"Pull My Daisy" is a poem by Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...

, Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac

Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...

 and Neal Cassady

Neal Cassady

Neal Leon Cassady was a major figure of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic movement of the 1960s. He served as the model for the character Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road....

. It was written in the late 1940s in a similar way to the Surrealist “exquisite corpse

Exquisite corpse

Exquisite corpse, also known as exquisite cadaver or rotating corpse, 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 Exquisite corpse, also known as exquisite cadaver (from the original...

” 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

Pull My Daisy is a short film that typifies the Beat Generation. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Daisy was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of his play, Beat Generation; Kerouac also provided improvised narration...

, which starred Ginsberg and was based on an event in the life of Cassady. The poem also featured in a jazz

Jazz

Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...

 composition by David Amram

David Amram

David Amram is an American composer, musician, conductor, and writer. As a classical composer and performer, his integration of jazz , ethnic and folk music has led him to work with the likes of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Willie Nelson, Langston...

, which appeared in the opening of the film. The film is available on the UBUWEB Archive.

"Pull My Daisy" can be found published in various forms in Kerouac's Scattered Poems

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 variant texts of "Pull My Daisy," and American haikus....

and Ginsberg's Collected Poems.