Customer Reviews

Book of Blues

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Kerouac's Book of Blues is an important book for anyone interested in Kerouac's spontaneous style of writing. For those more familiar with his novels and prose Book of Blues will open a more pure and raw form of verse than even "On the Road". Kerouac was truly a poet at heart. To get the full effect of this book which reaaly needs to be read aloud to full experience I also highly recommend Kerouac's Blues & Haikus CD which contains him reading several of the poems in Book of Blues.

Book of Blues is an important piece of writing that chronicles an important time in Kerouac's life and works well with Desolation Angels. As I read Desolation Angels, I noticed that Jack Duluoz makes references to various works of poetry as he moves through the book and Book of Blues contains many of those poems. Desolation Blues was written about his time on Desolation Peak and accompanies that section of the book well. You begin to understand Jack's thoughts and anxities better. Later Jack is in Mexico City writing Mexico City Blues but he also wrote Orizabo(I believe) at the same time, at least according to Desolation Angels. Orizabo Blues can be seen as the outakes or the preparaton from Mexico City Blues. Later on in the book, Jack Duluoz is back in Mexico City after his trip to Europe and during these times he wrote Cerrera Medellin blues. Other Blues not included in Book of Blues though mentioned in Desolatioin Angels are Washington, D.C. Blues and Tangier Blues which have yet to be published. Book of Blues is an important book to the Kerouac canon.

this book has so many unique qualities to it, and they all focus so much on Kerouac's unusual lifestyle... the book, with it's so many chouruses is an inspiration!

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.

Contains the outstanding 'Desolation Blues'. Otherwise unremarkable

I first read Kerouac's writtings over 30 years ago. The content of this work is firm but is limited in it's scope and focus. The author usually slips into a tanghent that not many of us would comprehend unless we had lived in the 1960's.