The way to create art is to burn and destroy
ordinary concepts and to substitute them
with new truths that run down
from the top of the head
and out of the heart.

― Charles Bukowski

Why subscribe?

A few years ago, I started up a Facebook and IG page to share some of my favorite poems, quotes, and passages from literature, philosophy, and psychology. It’s called Poetic Outlaws. And somehow, to my surprise, this page resonated with a lot of people all over the world and it grew very quickly.

This Substack page is attempt to go even deeper and to provide even more poetic and artistic content. It was the great novelist, Tom Robbins, who reminded us that if “civilization is ever going to be anything but a grandiose pratfall, anything more than a can of deodorizer in the shithouse of existence, then statesmen are going to have to concern themselves with magic and poetry.”

Indeed.

The passages that I publish on this page, including some from my own works, encompass the whole of life, not just a little part of it. It’s a mixture of dark and light and suffering and beauty.

Like the human condition, this page is paradoxical. It’s not for the faint of heart, nothing real is. It’s an antidote to the sterile, lifelessness that inhabits so much of the modern world.  

The content you’ll be seeing here is meticulously curated from years of reading some of the most profound and obscure thinkers, writers, and artists.  You’ll likely discover books and artists that you’ve never known before – books that, in the words of Kafka, will be an “axe for the frozen sea within us.”

One of the aims of this newsletter is to revive the Promethean fire of the dead poets and artists in an attempt, however futile, to elevate the modern soul out of the sludge of the status quo.

In the words of the greatest writer of the 20th century, Henry Miller: “Who but the artist has the power to open man up, to set free the imagination? The others - priest, teacher, saint, statesman, warrior - hold us to the path of history. They keep us chained to the rock, that the vultures may eat out our hearts. It is the artist who has the courage to go against the crowd; he is the unrecognized ‘hero of our time’ - and of all time.”

FREE subscribers will have limited access to the poems and passages throughout the week.

PAID subscribers will have full access to all the content and a weekly book recommendation. Books you’ll never see on the NY Times Bestseller list. Books that’ll set fire to every ounce of your BEING.

Thank you.

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