Book of Blues - Softcover

Kerouac, Jack

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140587004 ISBN 13: 9780140587005

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1995

Synopsis

Best known for his "Legend of Duluoz" novels, including On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac is also an important poet. In these eight extended poems, Kerouac writes from the heart of experience in the music of language, employing the same instrumental blues form that he used to fullest effect in Mexico City Blues, his largely unheralded classic of postmodern literature. Edited by Kerouac himself, Book of Blues is an exuberant foray into language and consciousness, rich with imagery, propelled by rythm, and based in a reverent attentiveness to the moment.

"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 musicians spontaneous phrasing & harmonizing with the beat of time as it waves & waves on by in measured choruses." —Jack Kerouac

About this title

About the Author

Jack Kerouac(1922-1969), the central figure of the Beat Generation, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922 and died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969. Among his many novels are On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and Visions of Cody.

From Booklist

Gaps in Kerouac's complex and sonorous canon are being filled in slowly but surely. Last winter brought his Selected Letters and The Portable Jack Kerouac , and now we have this set of eight previously unpublished "blues" poems written between 1954 and 1961. These long poems, series of "choruses" or sketches, resemble, in form and avidity, Kerouac's amazing verse creation Mexico City Blues (1959). They are strongly tied to place and are, as the allusion to music implies, boldly improvisational. Kerouac finds and breaks connections between images and observations as he channels the energy of San Francisco, New York, Washington, and various Mexican towns and cities into great rushes of language. As he riffs and indulges in easy wordplay, Kerouac can be either astute or sloppy, visionary or banal, but, as Robert Creeley writes in his fine introduction, his poems "provide an intensely vivid witness of both writer and time." Whatever their failings, these scintillating poems will strike a chord with fans of performance poetry or even rap, as well as with Kerouac enthusiasts. Donna Seaman

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0140587004
• ISBN 13: 9780140587005
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 274