Customer Reviews

Scattered Poems

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

There are few times in the history of mankind that we can sit back and allow ourselves to be manipulated by a pure mad man (brilliant writer). Kerouac's poems allow the mind to travel to the brink of truth and reality and come back unharmed and ... enlightened ... Thank God for kerouac ... he makes the world a better place and his poems are subconcious unfiltered visions of real life. "Pull My Daisy" with Ginsberg is a masterpiece as is "Old Angel Midnight". here is one poem : TO EDWARD DAHLBERG

Don't use the telephone. People are never ready to answer it. Use Poetry.

And Jack Kerouac does use poetry ... he uses it to give insight into a world he knew so well.

This rather than 'on the road' was the first Kerouac book I read and found it liberating as before I only knew poetry in those tired old scholastic tomes, this bit, kicked and moaned without old constraints, it is beautiful sad and brief like Kerouac's life.

Kerouac wrote some pretty bad poems, but he also wrote some darn good ones. Any collection of his poetry will contain the good and bad. Every poet has good stuff and bad stuff, and you have to write the bad stuff to get to the good stuff. Kerouac was a highly original poet, influenced by jazz improvisation. He plays with words and rhyme in ways no poet does. Scattered Poems is indeed a scattered collection with some original poems and poems from his collections that weren't published at the time but are now available in print. My favorite in the book is a biographical poem on the great French poet Rimbaud. He hits, in a poetic way, the high points of his life, and then draws an interesting comment on life. If your not a trained reader of poetry, some of his work will go by you, but with Kerouac there's always an effort to reach all readers in some of his work. He was not a literary man.

I was happy to finally find a collection of Kerouac's poetry! I know his poems are out there, but they are hard to come by, at times. I have always had some admiration for artists of the beatnik movement. I decided to teach a mini-unit on the beat poets for a high school course; having a nice collection of poems as examples was key to the unit. This particular collection of Kerouac poems included some of his "Western haikus," which illustrated Kerouac's non-conformity in writing. Excellent little book to have!

Jack Kerouac, Scattered Poems (City Lights, 1971)

Over the few years Kerouac wrote, he dashed off a number of poems that managed never to get collected, many of them in letters to Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. City Lights, with help from Ginsberg, compiled a small volume of these poems and released them some thirty years ago.

While a few of the works here (and, in some cases, a line or two within one of the works) shows the power and natural affinity for language that makes Kerouac one of the enduring figures of American literature, Most of what's here is solid evidence that, where uncollected poems are concerned, there's usually a reason why they weren't published in the first place. Perhaps it is the prominence of the author in question, but while reading most of this work, I got a sense of hopelessness, a pathetic (in the classic definition of the term) feeling of emptiness. Unlike both the surrealism and the jazz from which Kerouac and his fellow Beats drew their inspiration, and also unlike the authors
from that time who have been incorrectly labelled as Beats (Bukowski, Alfred Chester, to an extent Paul Bowles, etc.), Kerouac's material seems to lack either the underlying meaning or the sense of immediate purpose that separates the best of the aforementioned authors from their scads of less talented imitators.

One place in which Kerouac does shine here, though, is in a small selection of haiku at the end of the book. Kerouac was one of the first American authors to really grasp the spirit of English-language haiku, as mentioned in a brief intro to the book's last section. Kerouac quotes a few Basho haiku and bemoans the inability of English to imitate the free-flowing Japanese language, coming to the conclusion that the "seventeen syllable" rule should be dropped for American haiku (as most serious haiku writers and scholars in English have also done in the forty or so years since Kerouac originally composed the works here). In the haiku, where Kerouac is forced to work with tight lines and spare images, his gift comes through. Unfortunately, it does so in far too few other pieces in this book. **

A disappointing collection, probably put together to capitalize on the author's name.