"Pull My Daisy" is a poem by

Allen Ginsberg Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Gener ...

Jack Kerouac Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac (; March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Of French-Canadian a ...

and

Neal Cassady Neal Leon Cassady (February 8, 1926 – February 4, 1968) was a major figure of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic and counterculture movements of the 1960s. He was prominently featured as himself in the "scroll" (first d ...

. It was written in the late 1940s in a similar way to the

Surrealist Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to l ...

“

exquisite corpse Exquisite corpse (from the original French term ', literally exquisite cadaver), is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. ...

” game, with one person writing the first line, the other writing the second, and so on sequentially with each person only being shown the line before. It provided the title for the film ''

Pull My Daisy ''Pull My Daisy'' is a 1959 American short film directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, and adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of his play, '' Beat Generation''. Kerouac also provided improvised narration. It features poets Allen ...

'', which was narrated by Kerouac, and featured Ginsberg and other writers, artists and actors of the

Beat Generation The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generatio ...

. It was based on an event in the life of Cassady. The poem also featured in a

jazz Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major ...

composition by

David Amram David Werner Amram III (born November 17, 1930) is an American composer, arranger, and conductor of orchestral, chamber, and choral works, many with jazz flavorings.

, which appeared in the opening of the film. "Pull My Daisy" can be found published in various forms in Kerouac's ''

Scattered Poems ''Scattered Poems'' is a collection of spontaneous poetry by Jack Kerouac. These poems were gathered from underground and ephemeral publications, as wells as from notebooks kept by the author. Some poems include: "San Francisco Blues," the varia ...

'' and Ginsberg's ''Collected Poems''.

References

{{Kerouac Poetry by Allen Ginsberg Beat poetry American poems Poetry by Jack Kerouac