"Just as Jack Kerouac upended the conventions of the novel with On the Road, he also revolutionized American poetry in this ingenious collection.
Bringing together selections from literary journals and his private notebooks, Jack Kerouac’s Scattered Poems exemplifies the Beat Generation icon’s innovative approach to language.
Kerouac’s poems, populated by hitchhikers, Chinese grocers, Buddhist saints, and cultural figures from Rimbaud to Harpo Marx, evoke the primal and the sublime, the everyday and the metaphysical. Scattered Poems, which includes the playfully instructive “How to Meditate,” the sensory “San Francisco Blues,” and an ode to Kerouac’s fellow Beat Allen Ginsberg, is rich in striking images and strident urgency.
Kerouac’s widespread influences feel new and fresh in these poems, which echo the rhythm of improvisational jazz music and the centuries-old structure of Japanese haiku.
In rebelling against the dry rules and literary pretentiousness he perceived in early twentieth-century poetry, Kerouac pioneered a poetic style informed by oral tradition, driven by concrete language with neither embellishment nor abstraction, and expressed through spontaneous, uncensored writing."
"From the acclaimed Beat Generation author of On the Road and The Dharma Bums come eight extended poems in which he reflects on the urban settings he finds himself in.
Best known for his novels, Jack Kerouac is also an important poet. In these poems, Kerouac writes from the heart of experience in the music of language, employing the same instrumental blues and jazz forms that he used in another book of poems, Mexico City Blues.
The poems included here, written between 1954 and 1961, are: - “San Francisco Blues”- “Richmond Hill Blues”- “Bowery Blues”- “MacDougal Street Blues”- “Desolation Blues”- “Orizaba 210 Blues”- “Orlanda Blues”- “Cerrada Medellin Blues”The author explains his musical influences and the self-imposed length of the poems: “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 another, 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 time as if waves & waves on by in measured choruses.”—Jack Kerouac
Book of Blues is an exuberant foray into language and consciousness, rich with imagery, propelled by rhythm, and based in a reverent attentiveness to the moment."
"From the renowned Beat writer Jack Kerouac comes this important work of lyric verse, one of his most formally inventive books.
A long poem in Kerouac’s freewheeling and spontaneous improvisational style, Mexico City Blues is a unique epic of sound, rhythm, and religion. Called superb sensory meditations, the poetry takes in life, death, and spirituality but roams widely across continents and cultures. Memories, fantasies, dreams, and surrealistic free association are all lyrically combined in the loose format inspired by jazz and the blues.
Considered a major contribution to post-World War II American poetics, it opened up a new way of writing that had a major influence on others, including Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Michael McClure, and Bob Dylan.
Kerouac began writing the 242 stanzas, or “choruses', that became Mexico City Blues while living in Mexico City, with the stanzas defined only by the size of Kerouac’s notebook page. Written between 1954 and 1957 and first published in 1959, it is Kerouac’s most important verse work.
This poetry—wild, joyful, sad, and magnificent—is a surreal and all-encompassing experience and reveals the portrait of a complex man endowed with deep sensitivity."
"From famed Beat writer Jack Kerouac comes a collection of essays and stories compiled from journal entries he made during his travels.
In his first autobiographical work, Jack Kerouac reveals exhilarating stories of the years he spent traveling, while writing his acclaimed novels. His journeys took him from California deserts crisscrossed by train tracks to the bullfights of Mexico to the Beat nightlife of New York City and across the Atlantic to Paris, Morocco, and London.
He also writes about relationship, jobs, and the nature of life on the road. Here are echoes of landscapes that appear in some of his novels, including The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels.
Included here are “Piers of a Homeless Night,” “Mexico Fellaheen,” “The Railroad Earth,” “Slobs of the Kitchen Sea,” “New York Scenes,” “Alone on a Mountaintop,” “Big Trip to Europe,” and “The Vanishing American Hobo.” All feature his distinctive exuberant style of prose. This collection, first published together in 1960, is a unique addition to Kerouac’s body of work."
"Maggie Cassidy (escrita en 1953 y publicada en 1959) es el tercer volumen del magno ciclo La leyenda de Duluoz. En ella, el joven Jack Duluoz, de dieciséis años, conoce a una chica en el baile de Nochevieja de 1939, coquetean, vuelven a verse, se dan celos, son víctimas de murmuraciones, se pelean, se reconcilian y se enfrentan a las primeras decisiones de la vida adulta.
Es la historia del primer amor del protagonista, un amor adolescente que engloba otros despertares: al mundo exterior, la sexualidad, la espiritualidad, los estudios, el trabajo, la vocación. No es una historia sublime, ni trágica, ni arquetípica: es una historia que consigue captar la realidad de la vida corriente y reflejar la experiencia universal del primer amor a través de una personalísima maestría narrativa, servida en una prosa única, fascinante, absorbente; repleta de lirismo y energía, de ternura y afecto."
"Jack Duluoz (Kerouac) ha publicado una novela (En el camino) que ha alcanzado un gran éxito, pero la fama es como una fiera que lo devora. Huyendo de la imagen que los críticos y los lectores se han forjado de él, en junio de 1960 se refugia en una cabaña que su amigo Lorenzo Monsanto (Lawrence Ferlinghetti en la vida real) tiene en la costa californiana de Big Sur, entre San Francisco y Los Ángeles, donde medita, sufre alucinaciones, escribe poemas místicos, bebe como un cosaco, recibe visitas, se droga y evoca el pasado. También hace excursiones y va a ver a su viejo amigo Neal Cassady (su compañero de aventuras de En el camino, que aquí se llama Cody Pomeray).
Sus encuentros con los antiguos amigos no carecen de consecuencias, pues todos excepto él parecen haber aceptado los convencionalismos del mundo en que viven. La estancia en Big Sur es una prueba de fuego, un purgatorio cristiano o uno de los transitorios infiernos budistas que le permitirán volver a la civilización completamente transformado.
En la nota inicial de esta novela, el autor confiesa que todos sus libros forman parte de una sola obra, «La leyenda de Duluoz», en la que quería aunar todo el experimentalismo posible, combinar la experiencia exterior con la interior. Big Sur es la máxima expresión de esta poética."
"Jack Kerouac’s last published work is an endearing portrayal of brotherhood and the classic American road trip adventure, viewed through the eyes of a young boy.
This novella tells the story of a ten-year-old Black boy named Pictorial Review “Pic” Jackson, who lives with his grandfather in North Carolina in the 1940s. After his grandfather dies and Pic is living with another relative, his older brother, Slim, shows up to take him out of that dysfunctional home, and they journey from the rural South to New York City.
They head for Harlem, where Slim lives with his girlfriend and where Pic sees firsthand the economic hard times his brother is experiencing. After losing job after job, Slim sends his pregnant girlfriend off to San Francisco to live with her sister. Then the brothers set out to hitchhike their way west, making their way to California across a country suffused with danger, music, love, and hardship.
Told from the point of view of Pic, Kerouac wrote this work in a dialect that is stereotypical for Black American youth of that era."
"A brand new volume of previously unpublished writings from the archives reflecting Jack Kerouac’s Buddhist thinking
From a young age Kerouac was a spiritual thinker and questioner, and he always considered himself a spiritual writer. Buddhism gave more meaning to Jack’s work as a writer: he was working not for personal accomplishment and glory but for human betterment. And Buddhism justified his lifestyle: with its vision of the material world as empty and illusory, he was free to do what he wanted.
This collection shows Jack at his earnest, soulful best. The writing is consistently and wonderfully Kerouacian: it is honest, reflective, heartfelt, and revealing, with great characterizations amid his self-exploration as he wrestles with his consciousness, desperate for belief."
"A satori, in Kerouac’s own words, is “the Japanese word for ‘sudden illumination,’ ‘sudden awakening,’ or simply ‘kick in the eye.’”
This is a story of philosophy, identity, and the powerful grip of travel, written by an iconic American author at the height of his fame, after spending ten days in France searching for his French heritage.
Was the satori handed to him by a taxi driver, a waiter, a monsieur with a dazzlingly beautiful secretary, or while feeling fearful in the foggy streets at 3:00 a.m.? Or was it when hearing a requiem by Mozart in an old church, seeing trees in the Tuileries Garden, or while walking on a bridge over the River Seine?
The author experienced all that and more, often spending time in seedy bars and caught up in all-night conversations, as revealed in this work that shows the range and versatility of Kerouac’s mature talent.
To Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, “my search for this name in France” results in, according to his own words, “the tale that’s told for no other reason but companionship, which is another (and my favorite) definition of literature.”"
"Originally published in 1965, this autobiographical novel covers a key year in Jack Kerouac’s life—the period that led up to the publication of On the Road in September of 1957.
After spending two months in the summer of 1956 as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington, Kerouac’s fictional self Jack Duluoz comes down from the isolated mountains to the wild excitement of the bars, jazz clubs, and parties of San Francisco, before traveling on to Mexico City, New York, Tangiers, Paris, and London.
Duluoz attempts to extricate himself from the world but fails, for one must “live, travel, adventure, bless, and don’t be sorry.” Desolation Angels is quintessential Kerouac."
"From the most famous of the Beat writers and the author of On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Kerouac’s intoxicating love story of two young bohemians
Written over the course of three days and three nights, The Subterraneans was generated out of the same kind of ecstatic flash of inspiration that produced another one of Kerouac’s early classics, On the Road. Centering around the tempestuous romance and breakup of Leo Percepied and Mardou Fox—two denizens of the 1950s San Francisco underground—The Subterraneans is a tale of dark alleys and smoky rooms, of artists, visionaries, and adventurers existing outside mainstream America’s field of vision. Loosely based on Kerouac’s own life, and peopled with analogues of real-life friends, including William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady, The Subterraneans is a vivid and breathless masterwork of Beat literature."
"Written in 1967 from the vantage point of the psychedelic sixties, Vanity of Duluoz is a fascinating portrait of the artist as a young man.
This book presents the formative years in the life of Jack Duluoz—Kerouac’s alter ego—beginning with his high school experiences as a sporting jock in small-town New England and his time at Columbia University on a football scholarship. Just as Jack’s glamorous new adult life begins, so does World War II, and he joins the US Navy to travel the world. The more he experiences, the more he realizes the limits of his former plans and decides to and return to New York, where he collides with the start of the Beat movement—and a riot of drugs, sex, and writing. Vanity of Duluoz was Kerouac’s final work published before his death in 1969."
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