Mexico City Blues

One of the renowned Beat writer’s most formally inventive books, Mexico City Blues is Jack Kerouac’s essential work of lyric verse, now reissued following his centenary celebration Written between 1954 and 1957, and published originally by Grove Press in 1959, Mexico City Blues is Kerouac’s most important verse work. It incorporates all the elements of his theory of spontaneous composition and his interest in Buddhism. Memories, fantasies, dreams, and surrealistic free association are lyrically combined in the loose format inspired by jazz and the blues. Written while Kerouac was living in Mexico City, and with references to William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Bill Garver, this exciting book in Kerouac’s oeuvre is an original and moving epic of sound, rhythm, and religion.

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 rythm, 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

In this pioneering critical study of Jack Kerouac’s book-length poem, Mexico City Blues—apoetic parallel to the writer’s fictional saga, the Duluoz Legend—James T. Jones uses a rich and flexible neoformalist approach to argue his case for the importance of Kerouac’s rarely studied poem. After a brief summary of Kerouac’s poetic career, Jones embarks on a thorough reading of Mexico City Blues from several different perspectives: he first focuses on Kerouac’s use of autobiography in the poem and then discusses how Kerouac’s various trips to Mexico, his conversion to Buddhism, his theory of spontaneous poetics, and his attraction to blues and jazz influenced the theme, structure, and sound of Mexico City Blues. Jones’s multidimensional explication suggests the formal and thematic complexity of Kerouac’s long poem and demonstrates the major contribution Mexico City Blues makes to post–World War II American poetry and poetics.

A collection of poems by beat generation author Jack Kerouac, written between 1954 and 1965 about Mexico, Tangier, Berkeley, the Bowery, God, drugs, and other topics.

In the '80s, when author/photographer Kurt Hollander lived in New York and published The Portable Lower East, life there was particularly rough, and cops often drove yellow cabs as a method to surprise and roust its residents. Before the decade ended, Hollander moved to the equally rough climes of Mexico City, making his living writing and photographing for The Guardian, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. Hollander's visual and textual extravaganza, Several Ways to Die in Mexico City, provides a perspective of this extraordinary city that could only have been caught by an observant outsider who lived in all its nooks and crannies for over two decades. Crammed with caustic but fair observations of the city's history, food, cults, drugs, and buildings, Hollander proves that he can love a city and culture that also kills its inhabitants softly. While living high in Mexico City, Kurt Hollander edited poliester, the renowned bilingual art magazine about the Americas. He also directed the feature film Carambola, and wrote a successful series of children's books. Grove Press published the Portable Lower East Side anthology in 1994.

Highlighting a lesser-known aspect of one of America's most influential authors, this new collection displays Jack Kerouac's interest in and mastery of haiku. Experimenting with this compact poetic genre throughout his career, Kerouac often included haiku in novels, correspondence, notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, and recordings. In this collection, Kerouac scholar Regina Weinreich supplements an incomplete draft of a haiku manuscript found in Kerouac's archives with a generous selection of Kerouac's other haiku, from both published and unpublished sources. With more than 500 poems, this is a must-have volume for Kerouac enthusiasts everywhere.

In 1952 and 1953 as he wandered around America, Jack Kerouac jotted down spontaneous prose poems, or "sketches" as he called them, on small notebooks that he kept in his shirt pockets. The poems recount his travels—New York, North Carolina, Lowell (Massachusetts, Kerouac’s birthplace), San Francisco, Denver, Kansas, Mexico—observations, and meditations on art and life. The poems are often strung together so that over the course of several of them, a little story—or travelogue—appears, complete in itself. Published for the first time, Book of Sketches offers a luminous, intimate, and transcendental glimpse of one of the most original voices of the twentieth century at a key time in his literary and spiritual development.

He was the leading light of the Beat Generation writers and the most dynamic author of his time, but Jack Kerouac also had a lifelong passion for music, particularly the mid-century jazz of New York City, the development of which he witnessed first-hand during the 1940s with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk to the fore. The novelist, most famous for his 1957 book On the Road, admired the sounds of bebop and attempted to bring something of their original energy to his own writing, a torrent of semi-autobiographical stories he published between 1950 and his early death in 1969. Yet he was also drawn to American popular music of all kinds – from the blues to Broadway ballads – and when he came to record albums under his own name, he married his unique spoken word style with some of the most talented musicians on the scene. Kerouac's musical legacy goes well beyond the studio recordings he made himself: his influence infused generations of music makers who followed in his work – from singer-songwriters to rock bands. Some of the greatest transatlantic names – Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, Van Morrison and David Bowie, Janis Joplin and Tom Waits, Sonic Youth and Death Cab for Cutie, and many more – credited Kerouac's impact on their output. In Kerouac on Record, we consider how the writer brought his passion for jazz to his prose and poetry, his own record releases, the ways his legacy has been sustained by numerous more recent talents, those rock tributes that have kept his memory alive and some of the scores that have featured in Hollywood adaptations of the adventures he brought to the printed page.