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| Author | Jack Kerouac |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Roy Kuhlman |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Grove Press |
Publication date | 1959 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (hardback and paperback) |
| OCLC | 20993609 |
| Preceded by | Maggie Cassidy (1959) |
| Followed by | Book of Dreams (1960) |
Mexico City Blues is a poem by Jack Kerouac, written in 1955 and published in 1959.[1] The poem is composed of 242 "choruses" or stanza and was the product of Kerouac's spontaneous prose style, his Buddhism, and his disappointment at his failure to publish a novel between 1950's The Town and the City and 1957's On the Road.[2]
Writing and publication
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Kerouac wrote the choruses that became Mexico City Blues while living with Bill Garver, a heroin addict and friend of William S. Burroughs, in Mexico City in 1955.[3] Kerouac sketched poetry while listening to Garver talk.[4] Rather than transcribing what was said exactly, he wrote down what he heard, and memories he associated with what he heard.[5] The poem was written over a period of three weeks, in which Kerouac composed around 12 choruses each day.[6] While Kerouac's work in the haiku form had been carefully composed and frequently revised, in Mexico City Blues he returned to the equivalent of the spontaneous prose style.[6] The choruses were written under the influence of marijuana and morphine.[3] After finishing Mexico City Blues, while still in Mexico City, Kerouac wrote Tristessa.[7]
In October 1957, after Kerouac achieved fame with On the Road, he sent Mexico City Blues to City Lights Books in the hopes of publication in their Pocket Poets series.[8] In 1958, after the publication of The Dharma Bums, Kerouac's friend Allen Ginsberg tried to sell the book to Grove Press and New Directions Press.[9] It was eventually published by Grove in November 1959.[10]
Overview
[edit]The choruses include references to real figures including Burroughs and Gregory Corso, as well as religious figures and themes.[3] They often refer to Sanskrit terms for states of consciousness, the names of Buddhist teachers, and the philosophy of the Śūraṅgama Sūtra and the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra. The final choruses imagine the Buddha as a bebop musician.
Some of the choruses incorporate long transcriptions of Garver's monologues, dealing with topics including his experiences working on the Hong Kong to China ferry and his use of sodium amytal and heroin. The choruses also describe Kerouac's own experiences of phlebitis and hospitalisation and his early childhood in Lowell, Massachusetts.[6]
In her biography of Kerouac (1973), Ann Charters identified Mexico City Blues as the "most directly related to jazz" of Kerouac's work.[5]
Reception
[edit]Rexroth review and contemporary reception
[edit]Upon publication a review by the poet Kenneth Rexroth appeared in The New York Times. Rexroth criticized Kerouac's perceived misunderstanding of Buddhism ("Kerouac's Buddha is a dime-store incense burner") and concluded "I've always wondered what ever happened to those wax work figures in the old rubber-neck dives in Chinatown. Now we know; one of them at least writes books."[11] In his monograph on the poem, literary critic James T. Jones describes Rexroth's piece as "a model of unethical behavior in print" which "consigned one of Kerouac's richest works to temporary obscurity", and argued it may have been written in retaliation for perceived poor manners on Kerouac's part, or as an indirect attack on Kerouac's friend Robert Creeley, who had an affair with Rexroth's wife. Creeley himself published a more positive review in Poetry, as did Anthony Hecht in The Hudson Review.[12]
Charters suggested that Rexroth may have been motivated by anger at Kerouac's portrayal of him in The Dharma Bums.[13] Ginsberg, in observations recorded in Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee's oral history Jack's Book (1978), attributed Rexroth's "damning, terrible" review and his condemnation of the Beat phenomenon to Rexroth feeling vulnerable as a result of the perception that "he had now 'shown his true colors' by backing a group of unholy, barbarian, no-account, no-good people – Beatnik, unwashed, dirty, badmen of letters who didn't have anything on the ball. So he may have felt vulnerable that he originally had been so friendly, literarily, and had backed us up."[14]
The poet Gary Snyder, a friend of Kerouac's, in 1959 described Mexico City Blues as "the greatest piece of religious poetry I've ever seen."[15]
Later studies
[edit]Jones has described Mexico City Blues as
definitive documentation of Kerouac's attempt to achieve both psychic and literary equilibrium. He endeavored to express in a complex, ritualized song as many symbols of his personal conflicts as he could effectively control by uniting them with traditional literary techniques. In this sense, Mexico City Blues is the most important book Kerouac ever wrote, and it sheds light on all his novels by providing a compendium of the issues that most concerned him as a writer, as well as a model for the transformation of conflict into an antiphonal language.[16]
In his book Jack Kerouac: Prophet of the New Romanticism (1976), Robert A. Hipkiss criticizes much of Kerouac's poetry, but identifies Mexico City Blues as probably containing Kerouac's best poetry, and praises the 235th Chorus in particular.[17] Hipkiss compares the 235th Chorus to Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", and interprets the chorus, which reads "How do I know that I'm dead / Because I'm alive / And I got work to do ...", as referring to obligations which give purpose to the narrator's life, but which are "painful and not satisfying". Unlike in Frost's poem, in Mexico City Blues "there is no satisfactory putting aside of the death wish by contemplating the 'miles to go before I sleep.'"[18] Hipkiss describes the poem as "an expression of the creative impulse very much for its own sake—a refusal of rules of creation and a celebration, in the act, of the spontaneity inherent in creativity."[19]
In other media
[edit]When Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg visited Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts as part of the Rolling Thunder Revue tour, they visited Kerouac's grave where Ginsberg recited stanzas from Mexico City Blues. Footage of the two men at the grave was featured in the film Renaldo and Clara (1978). Ginsberg later said that Dylan was already familiar with Mexico City Blues, having read it while living in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1959.[20]
Notes
[edit]- ^ Charters 1973, p. 409.
- ^ Jones 2010, p. 10.
- ^ a b c McNally 1979, p. 195.
- ^ Charters 1973, pp. 219–20.
- ^ a b Charters 1973, p. 220.
- ^ a b c Charters 1973, p. 221.
- ^ McNally 1979, p. 196.
- ^ McNally 1979, p. 243.
- ^ McNally 1979, p. 254.
- ^ McNally 1979, p. 274.
- ^ Rexroth, Kenneth (November 29, 1959). "Discordant and Cool". The New York Times.
- ^ Jones 2010, p. 15.
- ^ Charters 1973, p. 307.
- ^ Gifford, Barry; Lee, Lawrence (1999) [1978]. Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. Edinburgh: Rebel Inc. ISBN 086241928X.
- ^ McNally 1979, p. 208.
- ^ Jones 2010, p. 4.
- ^ Hipkiss 1976, p. 81.
- ^ Hipkiss 1976, p. 52.
- ^ Hipkiss 1976, p. 94.
- ^ Wilentz, Sean (August 15, 2010). "Bob Dylan, the Beat Generation, and Allen Ginsberg's America". The New Yorker.
References
[edit]- Charters, Ann (1973). Kerouac: A Biography. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books. ISBN 0879320559.
- Hipkiss, Robert A. (1976). Jack Kerouac: Prophet of the New Romanticism. Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas. ISBN 0700601511.
- Jones, James T. (2010) [1992]. A Map of Mexico City Blues: Jack Kerouac as Poet (Revised ed.). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 978-0809385980.
- McNally, Dennis (1979). Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America. New York: Random House. ISBN 0394500113.
External links
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