Kerouac pun for Al Gelpi

This is a great find! A poem that has it all - humor, a retro poet, an icon of American Literary Studies, the thrill and intrigue of discovery, the patina of age and mystery: a poem written by Jack Kerouac for Albert Gelpi, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. See the one-of-a-kind broadside here (with the proper line breaks and indent).

A Pun for Al Gelpi

Jesus got mad one day
at an apricot tree.
He said, "Peter, you
of the Holy See,
Go see if the tree is ripe."
"The tree is not yet ripe,"
reported back Peter the Rock.
"Then let it wither!"
Jesus wanted an apricot.
In the moring, the tree
had withered,
Like the ear in the agony
of the garden,
Strucky down by the sword,
Unready.
What means this parable?
Everybody
better see.
You're really sipping
When your glass
is always empty.

The other cool thing, is the website on which I found this pun - Modern Books and Manuscripts
Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138. What could be better than a link to a library that is in the business of acquiring beautiful old and new books, poems, items of desire and importance!

I'm happy about all this today because - if I am lucky - Al Gelpi will be able to serve as my advisor during my upcoming thesis year. My thesis has been approved with a reservation or two - mostly that I narrow my focus - which I knew I would have to anyway. I am looking at the evolution of domestic imagery (laundry?) in American poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. It should be lovely and hard and exciting and exhausting and gorgeous and revelatory - I'm tired already. But this conditional approval of my thesis is a good thing. It's hard to say, but, "yeah for me!"