by Jack Kerouac
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Book of Blues is one of the unpublished manuscripts Jack Kerouac left in his meticulously organized archive. It does not contain all of Kerouac’s unpublished blues poems—he chose not to include, for instance, “Berkeley Blues,” “Brooklyn Bridge Blues,” “Tangier Blues,” “Washington DC Blues,” and “Earthquake Blues.”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
