Book of Blues

De: Jack Kerouac

From the acclaimed Beat Generation author of On the Road and The Dharma Bums come eight extended poems in which he reflects on the urban settings he finds himself in.

Best known for his novels, Jack Kerouac is also an important poet. In these poems, Kerouac writes from the heart of experience in the music of language, employing the same instrumental blues and jazz forms that he used in another book of poems, Mexico City Blues.

The poems included here, written between 1954 and 1961, are:
• “San Francisco Blues”
• “Richmond Hill Blues”
• “Bowery Blues”
• “MacDougal Street Blues”
• “Desolation Blues”
• “Orizaba 210 Blues”
• “Orlanda Blues”
• “Cerrada Medellin Blues”

The author explains his musical influences and the self-imposed length of the poems: “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 another, or not, in jazz, so that, in these blues as in jazz, the form is determined by time, and by the musician’s spontaneous phrasing & harmonizing with the beat of time as if waves & waves on by in measured choruses.”—Jack Kerouac

Book of Blues is an exuberant foray into language and consciousness, rich with imagery, propelled by rhythm, and based in a reverent attentiveness to the moment.

©1995 Estate of Stella Kerouac (P)2025 Blackstone Publishing