Mexico City Blues

by Jack Kerouac

'I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday' Freewheeling and spontaneous, Mexico City Blues is Jack Kerouac's most significant and emblematic poem. Consisting of 242 loosely linked 'choruses', it takes in life, death, spirituality, jazz improvisation, memory, fantasies and dreams, all infused with the rhythm of the blues, to create a surreal and all-encompassing epic. 'A spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature' Allen Ginsberg 'A jazz poet. His sentences frequently move into tempestuous sweeps and whorls and sometimes they have something of the rich music of Gerard Manley Hopkins or Dylan Thomas' The New York Herald Tribune

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Classics, American, Literature, Americana, English Literature

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.

Of French-Canadian ancestry, Kerouac was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. He "learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens." During World War II, he served in the United States Merchant Marine; he completed his first novel at the time, which was published more than 40 years after his death. His first published book was The Town and the City (1950), and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, On the Road, in 1957. It made him a beat icon, and he went on to publish 12 more novels and numerous poetry volumes.
Kerouac is recognized for his style of stream of consciousness spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as his Catholic spirituality, jazz, travel, promiscuity, life in New York City, Buddhism, drugs, and poverty. He became an underground celebrity and, with other Beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its politically radical elements. He has a lasting legacy, greatly influencing many of the cultural icons of the 1960s, including Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Jerry Garcia and The Doors.
In 1969, at the age of 47, Kerouac died from an abdominal hemorrhage caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking. Since then, his literary prestige has grown, and several previously unseen works have been published.

Reviews

[Jon Nakapalau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zenful jazz riffs on our smoke veiled existence - beautiful. There is something so sad about reading Kerouac; I get the feeling that he never quite found what he was looking for (even though he looked really hard). Am I the only one who senses a strong existentialist 'undercurrent' to his work? Not sure, but it sure seems so to me.

[Jessaka · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have to say that it is just his poetry, and I am not fond of it. His poetry is rambling; it doesn’t make sense. It is as if he is sitting in a psychologist’s office and the doctor has told him to think of a word and think of another that comes up form thinking of the first word, and so on. , I think it is called “free association.”

[Donovan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Listen, I've read a lot of poetry, especially studying English Literature for so many years. Dickinson, Frost, Shakespeare, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Eliot. Carver, Bukowski, Bly, Hoaglund, Glück, Cisneros, Nick Flynn. Abdurraqib, Diaz, Danez Smith, Rankine, Harjo. I've read Kerouac's three most popular novels, being On the Road (have read this three times), Dharma Bums, and Big Sur. Love him or hate him, he's a master beat novelist in the "stream of consciousness" style. But his poetry? Grade A Shit.

In college, the professors explained the different schools of poetry, such as literary poetry and performance poetry. Literary poetry focuses on the holistic literary meaning and literary devices, whereas performance poetry focuses more on the sounds and wordplay while sacrificing meaning. This is trying so hard to be both by pretending to be clever and literary and stream of consciousness, but possessing some alliterative wordplay and interesting sounding nonsense. The trouble with his poems is that there's no point or theme, no larger image or feeling to build into a recognizable construct. It's like he takes a line and runs wherever the fuck he wants to no effect. And that's fine for an exercise, to mutter to yourself in the dark before you go to sleep. But don't fool yourself into believing you've crafted something genius. If Kerouac would have workshopped any of these he would have gotten destroyed for his arrogance.

"They got nothing on me / at the university / Them clever poets / of immensity" (49th Chorus, 1-4). Maybe if he'd studied poetry, learned the rules before breaking every single one of them... The trouble with the Beats is they wanted to break all the rules without learning them first. And that sort of worked with fiction, because stylized and breathless prose is readable and can even be exhilarating. But Kerouac's poetry breaks the rules to no avail, without making any new bold statement except that he is exceptionally unschooled in poetry and thinks himself a god.

But what specifically is terrible? His poetry contains clichés and dialog out of context, heavy-handed stream of consciousness, and lacks any remote sort of imagery. The worst part is that he elevates nothing to the level of something, tries to make gods of stillborn gusts of half-thought, of idiotic drug-addled dialog, of such tangential blowhard irrelevance it's infuriating that he could be capable of such garbage when his prose is magic. He just couldn't focus, couldn't edit, couldn't kill his darlings. With training and a brutal editor he might have made an okay poet. But this is the worst case of delusional grandeur I've ever seen.

[robin friedman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kerouac's Mexico City Blues

Kerouac wrote his volume of poetry "Mexico City Blues" during the summer of 1955 while living in Mexico City. During this time, he also wrote his sad and still underappreciated short novel, "Tristessa" Tristessa [TRISTESSA] [Paperback]. "Mexico City Blues" had a difficult history. Kerouac's friend, Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Press, rejected the book for publication in 1956. In 1959, Grove Press published the work. Then, in November, 1959, the poet Kenneth Rexroth published a devastatingly critical review titled "Discordant and Cool" in the New York Times. Rexroth wrote: "Mr. Kerouac's Buddha is a dime-store incense burner, glowing and glowering sinisterly in the dark corner of a Beatnik pad and just thrilling the wits out of bad little girls." Rexroth concluded his review with mocking irony: It's all there, the terrifyingly skillful use of verse, the broad knowledge of life, the profound judgments, the almost unbearable sense of reality. I've always wondered whatever happened to those wax-work figures in the old rubberneck dives in Chinatown. Now we know; at least one of them writes books."

For all its weaknesses, "Mexico City Blues" has survived its publication history and Rexroth's criticism. The book continues to be read, discussed, argued about, and taught. "Mexico City Blues" is a collection of 242 short poems, each of which is titled simply as a numbered "Chorus". Kerouac wanted to write poetry in the style of the jazz and bop music he loved; and in this he for the most part succeeded. He wrote at the outset of the book:

"I want to be considered a jazz poet
blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam
session on Sunday. I take 242 choruses;
my ideas vary and sometimes roll from
chorus to chorus or from halfway through
a chorus to halfway into the next."

The work is written free-style and spontaneously with Kerouac,as he says, frequently taking an idea from one chorus and following through into the next. (The dividing lines between some of the choruses thus frequently seem artificial and mask a continuity in the text.) As with all poetry, the choruses in "Mexico City Blues" work best when declaimed and read aloud. Remember the Beats of Kerouac's day, as these poems were recited in coffee-houses to bongos. In reading the book, I was able to recapture some of this by "surfing" and by finding examples of choruses either read skillfully or accompanied by piano, drum, or small combo. Reading aloud, alone or with music and rhythm, brings to life these choruses.

The choruses have many themes, of which Kerouac's interest at the time in Buddhism is one. Rexroth devalues severely Kerouac's insight into Buddhism, among other things. The poems include sequences about Kerouac's early life and his relationship to his parents and to his older brother Gerard who died at the age of 9 when Kerouac was 4. This death haunted Kerouac throughout his life. The choruses include meditations on death. There are poems about substance abuse which haunted Kerouac throughout his life and which undoubtedly played a role in the poems. There are choruses about Kerouac's life in Mexico, on the railroads, travelling around, and about much else.

"Mexico City Blues" is a long, erratic collection. Given the spontaneous method of writing and the circumstances under which it was written, much of the collection is indeed poor, ranting, almost unreadable, and deserving of Ferlinghetti's declination of the book and of Rexroth's criticism. At its best, there are some good poems here and a distinctive beat creative voice. I found that as I reread and thought about the book more of the choruses began to make sense. With many frustrating things in the collection, overall the book works.

Some of the individual choruses has become relatively well-known and anthologized. Here are a few passages from the work, among several, that seem to me characteristic and that I enjoy. In the conclusion of the 33d Chorus, Kerouac writes about himself:

"I'm an idealist
who has outgrown
my idealism
I have nothing to do
the rest of my life
but do it
and the rest of my life
to do it"

The 234th Chorus is among the shortest in the collection and captures something of Kerouac's spiritual outlook. It reads in full.

"Holy poetry.
'All thinks are empty of self-marks'
'If it is space
that is perception of sight
You ought to know,
and if we were to substitute
One for the other, who'd win?"
Santiveda, St. Francis, A Kempis
Hara

A sinner may go to Heaven
by serving God as a sinner."

The last few choruses include Kerouac's tribute to jazz musician Charley Parker who had recently died and whose bop inspired Kerouac. In the 239th chorus, Kerouac said of Parker"

"The expression that says 'All is Well"
-- This was what Charley Parker
Said when he played, All is Well.
You had the feeling of early-in-the morning
Like a hermit's joy, or like
the perfect cry
Of some wild gang at a jam session
'Wail Wop' -- Charly burst
His lungs to reach the speed
Of what the speedsters wanted
And what they wanted
Was his Eternal Slowdown.
A great musician and a great
creator of forms
That ultimately find expression
In mores and what have you."

"Mexico City Blues" is a mixed collection that captures its author and an important American literary movement. Some of it will inspire. The book has been published several times since its initial printing. It is also included in a Library of America volume devoted to the "Collected Poems" of Kerouac.

Robin Friedman

[Mat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very hard one to evaluate because in order to rate this book appropriately, I believe, we should do so according to the terms and goals which Kerouac set for himself before he set out to write the 242 highly idiosyncratic choruses that make up Mexico City Blues, probably his strongest collection of poetry, and what Michael McClure called the "greatest religious poem of the 20th Century."

Kerouac says, at the outset, that he considers himself like a jazz singer, 'blowing' these choruses in a mid-afternoon jazz session. His voice, as poet, is his instrument, and for those of you not familiar with Kerouac, after meeting Neal Cassady, which means basically most of his work after his first novel, The Town and the City, he was all about spontaneity or spontaneous prose or what Ginsberg once dubbed 'spontaneous bop prosody.'

Therefore, what we have in these 242 choruses are all the ups and down, the peaks and valleys of Kerouac's poetry, his very best and his easily forgettable lines but we must remember that this is intentional. Jazz musicians do not go back to correct a 'mistaken note' so why should Kerouac do the same when is trying to do the same thing with paper and pen in his hands?

This is where people fail to understand Kerouac's 'mission' in writing Mexico City Blues. It was an immediate response to Ginsberg's 'Howl' and all the poets who sit down and revise and revise and revise until they want something pretty. Kerouac would revise sometimes, as Ann Charters and other Kerouac scholars have pointed out, when he was writing something like a sutra ('Scripture of the Golden Eternity' is a good example) but here it's all about 'first thought, best thought.'

And as Kerouac himself once said in an interview with Kerouac scholar Professor Charles Jarvis "once He moves that hand, it's a SIN to go back and revise!" I assume Kerouac means 'God' when he says 'He' but he might also equally be referring to his brother Gerard whom he believed was "safe in heaven dead" along with his father Leo.

If you decide to pick up this book and read it, please remember that not all the choruses / poems are great; in fact some of them are downright obscure. However, when Kerouac hits the groove just at the right moment, just like his hero Charlie Parker soaring into the climax of his greatest solos, THEN and only then will you understand his purpose and be thankful for purchasing this book.

My own personal favourites were "11th Chorus" and "230th Chorus" which is one of the most beautiful single poems I have read in the whole beat canon, to the point where other great beat legends such as Gregory Corso would sometimes include it in their own poetry reading repertoires. Not for the faint of heart but if you are looking for something experimental, heavily immersed in Buddhist philosophy and ringing to the rhythms of bebop jazz, then this might just be down your (Kerouac) alley. Enjoy and salud!

[Lucas Theron Lammott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think the thing with JK is finding the diamond in the "rough" between the free flow. Try not to think to hard about what your reading but let it speak to you in your own way... does that make any sense?

[Brad Lyerla · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am uncomfortable rating poetry. I do not often read poetry these days. I used to, but that was a long time ago.

I had some favorites: Thomas Hardy’s THE DARKLING THRUSH; Ezra Pound’s AN IMMORALITY; William Blake’s THE SICK ROSE are a few of them. I first read them a half century ago.

One that I particularly loved, my most favorite, was a poem written by Gary Snyder. It is called HAY FOR THE HORSES. Snyder, of course, was a friend of Kerouac’s. Snyder inspired Kerouac’s novel THE DHARMA BUMS, or so I gather.

I never told anyone that HAY FOR THE HORSES was my favorite until a funny thing happened. My daughter Nina is now 35 years old. (She is #3 in our combined family of 5 children, and a lovely child she is.) When she was a senior in high school, I noticed that she was reading a very thick anthology of American poetry. I asked her if she had a favorite poem. You guessed it, she said HAY FOR THE HORSES. I believe that this is more than a coincidence. It is a great poem. A lot of poetry fans admire it. Still it was very meaningful to me that we shared this favorite.

That is not why I chose to read MEXICO CITY BLUES. I chose MEXICO CITY BLUES now because I recently saw a documentary where Greg Corso described MEXICO CITY BLUES as Kerouac’s most formal work. I took that to mean in context that Kerouac did serious editing before he published it. I wanted to read what Kerouac’s serious editing is like.

MEXICO CITY BUES is long, 242 choruses. But it is a quick read because it is well written. I enjoyed it. But somehow Kerouac’s imagery was a little hit and miss for me. At one moment, he had me chuckling and the next scratching my head. His religiosity is very apparent, but thinly sketched. A Roman Catholic twist on Buddhism, or the reverse? Kerouac is still working it out (or running away from it, which may be the same thing).

Like most Beat literature, MEXICO CITY BLUES is aimed at a younger audience. At least it seems aimed at a younger audience to me in my 70s. Maybe if I had read it in my 20s, it would have felt timeless. Whatever. I found it to be stimulating and gentle at the same time. And I recommend it for readers of any age.

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me years to get beyond the Beat myth and see these poems for what they are; some of the most joyful, goofy and affecting writings of the last century. Kerouac wrote all 242 choruses--one per notebook page--over six weeks in 1955. His improvised word-jazz was at its peak; the poems are fresh and spontaneous but rarely sloppy (try it yourself if you don't believe me). The Buddhist leanings are a little simple-minded, but simplicity is part of the point. Kerouac combines a love for made-up words and feeling for language as pure sound with a lyrical directness you find more often in pop songs than modern poetry. Hearing Kerouac read some of these on the Steve Allen record made me realize how rare a thing his poems achieved: sentiment, experiment, tenderness, peace. A moving companion to On the Road .

[Theo Logos · Rating 3 out of 5]

”I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday.”

That quote above is what Kerouac said in the Notes that began this volume of poetry — an explanation of what’s to follow. And I must say he nailed it. These poems resemble nothing so much as a long, chaotic jam session of Bop musicians, complete with experimental riffs, playful asides, and harsh, discordant sounds that keep things shook up.

I’m a fan of Bebop jazz, so these poems should resonate with me. But something is off. Imagine if Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk were jamming with other musicians, but Monk says to Parker, “Hey Bird, just for giggles let me blow your sax and you come tickle these keys!” The resulting session may indeed have been a curiosity, would likely be something you’d want in your collection, but it likely wouldn’t have been either of their best work. That’s what this volume feels like. Kerouac is working in a medium that was not his best instrument, and it shows.

Some of these poems start out brilliantly, then fade into insignificance or worse. Others contain memorable lines surrounded by nonsense. No one of the Choruses stands out separately as a great poem, though several are interesting. These choruses are best taken as a whole — listen to their entirety to feel the intended rhythm.

Below is a taste of the riffs that are these choruses.

******************************************

5th Chorus

I am not Gregory Corso
The Italian Minnesinger –
Of the song of Corsica –
Subioso Gregorio Corso –
The haunted Versemaker
King
Of Brattle Street.
In streets of snow
He wove the show
And worried in tunnels
And mad dog barked

KIND KING MIND
Allen Ginsberg called me

William Burroughs
Is William Lee

Samuel Johnson
Is Under the sea

Rothridge Cole parter
Of Peppers
Is Numbro
Elabora

If you know what I
p a l a b r a


19th Chorus

Christ had a dove on his shoulder/
– My brother Gerard
Had 2 Doves
And 2 Lambs
Pulling his Milky Chariot.
Immersed in fragrant old
spittoon water
He was Baptized by Iron
Priest Saint Jacques
De Fournier in Lowell
Massachusetts
In the Gray Rain Year,
1919
When Chaplin had Spats
and Dempsey
Drank no whiskey by the track

My mother saw him in heaven
Riding away, prophesying
Everything will be alright
Which I have learned now
By Trial & Conviction
In the Court of Awful Glots..


29th Chorus

”Man, now, you wont let me talk”
Gripes the irreligious feline cat -
That cat has no trumpet
But bubblegum to blow on
Poor sad Bhikku of the Forest

Of poor, lost little Nino
In Calles of Forever,
Streets of Old Burma,
Be saved secret wretched
Urchin brother hero
You are protected
By the Guardians
of
the
Alone
All is alone, you dont have to talk
One Light, One Transcendental Ecstasy
If they dont understand that
In the South, it’s because
All the Baptists
Have not been to Shul

83rd Chorus

Don’t they call them
cat men
That lay it down
with the trumpet
The orgasm
Of the moon
And the June
I call em
them cat things
William Carlos Williams
— He knew

132nd & 133rd Chorus

Innumerable infinite songs/ Great suffering of the atomic/in verse/ Which may or may not be/ controlled/ by a consciousness/Of which you & the/ripples of the waves/are a part/That’s Buddhism/That’s Universal Mind/  Pan Cosmodicy/  Einstein believed/ In the God of Spinoza/ – (Two Jews/ – Two Frenchmen)/.             “Einstein probably put a lot/ of people in the bughouse by/ saying that/ All those pseudo intellectuals/went home and read Spinoza/then they dig in/to the subtleties/of Pantheism/ After ten years of research/They wrap it up/& sit down on a bench/& try to forget/ all about it/  Because Pantheism’s/ Too Much for Em/  They wind up trying to/find out Plato, Aristotle,/they end up in a/vicious Morphine circle


239th Chorus

Charley Parker Looked like Buddha
Charley Parker, who recently died
Laughing at a juggler on the TV
after weeks of strain and sickness,
was called the Perfect Musician.
And his expression on his face
Was as calm, beautiful, and profound
As the image of the Buddha
Represented in the East, the lidded eyes,
The expression that says “All is Well”
—This was what Charley Parker
Said when he played, All is Well.
You had the feeling of early-in-the-morning
Like a hermit’s joy, or like
the perfect cry
Of some wild gang at a jam session
“Wail, Wop”—Charley burst
His lungs to reach the speed
Of what the speedsters wanted
Was his Eternal Slowdown.
A great musician and a great
creator of forms
That ultimately find expression
In mores and what have you.


241st Chorus

And how sweet a story it is
When you hear Charley Parker
tell it,
Either on records or at sessions,
Or at offical bits in clubs,
Shots in the arm for the wallet,
Gleefully he Whistled the
perfect
horn
Anyhow, made no difference.

Charley Parker, forgive me-
Forgive me for not answering your eyes-
For not having made in indication
Of that which you can devise-
Charley Parker, pray for me-
Pray for me and everybody
In the Nirvanas of your brain
Where you hide, indulgent and huge,
No longer Charley Parker
But the secret unsayable name
That carries with it merit
Not to be measured from here
To up, down, east, or west-
-Charley Parker, lay the bane,
off me, and every body

[Heather Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

do you like poetry? dreams? me too. so does Jack. let's go sit on the roof now.

[Danilo Scardamaglio · Rating 3 out of 5]

È sicuramente una delle opere più strane che abbia mai letto, lasciare un commento mi risulta perciò particolarmente complesso. Mexico City Blues è una raccolta di 242 testi poetici, ordinati secondo parole o temi chiave che si succedono durante il corso dell'opera. Già a partire dal genere letterario e dalla categorizzazione si incontra qualche difficoltà: è davvero poesia? Penso di no, cioè forse, a sprazzi: anche per il genere la raccolta è estremamente eterogenea, si vaga da poesie vere e proprie, con un tono quasi classicheggiante, a prosa versificata, fortemente ritmata, fino a giungere a mere successioni di parole accomunate da rime o da semplici assonanze. Eterogenei sono anche i temi affrontati durante questo strambo viaggio: morte, amicizia, infanzia, serate jazz e così via, tutto però legato da un continuo leitmotiv, ossia il buddhismo, vera colonna vertebrale dell'opera, unica costante nei 242 chorus. Se leggendo la presentazione mi aspettavo che leitmotiv potessero essere i viaggi allucinogeni o soprattutto il jazz (vedasi intro di Kerouac stesso in cui afferma voler essere nient'altro qui che jazzista), in realtà mi sbagliavo: a parte qualche poesia esplicitamente "junky", il tema allucinogeno, inteso nel senso più ginsbergiano di viaggio, resta in parte sconnesso rispetto alla mole di testi, è presente per lo più nell'insieme di deliri e descrizioni grottesche; mentre la componente jazz (beat) spesso è sacrificata alle portate metafisiche dei testi. Il che a tratti è positivo, essendo molte poesie puramente beat pressoché inintellegibili, meri giochi di parole senza alcun senso logico o semantico; a tratti negativo in quanto altre poesie risultano la mera resa versificata di teoria buddhista, quasi senza intervento dell'autore stesso. Le poesie migliori sono in effetti quelle in cui i temi cari a Kerouac risultano meglio sincronizzati, omogeneizzati: a tal proposito il chorus 170 è qualcosa di fantastico, così come lo sciame di testi sull'infanzia vista retrospettivamente, o il commiato per Charlie Parker. Dunque in fine, se ci si aspetta di trovare il Kerouac di On the Road, lo si ritrova soltanto in parte: questo è un Kerouac sicuramente più sperimentale, più innovativo nelle forme, sicuramente meno incisivo e più scostante di quello ammirato nel suo capolavoro.

[Luke Redfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

one of kerouac's finest moments for it's differency. open to any page and engage.

om. hare rama. hallelujah.
mexico. new orleans. sweet denver.

jack will always be cliche to one demographic and a god to another. an innovator too plagiarized today, in the same vein that bob dylan stole from woody g before the trend had been set.
be ahead of your time, but not too ahead of it.

fame always leads to critics. kerouac was probably an asshole, but i have a special place in my heart for anyone who lived out their authenticism.

[Shane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the greatest work of poetry I've ever read. It's pure freedom of form, hypnotic meters, and chasmic depth inspired me to be a writer for the rest of my life.

[Odeen Rocha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prefiero ser delgado
que famoso
pero
soy gordo

[Zoya · Rating 5 out of 5]

There was a dead bug on the first page of the copy I borrowed from the library and I think that really added to the ambiance.

[Maja Shinigami · Rating 2 out of 5]

Svaki put kad se kaznim i pročitam nešto proizašlo iz prepotentnog mozga i pisaće mašine Jacka Kerouaca prisjetim se što znači nekvalitetno pisanje (u bilo kojem obliku).
Čovjek bi pomislio kako netko tko je izrazito loš prozaik možda ima neke nade u poeziji, ali Kerouac ima barem jedan talent, a taj je da je sranje u svemu što ima veze s pisanjem.
Jebalo te ''spontano pisanje'' i ''senzorne meditacije'', Jean.

[Arcadia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished my Extended Essay! Hence, I finished this.
At first, I won't lie, I was kinda reserved towards the poem. They just looked like random words strewn together on a page. Poems are supposed to be pleasantly musical, in some shape or another. However, after the extensive research that came with writing my monster essay, there is no denying Kerouac's inherent musicality in his poems. The erratic, spontaneous, improvisational feel of jazz is vividly latent in all of these choruses. Good job man.

Listen to Kerouac and Johnny Depp recite some of the choruses:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmOmA...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frJ8T...

[Stefan Gašić · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jack Kerouac ain't worth a jack shit

[Brad · Rating 2 out of 5]

At moments brilliant but mostly drug addled crap, Mexico City Blues is Jack Kerouac's career in microcosm. There are times when his poetry and prose are truly great, when he can incite or captivate or evoke a sensation like a master, but most of the time he is a hack.

I know, I know, y'all love him and think he is a literary god, but he really isn't. He and his friends (he is no Ginsberg or Ferlengetti, after all) came at a moment when they could do anything they wanted with no worries about editors or quality. In some moments and in some cases this was a boon, but it was not always so, and Kerouac's ouevre is too littered with the latter for him to be truly great. Read Mexico City blues and you'll see what I mean.

(p.s. it's more fun to read in French.)

[Todd · Rating 4 out of 5]

To make any sense of Mexico City Blues by Kerouac, you've got to read it out loud, and read it quickly.

Love his novels, and I'm starting to fall in love with his poetry.

... Also, if anyone is planning on getting into Kerouac's Buddhist texts, then, in the words of Jack: "To understand what I'm sayin, You gotta read the Sutras."

[Brian Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great supplement to other works by and about Kerouac. Not every line is great, but many are. And this poem is an insightful and enjoyable read.

[chacierrr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Daaaaaa ode to eternity

[Sladjana Kovacevic · Rating 5 out of 5]

MEXICO CITY BLUES-JACK KEROUAC
✒"Who am I?
do I exist?
(I don’t even exist anyhow)"
🎶Poema se sastoji od 242 strofe-ispovesti.
🎶Stihovi ponekad deluju kao nabacane asocijacije dok pesnik leži na kauču u psihološkoj ordinaciji. Među njima ima zaita pravih bisera. Ne morate se razumeti u Azteke ili budizam ili u bilo šta. Treba samo osetiti bluz.
✒"Good men

Who love

Have Karmas

Of dove"
✒"O live quietly; live to love
Everybody."
✒"I have no plans

No dates

No appointments with anybody

So I leisurely explore

Souls and Cities"
✒"The sound in your mind
is the first sound
that you could sing"
✒"How solid our ignorance –

how empty our substance

and the conscience

keeps bleeding

and decay is slow –

children grow."
✒"Dead and dont know it,
Living and do.
The living have a dead idea.
A person is a living idea;
after death, a dead idea."
✒ "I'd rather be thin than famous but I'm fat paste that in your broadway show"
✒"I’m an idealist who has outgrown my idealism I have nothing to do the rest of my life but do it and the rest of my life to do it"
✒ "I'd rather die than be famous, I want to go live in the desert With long wild hair, eating At my campfire, full of sand"
#7sensesofabook #knjige #bookstagram #literature #readingaddict

[Emily Walters · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe I don’t get the beats but I was struggling. I picked up this book hoping to be reminded of Mexico City (but to be fair when I go back and read my diary when I was in Mexico City, I only ramble about myself - like Kerouac). There were some that resonated with me:
98th chorus
123rd chorus
129th chorus
143rd chorus
201st chorus
213th chorus (less the content, more that was dedicated to Ginsberg and I like when artists are friends and reference each other)
227th chorus

That’s 7/242, like a 3% enjoyment rate.

[Scott Satterwhite · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read several of Kerouac's works, but haven't spent much time with his poetry. This collection was interesting to read, as he vascilated between Catholicism with a heavy emphasis on Buddhism, and closing with Charlie Parker as the Buddha. I enjoyed reading this and found it both meditative and inspiring.

[Cass · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am going to think about the 6th chorus for the rest of my life

[Swann · Rating 4 out of 5]

très sympa le bouddhisme et tout j'ai kiffé, un peu inégal par contre fin ok écrire sous drogue c'est marrant mais parfois faut relire avant de publier

[Santiago Montrés]

«Mexico City Blues è un grande classico. È un'opera originale, con un discorso molto personale, di una musicalità notevole. Un'opera di genio continuato, una suite di 242 poeie, come i Sonetti di Shakespeare, in cui Kerouac "jezza" la lingua americana» (Allen Ginsberg)

Kerouac. Un autore che mi ha affascinato da subito al nostro primo incontro, avvenuto nell'ottobre del 2013 quando lessi il suo romanzo "Sulla strada", di cui spero di potervi raccontare del mio incontro con questo libro al più presto.
Arriviamo a Mexico City Blues: una mattina, appena sceso dal tram mi avviavo verso Piazza Castello a Sassari per incontrarmi con un amico, a due passi dalla fermata, attraverso e passo per via Torre Tonda, dove si trova una bancarella di libri usati. Mentre camminavo il mio occhio si posò su questo libro, mi fermai e cominciai a sfogliare alcune pagine... Avevo conosciuto il Kerouac narratore, ma volevo conoscere anche il Kerouac poeta, così senza indugiare oltre acquisto il libro.
Son riuscito a leggerlo solo di recente.

Mexico City Blues venne pubblicato nel 1959, ma scritto nel 1955, ed è la sua prima opera poetica pubblicata. Un continuum poetico dal quale si viene condotti dal ritmo della sua Jam Session, ben 242 strofe, nei quali emerge il suo stile definito "prosodia bop" o "prosa spontanea" che rappresenta il testamento e il manifesto della Beat Generation.
Mexico City oltreché essere un luogo fisico rappresenta anche un luogo di "libertà", in certo senso rappresentata dalla droga lì facilmente reperibile e a basso prezzo, elemento che ritorna più volte all'interno della raccolta e che contribuisce in certa misura alla nascita della scrittura e dello stile di Kerouac. Da Mexico city si parte verso altre mete, verso altri mondi, in viaggio per non restare intrappolato nella sua stessa lirica. Il "blues", come elemento "malinconico" in un senso nostalgico di un America contraddittoria.
Pagine che raccolgono la sua anima e talvolta pagine visionarie, Kerouac in questa raccolta si a volte si presenta come un maestro della tradizione orientale, altre volte come un musicista che dà vita ad una danza tribale, quasi sciamanica. I temi delle 242 strofe sono vari: infanzia, vita, morte, spiritualità e misticismo che si susseguono nelle pagine una dietro l'altra dove i ritmi lenti, veloci certe volte psichedelici e metafisici, e ci si ritrova a danzare insieme al questo cantante bop, si riesce persino a vederlo. La band che suona un lungo blues dai temi variabili, e lui al centro che canta tutta la sua vita, la sua "malinconia", la sua trascendenza, sudato con una sigaretta in mano, e la folla che davanti a lui balla, rapita dalla sua voce.
Un battuto e beato, come egli stesso si definì dando una definizione della Beat Generation e questa raccolta racchiude tutti questi elementi, un opera complessa nei temi e non sempre di facile lettura, e in tutto questo la traduzione non aiuta, nonostante il lavoro dei traduttori, molte cose inevitabilmente si perdono nella riscrittura in una lingua "altra", diversa da quella originale. Il mio consiglio è, per chi conosce l'inglese di leggere le poesie prima in lingua madre e successivamente in italiano.
Detto questo, è un libro del quale ne consiglio la lettura, a tutti e non solo a chi già apprezza l'autore, specie in questa raccolta, Kerouac è una miniera inesauribile di spunti di storie vissute.
Prima di lasciarvi, vi trascrivo una poesia scelta da questa raccolta.

119a strofa

Il tuo Sé sia il mio lume,
Il tuo Sé sia la tua guida -
Così parlò Tathagata
Mettendo in guardia dalle radio
Che sarebbero venute
Un giorno
E avrebbero costretto la gente
Ad ascoltare automatiche
Parole altrui

e il generico flash dei rumori,
dimenticando il Sé, il non-Sé -
Dimenticando il segreto...

Lassù sulle montagne così alte
i sommi sacerdoti stregoni stanno
a ramazzare il ponte
di torsi dalle costole rotte
rotte sulla ruota di tortura
di
Kallaquack
cercando di capire in che modo uscir
fuor dalla calamità di polvere e
eternità, buz, è meglio
che tu torni alla barca
g e n t i l e

Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues

[Max · Rating 2 out of 5]

On the road on the go

[Μακης Περδικοματης · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://youtu.be/FPCqV33YFrA


Αν και την ποίηση συνήθως δεν την καταλαβαίνω, παρόλα αυτά μου αρέσει πάρα πολύ να διαβάζω, προσπαθώντας να συντονιστώ όσο μπορώ με το κάθε ποίημα ....

Την δεύτερη λοιπόν φορά που διάβασα τα Mexico City Blues του Kerouac, είχα και τη βοήθεια του A map of Mexico City Blues, Jack Kerouac as a poet , του James T. Jones.

Δεν ξέρω, φαντάζομαι ότι κι ο ίδιος ο Κέρουακ μπορεί να μην "ενέκρινε" το να διαβάζει κανείς τα ποιήματα του με... "χάρτη" αλλά εμένα μου άρεσε πολύ. Ο Jones αναφέρεται σε κάθε χορικό χωριστά, επισημαίνοντας κάθε φορά συνδέσεις που μπορεί να έχει το ποίημα με τη βουδιστική κοσμοαντίληψη που είχε ο Κέρουακ ή με περιστατικά από την προσωπική του ζωή.

Τα mexico city blues θεωρούνται μαζί με τα Οράματα του Κόντι ίσως τα πιο σημαντικά και μετάμοντέρνα έργα του Κέρουακ. Στα μέξικο Σίτι μπλουζ ο Κέρουακ κάθεται και σημειώνει σε ένα χαρτί τις ιδέες/ποιήματα/τραγούδια του ενώ ταυτόχρονα πιάνει ψιλή κουβέντα με τον ηρωίνομανη φίλο του Γκράβερ.
Πολλές φορές μάλιστα αποσπάσματα αυτής της κουβέντας μπορεί και περιλαμβάνονται τελικά μέσα στο ίδιο το ποίημα!

Η αυθόρμητη πρόζα, του Κέρουακ, επηρεασμένη από τον Τζαζ αυτοσχεδιασμό, αλλά κατά τη γνώμη μου κι από την αυτόματη γραφή των σουρρεαλιστων, εμφανίζεται εδώ σε όλο της το μεγαλείο.

Είμαστε τυχεροί που μπορούμε να ακούσουμε τον ίδιο τον Κέρουακ, συνοδεία τζαζ μουσικής, να απαγγέλλει κάποια από τα ποιήματα του!!

https://youtu.be/tNN-lvsBnRo