Page 13 of Book of Blues


  8TH CHORUS

  I’m now going into a deep trance

  where I see visions—

  Mwee hee hee ha ha.

  Johnny Holmes is just about

  the funniest man I know!

  He laughs in cemeteries

  in the woods of Connecticutt

  (Connect ton cul, we used

  to call

  it

  in little

  Canada.)

  Connect your arse.

  Some come on John, connect

  your arse to a Grave,

  pal, almost lover, and

  I’ll bring ye sweet

  daydrids

  in the morning

  of the 2 thieves & Me

  & You

  9TH CHORUS

  (Written before I knew about Pascal — 1965)

  But John’s like Pascal,

  or like Frank O’hara even,

  He wont let his head

  Believe his heart

  & all that

  So he skeptically adjusts

  his glasses, leans forward eagerly,

  almost hugely,

  & roars

  Qui à poignez

  ton cul dans

  terre!

  And 2 days later he looks it up

  in a French Dictionary,

  wondering what I’m thinking

  about, and what I think

  about him thinking.

  Wow Very Strange

  10TH CHORUS

  It’s dillier than that

  they daisies they pud

  in puddinhead blues.

  To Earl of Shockshire:

  “Sire, in this my Inscribe

  May’t you’ll fee.”

  The Earl of Shrockshire

  shires & showers & shh’s

  on back a batch

  of Tanguipore

  Tangled

  Telegrams

  Mistaken by Saint Peter

  as Hair of the Gate

  NOTES ON DATES AND SOURCES

  “SAN FRANCISCO BLUES”

  In a letter to Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac referred to writing this poem in March 1954, when he “left Neal’s . . . and went to live in the Cameo Hotel on Third Street Frisco Skid Row.”

  “RICHMOND HILL BLUES”

  Written in Richmond Hill, New York, while Kerouac was living with his mother. He began the poem on September 4, 1953, and completed it later that month.

  “BOWERY BLUES”

  Kerouac dated the poem March 29, 1955.

  “MACDOUGAL STREET BLUES”

  Kerouac dated the poem June 26, 1955.

  “DESOLATION BLUES”

  “Desolation Peak

  Mt. Baker Nat’l Forest

  Washington State

  August 1956”

  “ORIZABA 210 BLUES”

  “Written in a tejado rooftop dobe cell

  at Orizaba 210, Mexico City, Fall 1956

  . . . by candlelight . . .”

  “ORLANDA BLUES”

  Begun in July 1957, finished February 17, 1958, this poem was written in Orlando, Florida—“Orlanda” in native parlance.

  “CERRADA MEDELLIN BLUES”

  “July 1961

  37-A Cerrada Medellin

  Mexico, D.F., Mexico”

  Begun in June, finished in July.

  Book of Blues is one of the unpublished manuscripts Jack Kerouac left in his meticulously organized archive. It does not contain all of Kerouac’s unpublished blues poems—he chose not to include, for instance, “Berkeley Blues,” “Brooklyn Bridge Blues,” “Tangier Blues,” “Washington DC Blues,” and “Earthquake Blues.” Comparisons with Kerouac’s original handwritten notebooks indicate that in the process of editing the book he deleted and rearranged some verses, and made some small editorial changes. Readers familiar with the excerpts from “San Francisco Blues” published in Scattered Poems and the excerpts from “MacDougal Street Blues” published in Heaven and Other Poems will notice that Kerouac subsequently made changes in some of those verses. Kerouac’s original typescript of Book of Blues is located in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

  I have taken the liberty of dedicating this book on Jack’s behalf to two of his close friends and correspondents, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch.

  —John Sampas,

  Literary Executor, Estate of Jack and Stella Kerouac

  JACK WOULD SPEAK THROUGH THE IMPERFECT MEDIUM OF ALICE

  So I’m an alcoholic Catholic mother-lover

  yet there is no sweetish nectar no fuzzed-peach

  thing no song sing but in the word

  to which I’m starlessly unreachably faithful

  you, pedant & you, politically righteous & you, alive

  you think you can peal my sober word apart from my drunken word

  my Buddhist word apart from my white sugar Thérèse word my

  word to comrade from my word to my mother

  but all my words are one word my lives one

  my last to first wound round in finally fiberless crystalline skein

  I began as a drunkard & ended as a child

  I began as an ordinary cruel lover & ended as a boy who

  read radiant newsprint

  I began physically embarrassing—“bloated”—&

  ended as a perfect black-haired laddy

  I began unnaturally subservient to my mother &

  ended in the crib of her goldenness

  I began in a fatal hemorrhage & ended in a

  tiny love’s body perfect smallest one

  But I began in a word & I ended in a word &

  I know that word better

  Than any knows me or knows that word,

  probably, but I only asked to know it—

  That word is the word when I say me bloated

  & when I say me manly it’s

  The word that word I write perfectly lovingly

  one & one after the other one

  But you—you can only take it when it’s that one & not

  some other one

  Or you say “he lost it” as if I (I so nothinged) could ever

  lose the word

  But when there’s only one word—when

  you know them, the words—

  The words are all only one word the perfect

  word—

  My body my alcohol my pain my death are only

  the perfect word as I

  Tell it to you, poor sweet categorizers

  Listen

  Every me I was & wrote

  were only & all (gently)

  That one perfect word

  —Alice Notley

 


 

  Jack Kerouac, Book of Blues

  (Series: # )

 

 


 

 
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