—Dedicated to the memory of Allen Ginsberg
WHAT SPOKE TO ME initially reading Mexico City Blues was passionate cry & heartbreak, sensitive, goofy, energetic lines popping open, antennae raw & in the wind, and the constantly shifting exchange of earth & sky. Down to earth, down to his own rhythm, then out with the spin of an infinite mind riff. And up, way up, to revelation like “The Victor is not Self” or “(ripping of paper indicates/ helplessness anyway)” or “We die with same/ unconcern we lie.” Philosophical. And stoned. And details. And naming things. And naming people. And naming heroes, writers, musicians, Buddhist saints & Boddhisattvas & deities. So everybody’s included. People’s names are pure sound & sacred because they exist & are therefore holy. It’s like the “sacred conversation” you see in Italian Paintings where all the saints are smiling beatifically and conversing in gentle tones on profound subjects. Nothing’s excluded, and yet Mexico City Blues is a very discriminating sequential poem. It has an amazing clarity, honesty, aspiration. Nothing is unnecessary inside it. And friendly, too. A real experiment in original mind living in conditioned mind wanting to “blow” free. Pop through on other side which is sound, energy, shape on page of ear & eye. If you can’t sustain the images, if you don’t “get” his logopoeia right off, try staying with the sound and the persona and sheer energy. I also appreciate in here the idea of choruses. Reminiscent of Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints. One thinks of angels & saints singing, choirs of kids in church, of resounding classical pieces singing out the sufferings of Christ or man. And in a particular vernacular mode. And the exhilaration too of salvation, redemption, life, life, life! It’s always pounding like that. See, I’m alive I’m thinking! And everything around me has got life too. And these are sounds also made in heaven. And I write because it’s all fleeting & we’re all going to die & my poetic duty is to make this experiment holy. This is certainly the sense you get when you hear Kerouac’s voice reading aloud on the discs & tapes.
Punk! says Iron Pot Lid
Tup! says finger toilet
Tuck! says dime on Ice
Ferwut! says Beard Bird.
And improvising on a thought, a word, an increment of a word, a phone or phoneme and responding. So fast. A “perfect explication of mind” said the Tibetan meditation teacher Chogyam Trungpa after Allen Ginsberg read parts of the poem to him. Allen & I named a poetics school after Jack Kerouac at the Buddhist-inspired Naropa Institute in Colorado because he had the most spontaneously lucid sound. And he’d also realized the first Buddhist Noble Truth which is the Truth of Suffering. It wafts through all his work: deep pain & empathy. Sometimes it’s as if he’s just whistling in the dark in Mexico City Blues. And so hip for a quasi-white guy. And mixed-breed American being interesting ethnic Quebecois origin, and macho even, but a secret scaredy cat. But this funny Buddhist twist keeps coming around into everything. Because, I think, he was always thinking, following his mind, checking things out & reading sacred scripture (see his explicit massive journal/ poetics collage Some of the Dharma, Penguin 1997) which are subtle & spontaneous & illuminating insights into the very nature of mind. So what you have is the literal practice inherent in his mind-work. Each chorus is an examination & delight in language-mind.
Starspangled Kingdoms bedecked
in dewy joint
DON’T IGNORE OTHER PARTS
OF YOUR MIND, I think,
And my clever brain sends
ripples of amusement
Through my leg nerve halls
And I remember the Zigzag
Original
Mind
of Babyhood
when you’d let the faces
crack & mock
& yak & change
& go mad utterly
in your night
firstmind
reveries
talking about the mind
The endless Not Invisible
Madness Rioting
Everywhere
—from “17th Chorus”
You’ve got here a “mental” sound as in
A bubble pop, a foam snit
Time on a Bat—growl of truck.
which also has terrific consonant mantra properties.
The glories of simultaneity explode all over the text. How can Lester Young in eternity, Cleopatra’s knot, Rabelais, Marco Polo & his Venetian genitals, Charlie Chaplin, Joe McCarthy, Charlie Parker, various friends & family, and Buddha co-exist? They do so in the mind of the poet.
What I appreciated as a young teen girl growing up on MacDougal Street in Manhattan’s West Village was this poem’s particular accessibility. Its obvious relationship to jazz, to Dharma (I was seriously starting to read Buddhist texts at my Quaker high school Friends Seminary), to smoking pot (a hot experience & topic at the time). And how it was delineated by small notebook page. Perfect form/content marriage. I was writing shapely (goofy?) poems which had a look of e.e. cummings. But I wanted to be as romantic as Keats and Yeats with the cosmic consciousness of Whitman. These very tangible “Beat” literary poets were now walking my streets (Gregory Corso—quintessential poète maudit— lived just several blocks away on Bleecker Street), alive & in the world I too inhabited doing things I was doing. My friend Martin Hersey, son of the novelist John Hersey, was wandering around with a well-worn copy of Naked Lunch in his guitar case. I travelled to Greece & Egypt by the time I was 18, hitching around, sleeping on freighter-boats. 20 years old I caught a ride to the West Coast to the Berkeley Poetry Conference and then Lewis Warsh & I hitched to Mexico under false IDs (being underage) later that summer after founding our magazine Angel Hair at a Robert Duncan reading. One thinks of influence. The work? The life? I took a vow at Berkeley to dedicate my life to poetry the sangha (spiritual community) of poets.
Kerouac was in stride poetically with many of the writers—the consociates—of his own time, not just his particular buddies. Certainly his companions were conducting some extremely outrageous experiments themselves. Burroughs’s jump cuts, Ginsberg’s cosmic adjectives—wanting to get all the details in—Gregory Corso’s subtle autodidactic troubadour finesse, Gary Snyder’s Buddhist thinking & content. And the idea of capturing the sound of the physical world (like Gertrude Stein wanting to get the rhythms of her dog lapping milk). Synesthesia. Kinesthesia. Mix of senses. A saw, a hammer—rip rap. But think, also, of Frank O’Hara’s poetics statement “Personism,” as a comparable poetics. The poem as a phone call. Think of endless rapping with Friends. How he wanted to get Neal Cassady’s vocal rhythms down, Lucian Carr’s etc. And also a jaunty persona as in Frank O’Hara poems, who also names his world. Places, people, things. Duncan & Olson’s composition by field. Projective verse. Even Williams’s “No ideas but in things.” All this was in the air. And the example of Gertrude Stein (mentioned in Mexico City Blues) who also followed the grammar of her own mind.
Technically, aside from the phenomenal legacy of the prose, we have Poems as Poems—San Francisco Blues, Mexico City Blues, Book of Haikus, Poems All Sizes. The poems as poems. That look feel are defined as such. Pome: If I don’t use the cork/I may spill the wine/ But if I do? The insistent pitch of the blues poems.
Mexico City Bop
I got the huck bop
I got the floogle mock
I got the thiri chiribim
bitchy bitchy bitchy
batch batch
Chippely bop
Noise like that
Like fallin off porches
Of Tenement Petersburg
Russia Chicago O Yay.
*
Mr Beggar & Mrs Davy—
Looney and CRUNEY,
I made a poem out of it,
Haven’t smoked Luney
& Cruney
In a Long Time.
Dem egges & dem dem
Dere bacons, baby,
If you only lay that
down on a trumpet
’Lay that down
solid brother
’Bout all dem
bacon & eggs
Ya gotta be able
to lay it down
solid—
All that luney
& fruney
As an active reader of classic novels, I always identified with the (mostly male) protagonists. I’ve talked to other women writers of my generation about this. Yes, we went with the hero. We were classic “puer” types—wanting the picaresque freedom the youths had. A kind of artistic bisexuality? You could say something about Kerouac’s stance as American male born 1922 in his life & in his novels & how that tugged on the particular heartstrings of understanding (maternal) women, the fruition of his generation’s identity problems around being soldiers (warriors) & all the attendant strands of his karmic stream adding up to the solid man, poet, writer, battling the expectation of whatever that could be in some eyes. Heroic? Certainly. So that was a lure. And he looked like a movie star! Normal, athletic, well built, handsome, smart. And from such & such a family that he loved so deeply, loyally, the underdog class thing had sentimental appeal. His language was Quebecois & working Massachusetts, and all the types & personalities around him fed that sound. But don’t forget he devoured literature, he was a true intellectual, thinking, thinking. He was extremely well read as an early letter to Elbert Lenrow (see Kerouac’s Selected Letters, 1940-1956, edited by Ann Charters, Penguin, 1995) indicates. Also the dominant outrider culture of the time: black jazz, scat singing. He was empathetic, symbiotic. But more than that Kerouac came through as a witness, a cosmic common denominator, one who would take the whole ride and then survive and tell you what it was like. And loving every minute of the telling. Propelled by an unnatural gift & original poetic idea to follow the grammar of his own mind & minds of others, a son of Gertrude Stein! Like the Tibetan “delog” who dies, travels & comes back to life to tell you what he or she “saw.” The shaman’s or poet’s call & duty. Because he took a lot “on,” Kerouac did.
He loved “scatting.” With a nod toward black improvisational music, he made amateur recordings of himself scatting with Neal Cassady & John Clellon Holmes. Holmes had a record-making machine where you could record your voice directly onto vinyl. He wrote his improvisations down as “Blues.” He read poems to Frank Sinatra crooning on the radio. He was drawn to this form for a number of reasons—he liked the spontaneous approach. He intended these blues poems to be heard, preferably with a jazz background, and made recordings for Verve & Hanover in 1958 & 1959. He performed with Zoot Sims & Al Cohn on one recording, with Steve Allen at piano on another. These now seem remarkable & unique auditory adventures. I could feel my own yearning toward performance (mixing poetry and music) back then. Composer/ musician David Amram who worked with Kerouac & Allen Ginsberg, others, became a close friend in 1962 (I was still in high school) & he’d take me around to some of the clubs. I met painter Larry Rivers at the Five Spot, another hipster linked to the poets. My former sister-in-law married Steve Lacy & I used to see Thelonious Monk at their loft. My mother was a nut for Mingus & Lacy. We listened to their music.
In “The Origins of Joy in Poetry” Kerouac conjures the new Zen-Lunacy. He speaks of the ORAL, of the exciting new poets like Lamantia and Whalen: They SING They SWING. “It is diametrically opposed to the Eliot shot, who so dismally advises his dreary negative rules like the objective correlative, etc. which is just a lot of constipation and ultimately emasculation of the pure masculine urge to freely sing.”
He speaks of the “mental discipline typified by the haiku … , that is, the discipline of pointing things out directly, purely, concretely, no abstractions or explanations, wham wham the true blue song of man.”
So his poetics so sensible in my own sensibility are clear and traceable in his letters, exchanges, explications, responses. You only have to read him aloud to get the brilliant oral torque & command. Although I never met the man he was everywhere in my immediate surroundings, and still haunts the premises, a holy ghost.