Book of Blues by Jack Kerouac

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 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.