Book of Blues by Jack Kerouac Page A

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:
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    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