Now a vision is what you see with the mind's eye; which is to say, a vision is what you see. A seer is a man who can see things that others cannot see. He is Prometheus, a man who goes into the void and brings back something and shows it to you, so that that kind of void is forever illuminated. After he has done that, anybody can look into that void and they can see it because the man brought it back. He illuminates something that anyone could see, but they don't see it. He does it some way. He paints it, he dances it, he writes it down.
Lew Welch
in The San Francisco Poets

The true poem is walking that edge between what can be said and that which cannot be said. That's the real razor's edge. The poem that falls all the way over into what can be said can still be very exciting, but the further it is from the razor's edge the less it has of the real magic. It can be very well done but the ones that make your hair stand on edge are the ones that are right on the line.
Gary Snyder
in The Real Work: Interviews and Talks 1964-1979

The unspeakable visions of the individual.
Jack Kerouac
item 9 in Belief & Technique for Modern Prose: List of Essentials

• 1.0.0 - Introduction
• 2.0.0 - Unspeakable Visions and Dissident Voices
• 3.0.0 - The Beat Generation in Print
  • 3.1.0 - The underground magazines and presses
  • 3.2.0 - The literary magazines
  • 3.3.0 - The alternative presses
    • 3.3.1 - New Directions
    • 3.3.2 - Grove Press
    • 3.3.3 - City Lights Books
    • 3.3.4 - Olympia Press
  • 3.4.0 - The mainstream publishers
• 4.0.0 - The Absorption of the Avant-garde

• Appendix A - The Orality of the Beat Writers
• Appendix B - Obscenity and the Avant-garde
• Bibliography
• Footnotes

Unspeakable Visions: The Beat Generation and The Bohemian Dialectic. © August, 1991 Michael Hayward