around the beginning of September. Meg and I are both doing fine, and the kids are too. But it's a heavy thing to go through and to be honest I just haven't cared about Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg or hypertext poetry or web-based fiction much lately.

I'm sure I'll get my enthusiasm back, and in the meantime I've been trying to think of ways to make Literary Kicks feel newer and more exciting, since it really hasn't been redesigned or rethought since it's birth more than five years ago (wow, it has been a long time).

I haven't crystallized my ideas much yet, but I know I want to start putting up some streaming video (yeah, I bought an iMac, tangerine, what a great machine). I also want to move beyond the Beat Generation and start covering a greater diversity of styles and genres. Most importantly, I want to open up the site to contributions from others, and turn it from a solo act into more of an ensemble performance.

Anyway, that's all coming at some time in the future ... unless it isn't, in which case it's not. As for what's happening out in the big world out there these days ... well, here are a few things that recently caught my eye.

1. Best new beat-related book so far this millennium: "Poems for the Nation", edited by Allen Ginsberg with Andy Clausen and Eliot Katz. This is a book of current political poems Ginsberg was putting together at the time he died. It features poems by Tuli Kupferkerg, Eileen Myles, Janine Pommy Vega, Anne Waldman, Amiri Baraka and many more. One reason I like the book is the personal enthusiasm of one of it's editors, the poet Eliot Katz, who is a true modern-day left-wing activist who told me excitedly about the book one Sunday on the Lower East Side as he ran from a poetry reading to a secret meeting of provacateurs who were planning to crash a World Bank/International Money Fund meeting in Washington D.C. Another reason I like this book is that it's small and quick to read and costs only six bucks (I'm sick of Beat books that cost $40.00). You can buy a copy here.

2. A sad recent death: Terence McKenna, a popular and much admired social critic of the neo-psychedelic school, in the tradition of Carlos Castaneda, Timothy Leary, etc. I wasn't personally familiar with his work (I've never been into psychedelics myself -- I took magic mushrooms once but nothing too special happened) but I've heard from many that McKenna was a truly original thinker and a very nice person. It's very sad that he died in the middle of a healthy happy life in Hawaiian seclusion, a victim of cancer at the age of 52.

3. On to the living: the great iconoclast Paul Krassner, who has been editor of the hippie propaganda rag "The Realist" for longer than I've been alive, now has a web presence. Krassner has done some interesting things with "The Realist" over the years -- for instance, he got in big trouble after the Kennedy assassination by accusing Lyndon B. Johnson of fucking Kennedy's bullethole on Air Force One. And I hear that was one of the tamer articles. Well, we all need a little realism, so catch a rare New York City appearance by Krassner, if you can, at an Earth Night party at the Bitter End on April 22 -- it's an all-night poetry jam also featuring David Amram, Bob Holman, Frank Messina and many others.

April is the cruelest month. Still, I believe things are looking up. You know, I don't believe in Jesus any more than I believe in magic mushrooms, but Easter is coming soon, and Patti Smith has a new CD out, and it's time to think for me about resurrection. So check back with me soon and hopefully I'll have an all-new, all-different Literary Kicks here to show you. Or maybe not.