You may remember a big list of names towards the end of The Absurdity of Writing Poetry. First of all, that list was not improvised, it is scripted (and below). Second of all, if you were to look at the script, you’d see it’s full of typos.
Well, here’s the complete list, hopefully typo-free, and with links to Wikipedia, YouTube and other sources of explanation.
(Yes, I know that you know who all these people are, but not everyone does.)
Picasso, Hurston, Kandinsky, Lennon, Kahlo, Warhol, Whitman,
Hemmingway, Dylan, Neruda, Stein, Baldwin, Ginsberg, Parker, Gillespie,
Fitzgerald, Armstrong, Holiday, Davis, Evans, Coltrane, Mingus, Monk,
Joplin, Eliot, Pound, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Shakespeare, Olivier, Brando,
Dean, Barrymore, Redgrave, Rushdie, Keats, Rakim, Kweli, Def, DMC, One, La
Rock, Shakur, Smalls, Rachmaninov, Ellington, Gaye,
Hendrix, Marley, Chekhov, Ibsen, Kushner, Fugard, Havel, Beckett, Joyce,
Kertész, Ōe, Coetzee, Mossman, McEwan, David Foster Wallace, Barth, Eco, Wilde,
Goethe, Crane, Sandburg, Rich, Reed, Cale, Eno, Byrne, Grimes, Waits, Ramone,
Strummer, Cobain, Kuti, Mitchell, Micheline, Lerner, Levy, Baraka, Motherwell,
Still, Pollock, Mailer, Márquez, Cassady, Gaines, Burroughs, Estep, Scott–Heron,
Bruce, Hicks, Pryor, Pinero, Cohen, Nabokov, Ellison, Sim, Bangs, Copland, Bernstein, Shostakovich, Cage, Gould, Mahler, Elling, Sondheim, Redding, Simone,
Vaughn, Cooke, Wonder, Charles, Jagger, Richards, Rauschenberg, da Vinci, Mucha,
Monet, Manet, Seurat, Basquiat, Banksy, Grotowski, Meisner, Boal, Bogart,
Brook, Lepage, Graham, Balanchine, Robbins, Ailey, de Dille, Cunningham, Oida,
Foreman, Chaykin, Winterson, Kundera, Woolf, Cervantes, Tezuka, Tatsumi, Murakami, Ishiguro, Kurosawa, Fellini, Truffaut, Godard, Eisenstein, Welles, Gilliam, Herzog, Bergman, Buñuel, Almodóvar , Kobayashi, Rumi, Marlowe, Austen, Flaubert,
Kafka, Tolstoy, Dostoyefsky, Pushkin, Sontag, Carver, Pessoa, Conroy, Faulkner,
Blake, Rimbaud, Proust, Symborska, Donne, Wordsworth, Shelley, Dickinson,
Yeats, Plath
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