"Language knows more than you do, how can you and language inform each other. Imagination can be contagious. This isn’t about you. Ask not what you can do with language but what can language do with you."

Dan Raphael: Music in Poetland…

"I think the whole concept of the outlaw or the counterculture is the concept of the outsider and the outsider is very real, that’s their connection, just people that don’t fit in who want to change things, that’s where they meet and are one and the same to a certain extent."

John Dorsey:  Off The…

"There is always hope in poetry and music unless art is disoriented by the needs of the market."

Katerina Koutsogiannopoulos:

The Summer of Love, Peace &…

"The Blues is very similar to literary elegy and satire, it is the expression of longing and loss."

Stanley Fefferman: Wonderful World

Canadian Stanley Fefferman is professor emeritus at York University,…

"In the counterculture at large it's the idea of independence — thinking for yourself  — expressing yourself — being yourself — in a long line from Neal & Allen to flower children to green hair to sex changes to hugely popular stoner films."

Brian Hassett: The Beat State Of…

"Water your art with your vital juices. When counterculture became a mass movement in the 1960’s that was the end of counterculture. Now, nerds are the outlaws but even that is becoming co-opted by the advertisers."

Phil Scalia: Art Valley Pixels…

"Many of the counterculture’s progressiveness regarding sexuality, drugs and technical innovation (in writing and art) have been absorbed into the mainstream of Western culture and its value has been appreciated."

Alexander Adams: Visual Literature…

"I miss integrity and originality. I hear the same thing over and over, same recycled ideas, same perfectly executed carbon copies of things done by better people. I miss the commitment creative people had before the hipster disaster fell on mankind."

Boaz Zippor: The Blues Of…

"The arts, all of them, are a collective conversation about the human experience, and they are a conversation we are having together."

John Brantingham:

The Truth of…

"I think the strains of social and political activism, along with the esthetics of the modern art world which developed into the space and atomic age, is what connects these roots to the futuristic expressions of spirit and soul."

Elliott Levin: Peace, Poetry &…

"In my darkest hours blues was a great friend. Blues is profound and spiritual, blues keeps you going when there’s nothing else."

Fred Voss: Walking With The Blues

Fred Voss…

"Music, poetry and activism have been the mainstay of my life, the fabric that has been woven into the relationship of these forms of artistic and socio-political expression."

The Moonlight Orchestra: Ancient Visions…

"The human struggle is a greater weight than most people realize."

Gary Heffern: 

Unholy Dreams & Holy Lives…

"Find your own way and remember to find peers and friends to share the burden and the ecstasy of a life in the arts--and thank those who help you. Take advice from elders like me with three grains of salt."

David Cope: Scream With Rhyme & Clarity…

"The joining of music and poetry influences the way information is received and perceived. A good musical riff will call the words up; an electric poetic phrase is music to the heart."

Pamela Twining: Dancer Of Rhymes…

"Music and poetry can affect your senses tremendously. They can both bring back memories and vivid memories at that. They can transport you into your own thoughts where your senses come alive and further open your mind."

Jake St. John: Roads…

"Blues/ jazz is based on improve which I see as a direct connection between the artist and the spirit mind/heart of the people. The Lakota say music carries the prayers of the people."

David Lee Carson: Archetypes Visions…

"Music and art can confront and free us from the mind and spirit prison because they  get us out of the cerebral chatter of the frontal lobes and allow our feelings to change instantaneously."

Dennis Formento: Free Mind & Spirit …

"While Blues speaks of the depth of the human heart, Jazz riffs off of that emotion into exciting forays into the unconscious—not unlike a poem—relying upon associative leaps and a fanciful imaginative reach."

George Kalamaras: A Yogi of Poetry…

"Jazz had a liberating momentum for the Beat writers, with its long-winded improvisation."

Steven Gray: The Barrio of Pagan Socialist

Steven Gray has been living in San…