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
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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”
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
INTRODUCTION
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 begin
s 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.
In my system, the form of blues choruses is limited by the small page of the breastpocket notebook in which they are written, like the form of a set number of bars in a jazz blues chorus, and so sometimes the word-meaning can carry from one chorus into another, or not, just like the phrase-meaning can carry harmonically from one chorus to the other, or not, in jazz, so that, in these blues as in jazz, the form is determined by time, and by the musician’s spontaneous phrasing & harmonizing with the beat of the time as it waves & waves on by in measured choruses.
It’s all gotta be non stop ad libbing within each chorus, or the gig is shot.
—Jack Kerouac
SAN FRANCISCO BLUES
1ST CHORUS
I see the backs
Of old Men rolling
Slowly into black
Stores.
2ND CHORUS
Line faced mustached
Black men with turned back
Army weathered brownhats
Stomp on by with bags
Of burlap & rue
Talking to secret
Companions with long hair
In the sidewalk
San Francisco
With the rain of exhaust
Plicking in the mist
You see in black
Store doors—
Petting trucks farting—
Vastly city.
3RD CHORUS
3rd St Market to Lease
Has a washed down tile
Tile entrance once white
Now caked with gum
Of a thousand hundred feet
Feet of passers who
Did not go straight on
Bending to flap the time
Pap page on back
With smoke emanating
From their noses
But slowly like old
Lantern jawed junkmen
Hurrying with the lump
Wondrous potato bag
To the avenues of sunshine
Came, bending to spit,
& Shuffled awhile there.
4TH CHORUS
The rooftop of the beatup
tenement
On 3rd & Harrison
Has Belfast painted
Black on yellow
On the side
the old Frisco wood is
shown with weatherbeaten
rainboards & a
washed out blue bottle
once painted for wild
commercial reasons by
an excited seltzerite
as firemen came last
afternoon & raised the
ladder to a fruitless
fire that was not there,
so, is Belfast singin
&n
bsp; in this time
5TH CHORUS
when brand’s forgotten
taste washed in
rain the gullies broadened
the acrobats of the
tenement
who dug bel fast
divers all
and the divers all dove
ah
little girls make
shadows on the
sidewalk shorter
than the shadow
of death
in this town—
6TH CHORUS
Fat girls
In red coats
With flap white out shoes
Monstrous soldiers
Stalk at dawn
Looking for whores
And burning to eat up
Harried Mexican Laborers
Become respectable
In San Francisco
Carrying newspapers
Of culture burden
And packages of need
Walk sadly reluctant
To work in dawn
Stalking with not cat
In the feel of their stride
Touching to hide the sidewalk,
Blackshiny lastnight parlor
Shoes hitting the slippery
With hard slicky heels
To slide & Fall:
Breboac! Karrak!
7TH CHORUS
Dumb kids with thick lips
And black skin
Carry paper bags
Meaninglessly:
“Stop bothering the cat!”
His mother yelled at him
Yesterday and now
He goes to work
Down Third Street
In the milky dawn
Piano rolling over the hill