Book of Blues
by Jack Kerouac
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jack KerouacIntroduction: Robert Creeley
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1995-09-01
ISBN: 0140587004
Number of pages: 274
Publisher: Penguin Books
Book Reviews of Book of Blues
Book Review: Be-Bop Boy
Summary: 4 Stars
Some of the general points made below have been used in other reviews of books and materials by and about Jack Kerouac.
"As I have explained in another entry in this space in a DVD review of the film documentary "The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg", recently I have been in a "beat" generation literary frame of mind. I think it helps to set the mood for commenting on Jack Kerouac's lesser non-prose work, the poems under review here, "Book Of Blues" that it all started last summer when I happened to be in Lowell, Massachusetts on some personal business. Although I have more than a few old time connections with that now worn out mill town I had not been there for some time. While walking in the downtown area I found myself crossing a small park adjacent to the site of a well-known mill museum and restored textile factory space. Needless to say, at least for any reader with a sense of literary history, at that park I found some very interesting memorial stones inscribed with excerpts from a number of his better known works dedicated to Lowell's `bad boy', the "king of the 1950s beat writers".
And, just as naturally, when one thinks of Kerouac then, "On The Road", his classic modern physical and literary `search' for the meaning of America for his generation which came of age in post-World War II , readily comes to mind. No so well known, however, is the fact that that famous youthful novel was merely part of a much grander project, an essentially autobiographical exposition by Kerouac in many volumes starting from his birth in 1922, to chart and vividly describe his relationship to the events, great and small, of his times. Those volumes bear the general title "The Legend Of Duluoz". Perhaps even less well known are his poetic works, although given his spontaneous writing style method and association with many of the key poets of the 1940s and 1950s, beat or not, it is less understandable. That is why we today, in the year of the forty anniversary of Kerouac's death, are under the sign of a compilation of his poetry, aptly titled, "Book Of Blues".
Kerouac, in a couple of famous essays and in various places in some of his novels, makes a very big point that he was deeply influenced by the rhythm of jazz and by the be-bop language associated with it. Certain passages from "On The Road" and other works clearly emphasize that point. Although Kerouac was not known as a major beat poet, and will not be remembered as such, he certainly rated as a talented minor one, as these poems, especially "San Francisco Blues" indicate. It is hard to get a sense, unlike with Allen Ginsberg, of Kerouac's ideas how these poems should "sound" from merely reading them on the page. But there is a method to the couple of hundred choruses that are included here in various forms broken into several interrelated poems. Let's put it this way, read a couple of Kerouac's books and then come back to this.
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