Book of Blues

PENGUIN BOOKS

BOOK OF BLUES

 

 

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a football scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. He quit school in his sophomore year and joined the Merchant Marine, beginning the restless wanderings that were to continue for the greater part of his life. His first novel,
The Town and the City
, appeared in 1950, but it was
On the Road
, first published in 1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the world what became known as the “Beat generation” and made Kerouac one of the most controversial and best-known writers of his time. Publication of his many other books followed, among them
The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans
, and
Big Sur.
Kerouac considered them all to be part of The Duluoz Legend. “In my old age,” he wrote, “I intend to collect all my work and reinsert my pantheon of uniform names, leave the long shelf full of books there, and die happy.” He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.

By Jack Kerouac

THE TOWN AND THE CITY

ON THE ROAD

THE DHARMA BUMS

THE SUBTERRANEANS

DOCTOR SAX

MAGGIE CASSIDY

MEXICO CITY BLUES

THE SCRIPTURE OF THE GOLDEN ETERNITY

TRISTESSA

LONESOME TRAVELER

BOOK OF DREAMS

PULL MY DAISY

BIG SUR

VISIONS OF GERARD

DESOLATION ANGELS

SATORI IN PARIS

VANITY OF DULUOZ

SCATTERED POEMS

PIC

VISIONS OF CODY

HEAVEN AND OTHER POEMS

POMES ALL SIZES

OLD ANGEL MIDNIGHT

GOOD BLONDE & OTHERS

THE PORTABLE JACK KEROUAC

SELECTED LETTERS: 1940–1956

BOOK OF BLUES

JACK KEROUAC

BOOK OF BLUES

PENGUIN POETS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in Penguin Books 1995

Copyright © Estate of Stella Kerouac, John Sampas, Literary Representative, 1995

Introduction copyright © Robert Creeley, 1995

All rights reserved

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following copyrighted works:

Selection from
Jack Kerouac
by Tom Clark. Copyright © 1984 by Tom Clark.

By permission of Marlowe & Company.

Selection from “Statement on Poetics for
The New American Poetry
”

from
Good Blonde & Others
by Jack Kerouac. © 1993, by permission of Grey Fox Press.

Selection from
Understanding the Beats
by Edward Halsey Foster.

By permission of the University of South Carolina Press.

“Jack Would Speak Through the Imperfect Medium of Alice” from
Selected

Poems of Alice Notley
, Talisman House, Publishers, 1993. Reprinted by

permission of the publisher. Copyright © 1993 by Alice Notley.

eISBN: 978-1-101-54880-6

 

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This book is dedicated to Philip Whalen and to the memory of Lew Welch

Hard now to go back to the time when Jack Kerouac was writing these poems, the fifties and early sixties, and to the way people then felt poetry
should
be written and what they thought it
should
be saying. Perhaps it hardly matters that much of the poetry of that time found little popular audience, or that it spoke in a way that often confounded its readers. There was a high culture and a low one, and poetry was something significantly attached to the former. The rest was just the passing blur of pop songs and singers, or else the shady edges of black culture and its curiously enduring jazz. Great composers like Stravinsky might use such “forms” for context, and might even get someone like Benny Goodman to play the results. But it always seemed an isolated instance—if not overt slumming.

That was the problem, in fact, not only with music, or poetry, but with writing itself. There was an intense orthodoxy, an insistent critical watchguard, patrolling the borders of legitimate literature to keep all in their necessary places. If one came from habits or ways of speaking or thinking that weren't of the requisite pattern, then the response was abrupt and hostile. Even a poet as Kenneth Rexroth, admitting his complex relation to Kerouac from their times together in San Francisco, wrote of
Mexico City Blues
(1959) that it constituted a “naive effrontery” to have published it as poetry, and that it was “more pitiful than ridiculous.” Donald M. Allen's break-through anthology,
The New American Poetry
(1960), soon made clear the resources and authority of what Kerouac and others of his situation were doing, but for a time it seemed that even the viable elders would prove too fixed in their aspirations or disappointments to recognize its authority.

What was the common dream? To be enough of whatever was wanted, to be real, to be included. That meant thinking and talking and moving in one's own legitimacy, one's own given “world,” with its persons, habits, humor and place. It was Ginsberg who early on valued particularly Kerouac's crucial insight, that one might write in the same words and manner that one would use in talking to a friend. There didn't have to be a rhetorical “heightening,” or a remove from the common, the intimate, and the personal.

Kerouac's friends were then specifically the poets: Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Bob Kaufman, Diane di Prima, Lew Welch, Amiri Baraka—and so on through a list now familiar indeed. In contrast, only the novelists John Clellon Holmes and William Burroughs (a source and company for all that “Beat” defined) were in any sense so alert and securing in their relations to him. His sister Caroline (“Nin”) and his mother were otherwise safe havens, and he left and returned to their company again and again. Two of the sequences here, “Richmond Hill Blues” (1953) and “Orlanda Blues” (1958), were written while living in his mother's house. The fact of all these relations sounds persistently throughout his writing, and in the poems it is especially emphatic. “Eleven Verses of Garver,” (in the section “Orizaba 210 Blues”) is literally that, the stories of his friend Bill Garver, described by Kerouac's perceptive biographer Tom Clark (
Jack Kerouac
, 1984) as “a garrulous, aging junkie who occupied the ground-floor apartment” at Orizaba 210, Mexico City, while Kerouac lived in the “mud block” (his words) on the roof. Clark notes it is in this circumstance that Kerouac works as well on
Mexico City Blues
and begins the novel of his “chaste, desperate courtship” of Bill Garver's connection for morphine,
Tristessa
(1960).

All such detail has been usefully spelled out in the various accounts of Kerouac's life. His own sense of what he was doing, either with prose or poems, is equally to the point. In his “Statement on Poetics” for
The New American Poetry
he writes: “Add alluvials to the end of your line when all is exhausted but something has to be said for some specified irrational reason, since reason can never win out, because poetry is NOT a science. The rhythm of how you ‘rush' yr statement determines the rhythm of the poem, whether it is a poem in verse-separated lines, or an endless one-line poem called prose . . .” Of course, the parallel is clearly jazz. Thus Edward Foster in his useful work,
Understanding the Beats
(1992), emphasizes Kerouac's own proposal of the relation as follows:

 

In a note at the beginning of [
Mexico City Blues
], Kerouac says that he wants “to be considered as a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jazz session on Sunday,” and the individual poems depend, like jazz pieces, on spontaneity and inspiration. Each of the 242 “choruses” is limited by the size of the notebook pages on which he wrote; if an idea (or riff) was not exhausted in that space, he would pick it up in the next poem . . .

Most of the choruses are playful and light, and seemingly anything that fits the general drift of the rhythm, music, and tone can be added, no matter how incongruous it may seem: the sound of a bus outside the building (“Zarooomooo”) an idea for Buddhist lipstick (“Nirvana-No”), nonsense language (“I'm a Agloon”) . . . In any case, the poem expresses the poet's sensibility at the moment of writing, and the final poem [of
Mexico City Blues
] identifies “the sound in your mind” as an origin for song . . .

A complaint commonly lodged against Kerouac is that he was at best a self-taught “natural,” at worst an example of the
cul de sac
the autodidact in the arts invariably comes to, a solipsistic “world” of his own limitations and confusions. Blake, naked in his garden, was thus vulnerable. Céline, with his obsessive determination to outplot plot, was also a fool of such kind, as are all heroes of transformation and risk—Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence and W.C. Williams among them. Otherwise it would be simply “minds like beds, always made up,” as Williams said, an enclosure of all that might have been made articulate, felt, tasted, witnessed, and confessed as actual to one's own life, for better or for worse, at last.

But Kerouac was never simply an isolated writer in a time of classic authority and stylistic composure. If one considers Saul Bellow's
The Adventures of Augie March
(1953) in relation to
On the Road
(1957), one will understand precisely what William Burroughs means in saying of Kerouac:

Kerouac was a writer. That is, he wrote. Many people who call themselves writers and have their names on books are not writers and they can't write—the difference being a bullfighter who fights a bull is different from the bullshitter who makes passes with no bull there. The writer has been
there
or he can't write about it. . . . Sometimes, as in the case of Fitzgerald and Kerouac, the effect produced by a writer is immediate, as if a generation were waiting to be written.

These poems provide an intensely vivid witness of both writer and time. Much is painful, even at times contemptible—the often violent disposition toward women, the sodden celebrations of drink—but it is nonetheless fact of a world still very much our own. Kerouac speaks its painful content, which is not to exempt him from a responsibility therefore. But a world is never simply a choice but a given, and it was not his intent to be brutal if that seems the point. Provincial, yet capable of effecting a common bond, of feeling a joy he could instantly make real for others, he lived in his world as particularly as anyone ever could. What holds it finally all together are
words
, one after another, as he plays, moves, with their sound, follows their lead, shifting from English to Franco-American
joual
, nonsense to sense, reflection to immediate sight and intimate record. He spoke no English until he was five. He wrote incessantly, carrying usually a small spiral notebook in his back pocket so as to “sketch” what occurred on the spot. He was in that old way “serious.” He really believed in words.

So one will read here his various recording, invention, improvisation, story. Yet all will be mistaken, misunderstood, if there is not the recognition that this remarkable person is living here, is actual in all that is written. Another poet, Alice Notley, wrote some years after Jack Kerouac's death in 1969 a poem of singular power, “Jack Would Speak through the Imperfect Medium of Alice.” This is its close:

 

. . . The words are all only one word the perfect

word—

My body my alcohol my pain my death are only

the perfect word as I

Tell it to you, poor sweet categorizers

Listen

Every me I was & wrote

were only & all (gently)

That one perfect word

—Robert Creeley,
Buffalo, N.Y.