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Jack Kerouac: Collected Poems

Edited by Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell

“The 2012 publication of Jack Kerouac’s Collected Poems as a volume in the Library of America is cause for celebration: now a substantial body of poetry by the renowned author of On the Road and other novels will finally be widely and easily available.”—Cary Nelson, Journal of Beat Studies

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

News Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Dylan: Desolation Angels led to “Desolation Row”
October 21, 2019

Video Talented New York trio finds the music in Jack Kerouac’s poetry and prose
October 24, 2017

Interviews Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell: Jack Kerouac and the “universal experience of being alive”
October 24, 2017

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Poetry was at the center of Jack Kerouac’s sense of mission as a writer. “I’d better be a poet / Or lay down dead,” he wrote in “San Francisco Blues.” The celebrated “spontaneous bop prosody” of his prose was a direct outgrowth of the poetry that filled his notebooks throughout his writing life. This landmark edition gathers for the first time all of Kerouac’s major poetic works—Mexico City Blues, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, Book of Blues, Pomes All Sizes, Old Angel Midnight, Desolation Pops, Book of Haikus—along with a rich assortment of his uncollected poems, six published here for the first time.

Kerouac wrote poetry in forms as diverse as the classical Japanese haiku (and his own American variants of it, which he sometimes called “Pops”), the Buddhist sutra, the prose poetry of Old Angel Midnight (which he described as “the haddal-da-babra of babbling world tongues coming in thru my window at midnight”), doggerel ballads and free-form songs, the psalms preserved in early notebooks, and the poetic “blues” he developed in Mexico City Blues and other serial works, seeing himself as “a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday.”

But his sense of form was closely allied to a commitment to spontaneous utterance—to a poetry awake to “All the endless conception of living beings / Gnashing everywhere in Consciousness / Throughout the ten directions of space”—and a longing for transcendent experience that marked his work from the beginning. “My only ambition,” he wrote in 1943, “is to be free in art.” That freedom came at a high personal price. Kerouac’s collected poems immerse us in what editor Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell describes as “the impenetrable complexities, engulfing vulnerabilities, and insoluble demands that life made on his heart and mind.”

Many poets have found Kerouac a liberating influence on their work. Robert Creeley called him “a genius at the register of the speaking voice, a human voice talking”; Michael McClure saw him as using “the whole of his life . . . as an instrument of perception”; for Allen Ginsberg he was “a poetic influence over the entire planet”; and Bob Dylan singled out Mexico City Blues as crucial to his own artistic development.

Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell, editor, is a poet, painter, and short story writer who was born in Haiti and grew up there and in France. She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, and is the author of the poetry collection Crossroads and Unholy Water and The Company of Heaven: Stories from Haiti. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

News Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Dylan: Desolation Angels led to “Desolation Row”
October 21, 2019

Video Talented New York trio finds the music in Jack Kerouac’s poetry and prose
October 24, 2017

Interviews Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell: Jack Kerouac and the “universal experience of being alive”
October 24, 2017

Interviews Todd Tietchen: “It took a while for literary culture to catch up with what Kerouac had accomplished”
November 18, 2016
Table of Contents

Introduction: “Jack Kerouac, in His Own Words,” by Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell

Mexico City Blues (242 Choruses)

The Scripture of the Golden Eternity

Book of Blues
San Francisco Blues
Richmond Hill Blues
Bowery Blues
MacDougal Street Blues
Desolation Blues
Orizaba 210 Blues
Orlanda Blues
Cerrada Medellin Blues

Pomes All Sizes
Bus East
Hitchhiker
Neal in Court
On Waking from a Dream of Robert Fournier
God
Haiku Berkeley
Poim (“Walking on Water”)
Various Little Pomes
Two Dharma Notes
Gatha
Beginning with a Few Haikus Some of Them Addresses in the Book
“When you become enlightened”
On Ether
Letter to Allen 1955
Mexico Rooftop
Mexican Loneliness
The Last Hotel
Berkeley Song in F Major
A Sudden Sketch Poem
Poem Written in the Zoco Chico
Three Tangier Poems
Tangier Poem
Poem (“Anyway the time has come to explain”)
Flies
Poem (“I could become a great grinning host”)
How to Meditate
Buddha
Poem (“I am God”)
Haiku (“Came down from my”)
My Views on Religion
Lady
Caritas
Poem (“Old hornet me”)
Lil Poem on Louis Ferdinand Céline
Skid Row Wine
The Moon
Poem (“Told him all about Minoan Civilization”)
The Thrashing Doves
The Sea-Shroud
My Gang
Pax
Haiku (“The moon,”)
Prayer
Poem (“You start off by suckin in”)
Angel Mine
Perm
Poems of the Buddhas of Old
Morphine
Silly Goofball Pomes
Pome (“Be me bespangled dotted-hat fool?”)
3 Poems About Titles of Novels
To Lou Little
Airapetianz
If I Were Jesus, God
Idiot
Old Western Movies
Woman
Hymn
Goofball Blues
Goofball Sillypomes
Drunken Scribbling Poem
Running Through—Chinese Poem Song
Sken 3
Cognac Blues
Beau Bébé
The Shack of Desolation
Poor Sottish Kerouac
Long Island Chinese Poem Rain
Pome (“If I dont use the cork”
Pome on Doctor Sax
A Curse at the Devil

Old Angel Midnight

Desolation Pops

Book of Haikus

Uncollected Poems
Observations
America in the Night
Old Love-Light
I Tell You It Is October!
“I am my mother’s son”
Thinking of Thomas Wolfe on a Winter’s Night
Alabama, May 11, 1944
A Translation from the French of Jean-Louis Incogniteau
Psalms
Song (“I left New York”)
Song: Fie My Fum
Pull My Daisy
Pull My Daisy (alternate version)
“He is your friend, let him dream”
Visions of Doctor Sax
The Poems of the Night
Long Dead’s Longevity
“Someday you’ll be lying”
Daydreams for Ginsberg
“Sight is just dust”
Mindmatter
A TV Poem
Heaven
Sitting Under Tree Number Two
To Harpo Marx
“I / clearly / saw / the skeleton underneath”
Rimbaud
Sea
Sept. 16, 1961, Poem
A Pun for Al Gelpi
To Edward Dahlberg
A Selection of Uncollected Haikus

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-193-0 780 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 231 Library of America Series

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