Jim Morrison's Poetry Notes

"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite."

I am taking next week off to celebrate the holidays, but I will be back in 2023 with more notes and notebooks!

First, a big thank you to all of Noted’s subscribers! I’m truly astounded by how many people care about notes.

And, a special thank you to those of you who have elected to become paid subscribers! I have donated a portion of those funds to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (home of James Baldwin’s notes). I am using the rest of these funds to travel to several other archives this winter!

To close out 2022, here is a look at Jim Morrison’s poetic notes.

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Jim Morrison (1943-1971) wanted to be a poet; instead, he became a rock star.

Throughout his short life, Jim rarely went anywhere without a notebook. As a teenager, every time he learned a new word, he’d write it down and create a story around it. According to his sister, Jim had a remarkable vocabulary.

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He found school boring and decided real education was to be found in the library. When he graduated from high school, he asked his parents for the collected edition of Nietzsche’s works. Doors co-founder, Ray Mazarek, claimed that “Friedrich Nietzsche Killed Jim Morrison.”

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The philosopher taught Jim that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. To be fair, Nietzsche wasn’t talking about heroin.

In his teenage years, Morrison filled notebooks with quotes from his favorite writers. One summer night in his early twenties, Jim went to the roof of his building and burned the old notebooks. Later, he mourned the loss:

I kept a lot of notebooks through high school and college, and then when I left school, for some dumb reason—maybe it was wise—I threw them all away. There’s nothing I can think of that I’d rather have in my possession right now than those two or three lost notebooks. I was thinking of being hypnotized or taking sodium pentothal to try to remember; because I wrote in those books night after night.

But, then, Morrison wonders if destroying these notebooks allowed him to be more original.

But, maybe, if I’d never thrown them away, I’d never have written anything original—because they were mainly accumulations of things that I’d read or heard, like quotes from books. I think if I’d never gotten rid of them I’d never have been free.

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Morrison filled those early notebooks with other people’s ideas and quotes. His later notebooks would contain his own poetry.

Morrison with one of his notebooks

Jim left behind over two dozen notebooks, even though he died at 27 and destroyed his high-school notes. He gave them titles like “Tape Noon,” “GOLD,” “Paris Journal,” and “Lizard Celebration.”

A selection of Morrison’s notebooks

Jim rarely dated his entries and never seemed to care about organizing his notes. Most notebooks cover a span of several years because Jim would grab whatever notebook was on hand. Overall, Jim's notes radiate a “compulsive creativity”

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as he recorded his (often drunk) poetic thoughts onto lined pages.

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“Notes on Vision”: The Film Student

In his early 20s, Jim was an artist searching for a medium. He enrolled in UCLA to study film, which is where he formed a band with fellow student, Ray Mazarek. Morrison filled his notebooks from this time with aphorisms on film that he would later publish in The Lords and the New Creatures (1970).

The Collected Works of Jim Morrison

Here are a few of Morrison’s dark views on cinema from these pages. They are rather ungenerous for a person studying film:

Cinema is the most totalitarian of the arts…

Film spectators are quiet vampires

It gives the impression of living

People who are somehow implicated in the process of living have no real need for film. Cinema caters mostly mainly to a dreary, ignoble psychology, one that accepts copies in place of the real. It is an attitude of dull cowardice…

Jim loved film, but he thought it should challenge the viewer. The film he made, HWY: An American Pastoral (1969) didn’t have much commercial appeal. As he explained in an interview, it’s “poetic…there’s no story or anything.”

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The Doors of Perception

Much of Morrison’s art aimed “to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.”

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This was the impulse behind the name for his band. “The Doors” comes from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1794):

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite.

In this short clip, Robby Kreiger and John Densmore explain the band’s name:

Morrison’s poetry, like his music, was in step with the political and sexual revolutions of the 1960s. The point of art, according to Morrison, was to wake up the audience, to startle them into seeing the world as it truly was. To clear “the doors of perception,” as Blake wrote. For this, Morrison resorted to violence or sex:

I rely on images of violence, which bring the shock of pain, to penetrate the barriers people erect and defend, not simple defenses; the phony facades people live behind. Blocking their perceptions from coming in, and blocking their feelings from coming out. There are two ways I try to shatter those facades, or at least make a hole where something can get in, to let the trapped feelings out—one way is violence, pain. The other is eroticism.

Another aspect of the 1960s art scene was radical experimentation that challenged traditional genres by intermixing them. In his notebooks, Morrison sketched plans for books that mashed-up different genres. They would be mosaics:

Mosaic

a series of notes, prose-poems

stories, bits of play & dialog

Aphorisms, epigrams, essays

Poems? Sure

Another “Plan for Book” goes as follows:

Plan for Book

Poem & Prose-Poem Sections

eg. on Diving

Jamaica

Airports etc.

Excerpts from Journal

Symbolic (ie. no names) Trial excerpts

Also appendix of all song lyrics

New Poems

(American Prayers)

Transcript of Miami Tape

The Collected Works of Jim Morrison

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Lyrics as Poetry

''The whole point of The Doors was poetry,'' according to Ray Manzarek.

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Morrison wrote most of The Door’s lyrics. Light My Fire, however, was written by Jim’s band-mate Robby Krieger. Still, with his brilliant lyricism, Morrison added a few lines such as “our love becomes a funeral pyre.” Perhaps his most important contribution to this song comes at the end of the chorus. Instead of repeating “come on baby light my fire,” Morrison changed the last line to “try to set the night on fire”.

These were words Morrison had written earlier in one of his poetry notebooks:

The Collected Works of Jim Morrison

Try to excite

A cry in the night

Try to set the Night on Fire (s)

And here is the band, performing “Light My Fire” (3 minutes) on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1967.

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The Miami Trial Notebooks

Over the next few years, Jim’s alcoholism accelerated. And his actions became increasingly unpredictable. At a Miami concert in 1969, the police charged Morrison with indecent exposure. He was sentenced to two months in jail. Released on bail, Morrison never served time because he died two years later while the case was under appeal. During the trial, Jim wrote journalistic entries, describing the court along side his usual stream-of-consciousness entries.

What is this insane starting & winking by prosecutors.

The Brunette as bait; distraction

—

great figures of our history & religion had long hair & beards

—

We’re all acting for each other

The Miami Trial Notebook (The Collected Works of Jim Morrison)

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Tape Noon (1971)

Jim became increasingly frustrated with his rock-star image. So he grew a beard and moved to Paris to establish himself as a poet. Unfortunately, alcoholism followed him.

He walked the streets of Paris with his notebooks. According to his biographer, Stephen Davis,

Jim Morrison carried a white plastic shopping bag from the Samaritaine department store with him whenever he went out. There were usually one or two spiral notebooks…

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One of these notebooks was "Tape Noon," which brought together poems Jim had written over the years. The verses are quintessentially Jim: philosophical, haunted by death, surreal.

To admit fear creates

a vacuum which must be filled by action

The grand highway

is

crowded

w/ 

lovers

&

searchers

&

leavers

so

eager

to

please

and

forget.

Wilderness

And finally, a line that feels like a send off:

Last words, last words

out

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The Paris Journal (1971)

This was the last of Morrison’s notebooks.

1971 “Paris Journal” (The Collected Works of Jim Morrison)

The Paris Journal contains angry, fever-dream poetry.

Now I’m a lonely man

Let me back into

The Garden

Blue shadows

of the canyon

I met you

& now you’re gone

& now my dream is gone

Let me back into your garden…

1971 “Paris Journal” (The Collected Works of Jim Morrison)

Jim always saw himself as a poet. And he would have loved that he was buried in the Poet’s corner of the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

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Notes on Jim Morrison’s Notes

I appreciate how Jim wasn’t precious about his notes. They weren’t beautiful or organized, but that didn’t matter. For Morrison, notes were a way to interrogate his own mind. They were an exploration of language as a way to explore thought.

…real poetry doesn’t say anything, it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you … and that’s why poetry appeals to me so much — because it’s so eternal.

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It didn’t really matter if his notes were organized, because they were really just a means to an end. For Jim, poetry was a way to cleanse “the doors of perception” and to see, as Blake wrote, how everything is “infinite.”

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Thanks, as always, for reading! Let me know you enjoyed this post by hitting the heart below. You can also support this newsletter by subscribing, commenting, and sharing!

See you in 2023,

Jillian

1. Collecting the Words of Jim Morrison. CBS Sunday Morning, 11 Aug. 2021. YouTube.

2. Morrison, Jim. Wilderness: The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison. Knopf Doubleday, 1989, p.2.

3. Hopkins, “Jim Morrison: The Rolling Stone Interview.”

4. Robbins, Tom. “Foreward: Fireflies of the Apocalypse.” The Collected Works of Jim Morrison: Poetry, Journals, Transcripts, and Lyrics, by Tom Robbins, HarperCollins, 2021.

5. James, “10 Years Gone.”

6. Saroyan, Wayne. “The Twisted Tale Of How Late Rocker Jim Morrison’s Poetry Found.” Chicago Tribune, 22 Mar. 1989, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1989-03-22-8903280648-story.html.

7. Davis, Stephen. Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend. Penguin, 2005, p.428.

8. Morrison, Jim. Wilderness: The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison. Knopf Doubleday, 1989, p.2.