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Book of Blues

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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 rhythm, 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

274 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1995

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About the author

Jack Kerouac

360 books11.6k followers
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.

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5 stars
359 (27%)
4 stars
433 (33%)
3 stars
378 (29%)
2 stars
96 (7%)
1 star
32 (2%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 53 reviews
Profile Image for Eddie Watkins.
Author 48 books5,557 followers
October 8, 2014
Jack Kerouac reminds me of my father-in-law a little, though my father-in-law’s hands are ever working with drywall, fiberglass, salvaged wood scraps, and various buckets of construction slops rather than with words. They both, however, swill(ed) bourbon like mother’s milk.

But the true substance of this comparison is their sensuous sloppiness coupled with an emotional apprehension of the world that can slip into the maudlin exposing a raw sensitivity that often masks itself in devil-may-care boorishness, and their headlong plunging into the world of things stoked by a mentality that never settles into anything resembling calm satisfaction.

I realized this similarity in a flash once while talking to my wife on the phone as she was watching her father repair a boat ramp in a slipshod manner. As she described it he was out in the heat wearing nothing but boxer shorts which had a butt-side opening as gaping as his front-side fly. This image reminded me of Kerouac and his poetry.

His poetry is a mess, but it’s a sensuous mess formed by a hands-on immersion, with a butt-side fly openness to the world. And inside this butt-side fly is a raw heart, and inside this raw heart is an adolescent boy who just wants to play and build and suckle bourbon from an all-enveloping mammary.

Profile Image for Avery Stempel.
68 reviews
November 15, 2019
Kerouac must be taken seriously. Must be laughed at. Adored. Despised. He combines all dichotomies into a singularity. Drives forward into the Long clearly night with a drink on his lips and a smile in his heart. He wonders at things. You can tell. I feel like we would have been good friends. I’m glad he left some of his thoughts behind for us to consider... for us to enjoy... this collected book of blues was delicious.
Profile Image for Ben Tamm.
22 reviews
July 26, 2024
Ole Jack is one of my favorite authors, but here only his lowest levels are on display; sometimes bordering on incoherent rambling with almost none of his engulfing verbal grace and charm.
Profile Image for chacierrr.
172 reviews19 followers
June 16, 2020
My first full reading of a book of poetry. I chose a Kerouac book of poetry since I’m already very familiar with his writing hence it being a good introduction. I thought some of the poems were really good while at other times I wasn’t sure what he was talking about but they were fun to read late a night a little fcked.
Profile Image for m. soria.
170 reviews
August 7, 2008
some of his most famous poems are part of this collection, poems that you can read with his voice in your head, because there exist recordings of them.
Profile Image for Judo  Livingspree.
12 reviews4 followers
February 24, 2017
I needed piano and drums in the background for these poems that should be read aloud.
Profile Image for Jake.
923 reviews55 followers
February 26, 2019
Pretty bad stuff, Jack. I keep reading Kerouac because On the Road was so good. This was just some nonsense poetry. Here's a random sample:

No such luck
For potter McMuck
Who broke his fist
On angry mitts
In fist fights
Falling everywhere
From down Commercial
To odd or even
All the pers
Blang! Blang!
I L W U had a hard time
And so did N A M
And S P A M
And as did A M
Profile Image for Nicholas Trandahl.
Author 16 books90 followers
March 19, 2025
Unbridled wild poetics. Chaotic immersion into set pieces, harvesting poetic ore from places across the world where it blooms like fractured radiant crystal. Kerouac was a writer who knew exactly what he was doing and did it well.
Profile Image for Mat.
603 reviews67 followers
October 12, 2013
Hmmmmm........tough call.
I think this is one of those books that divides the bona fide Kerouac fan from the Kerouac freak. Come to think of it, I probably used to belong to the latter category but now most probably belong to the former category.
Like with so many of Kerouac's poetry collections, there are highs and lows. Even in his largely unheralded classic Mexico City Blues, some pages are disappointing. Is this the best the King of the Beats has to offer, I wondered at times. But here I must stop and remind myself that to analyse Kerouac's poetry on the micro level is misleading and somewhat missing the point.

Kerouac himself provides the very keys to exploring that beautiful labyrinth of his mind - to understanding his work - he is a jazz poet, par excellence, blowing his blues like a tenorman on a Sunday afternoon jam session. And listen to any solo by the jazz greats - Coltrane, Parker or Davis - and you will soon realise that not every note, not even every phrase is melodious and good. But they are SEARCHING (yes that is the key word) for that sound and towards the end of the book Kerouac says (in a short aside) that he has found his sound. He is writing spontaneously and just like a jazz solo, the sum is definitely greater than the individual parts.

In some spots, Kerouac breaks into Joycean babble doubletalk but somehow that "scatalogical pile-up of words" (as Kerouac describes his own spontaneous bop prosody) is endlessly fascinating. Some of it makes no sense whatsoever no matter how many times you go back over it but some choruses seem to make some sort of sense on a telepathical level. And we must remember what the whole essence of beatness is - a sort of anti-intellectual-establishment crusade or protest. College professors of literature and writing often have very rigid boundaries for deciding what can be considered as strict 'literature'. Well, as Corso and Kerouac knew well, the man of the street (Jack Micheline is a prime example) knows society on a level that the college professor in his cozy college office cannot. Enter the beats. And that's what it is all about.

In my opinion, San Francisco Blues contains Kerouac's best work in this collection but parts of Orizaba and Cerrada blues are also fascinating.

Some of the poems in this collection are top notch five-star but there are some three and two-star choruses too and I know Kerouac is capable of doing better but to reiterate, the sum is greater than the parts. Still definitely worth a read but if you are new to Kerouac's poetry, start with the pristine, the sublime Mexico City Blues. Three stars for Book of Blues.
Profile Image for Taylor Church.
Author 3 books37 followers
September 9, 2016
Mary Karr, the ex-girlfriend of my arguably (the argument is in my own head) favorite author David Foster Wallace wrote : “Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air, a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody’s head off.”

I think many poems would in fact blow everyone’s heads off, if more people were apt to read poetry. Sadly, some of the finest works of art are lost—lost not because they are buried or stolen, but because no one is looking for them.

Admittedly, poetry is not my favorite form of letters, but sometimes it is so beautiful you cannot toss it aside. Plus, if one of your favorite prose writers also writes poetry, it’s hard to not want to gobble that up too. This was the case with Mr. Jack Kerouac. I had read 9 of his novels, and stumbled upon The Book of Blues in a used bookstore and bought it in a hurry, fearing I would never see it again on a bookstore shelf.

Like much of Jack’s work, it takes a special understanding of his life and milieu to better appreciate and cherish his work. His books are among other things, unorthodox, selfish, muddled, and at times confusing and full of street argot. But they are also heartbreakingly genuine, raw, lyrical, and touching. His poetry is no different. He weaves through his polarizing mind leaving no topic behind, covering Buddhism, Catholicism, friendship, sex, recreational drugs, the morning time, the sounds of streets and cities, and of course sadness and loneliness.

This collection of verse is unique in that the poems are compiled as if they were song lyrics and choruses, tied together to create some gorgeous masterpiece of jazz. Some lines are in French, some lines are utter balderdash, and some lines make you miss a girl from 8 years ago. But if nothing else, this work shows a man living life, and recording the beauty that most don’t see.
Profile Image for Nativeabuse.
287 reviews47 followers
November 18, 2011
I like Kerouac's books, I like Ginsbergs poetry, I love Burroughs, I love avant-garde poetry. So I was expecting to enjoy this.

But this was the worst poetry I have ever read in my entire life. I honestly don't understand all these high ratings at all.

It is hard to describe, It isn't all terrible, but a majority of it is. Most of it looks like the guy was trying to do cutups, and then when you realize he wasn't and he was seriously trying to write poetry about the streets of these cities it makes you wonder what the guy was thinking. Some of it is genuinely good, but these are few and far between.

I'll post a few excerpts here to give you a good look.

This is an exact poem in this book, typed out precisely as it appears, most of the poetry in this 288 page book looks like this.

"Dom dum dom domry
Dom—dom—hahem—
Sum—(creeeeee!)—Hnf—
Shh—Hnf—Shh—Haf
Shhh—Shhh—Hiffff—
—Ma—
Snffff—(bing bring,seting)
—"Yo conee na nache"—
D ding—d ding—d-ding—
Cramp!—O ya ta dee
—ker blum—kheum—
Hnffff—drrrrrrrr—drosh—
Pepock—Shiffle—t
bda—
Want a piece a bread
No"

The rest looks like this.
"Ugly pig
Burping
In the sidewalk
As surrealistic
Typewriters
Swim exploding by
And bigger marines
Lizard thru the side
Of the gloom
Like water
For this
is the Sea
Of
Reality."

If a couple hundred pages of this stuff sounds appealing to you then by all means read it.

From page 110
"But I cant write, poetry,
just prose."
Profile Image for John.
8 reviews1 follower
January 5, 2013
There are a lot of folks who may just not 'get' this, and that's OK. Looking back through the eyes of the 21st century, it's sometimes difficult for people to grasp, but the key here is the rhythm, the blues, the cant that's used, the gaps, and above all the clearly defined limitations of how he composed these 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 the other, 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 it waves & waves on by in measure choruses."


I'll echo what others have said. Put on some bop music - Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, early Coltrane...and then hear it in Jack's voice. Hit up YouTube and listen to his delivery of his prose, and realize it's all the same...beat.
Profile Image for Michael Hattem.
Author 2 books23 followers
July 31, 2010
I've always felt that Kerouac's poetry was highly underrated since his prose is so celebrated. Kerouac attempted to be as free as one can possibly be in a prose setting, but in his poems he didn't have to try so hard because of the form. And it shows. Personally, I feel some of his best writing is contained in a few of these blues poems and in Mexico City Blues. Some of it rivals and/or surpasses any of Ginsberg's non-Howl/Kaddish/Fall of America poems. And that's saying something. I think Kerouac should rightly be remembered as one of the century's great American poets as well as prose writers. As someone else said, you will likely get more out of these poems if you have read some of his prose previously but it's certainly not required.
117 reviews33 followers
December 15, 2014
I am not a big fan of Kerouac, but I was very pleased with this book. His method of composing words around music and jazz I found translated very well in his poetry. The fact that it didnt seem that he was trying to be a poet gave his verse that much more of a resonance that I feel is missing in much of his prose. All that being said, it would be hard to get a feel for this book without already being familiar with at least some of his prose for it is very intimate and needs a little background. Was a pleasure to read.
Profile Image for JJ.
13 reviews5 followers
March 9, 2009
I bought this to be a very fun kick around read and it turned out to work great for that. It was uplifting to read a few of Kerouac's choruses at any time and they really made me pay attention to detail.

This was the first book I wrote in. Different things that he spoke about which I wanted to read more about.

Also served as a good inspiration for my own writing. Just to experience his flow of thoughts at your own pacing was cool enough.

Profile Image for Sam Albala.
228 reviews10 followers
August 15, 2014
Jack Kerouac's Book of Blues was a wonderful collection of thoughts and clippings from traveling experiences. I felt a connection when reading these pieces. I would say some are vulgar and do not speak to me quite as much, but I did find joy and love, feeling like I was walking some streets with him. If you are new to his poetry I would recommend you start here. I haven't read anything as wonderful yet!
Profile Image for philosophie.
697 reviews
September 1, 2013
my first contact with kerouac's work and i decided to start by reading his poems. some may say that i should have read his novels beforehand, as his strength is in his prose, yet i beg to differ. i think his poems are filled with rhythm and musicality. it certainly was the best way to get sucked into his literary route.
Profile Image for Evan Gray.
3 reviews7 followers
June 7, 2013
Don't skip the introduction to this book! Bob Creely sets this book up perfectly by explaining the terms in which it came about and how it should be read.
Profile Image for Matt.
42 reviews
May 6, 2015
"Desolation Blues", yes, please.
Profile Image for Tonya.
648 reviews
December 20, 2016
I don't know what I was expecting, but this was not it. It was an interesting read. It was hard to follow at times, but worth the time to read it.
Profile Image for Brendan.
1,586 reviews27 followers
November 18, 2017
Kerouac's poetry rolls and dips, as I can only imagine him speaking on a long drive in the night.
Profile Image for iansomething.
183 reviews
February 3, 2024
Thunder
Thunder makes a booming
noise like windows
Being hysterically quietly
closed-
So Papa fell down the stairs
of time
In spite of holy water
And all yr mixed drinks
in Eternity



Smiles

Smiles pull flesh from cheek
Over pearls of bone
And make the watcher see
The quake of cream
In eyes of stone




Hollywood, if you want
little girls raped by sex
friends, don’t with
symbols, give it to me
S t r a i g h t

Otto was pretty miserable
He chased little girls
to rape in sawdust
apartments yet unbuilt

He was a ugly big Otto
but O when I was
a little girl I loved
all that

The lovely maniac
makes me smile
Profile Image for Donald.
1,729 reviews16 followers
September 4, 2017
While I love Kerouac's prose, I am not a fan of his poetry. This collection did nothing to change that. However, I did like the first batch in here, the 80 choruses titled "San Francisco Blues ". The San Francisco in here is not the one that the tourists see. It's battered and dreary, filled with drunks, whores, and the weary working man. That all struck a chord with me. The rest of the poems did not, some seemingly just gibberish to my eyes.
Profile Image for Thiala.
73 reviews
July 24, 2019
This is a decent book. It wasn't the best book I have read by Kerouac though. However, I have read worse books of poetry by other writers.

Book of Blues does have some interesting parts though. For example, there is a part written in all French. I'm glad I ran that part through a translator because I think it was one of the best parts of the book.

It doesn't take long to read and it's not a bad way to spend your day. I expected more from Kerouac but, it's still not bad. I have to give it 3 stars.
Profile Image for Jack Malik.
Author 20 books21 followers
August 26, 2023
Ah, Ti Jean you Holy Goof.

I’ll never understand reading Kerouac’s pomes. But I love that notunderstanding. Ol’ Sal Paradise & Mr. Duluoz can blow long fine tunes all Sunday afternoon. His song are scattered as far as Malaya. I am with you in Ipoh, o beatific figure searching for that simple, perfect word.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 53 reviews

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