“"Sketching.....Everything
activates in front of you in
myriad profusion, you just have to purify your mind and let it
pour the words and write with
100% personal honesty."
- Jack Kerouac
To truly enjoy a Beat poem what you need to do is to breathe in deep, clear your mind and forget everything that your Fulbright Scholar Prof has taught you.
Cleanse your thoughts from all the Formalist/Gender/Feminist/Structuralist/Post-Whatever criticisms and -whateverisms, for it may block the flow of words and thoughts that the poet is trying to convey.
Just follow the verses and let your instincts and your consciousness take you to literary Nirvana.
Read each verse in a spontaneous manner, just as how the poet writes the poem:
in a swift spontaneous burst of raw energy and passion...
That is how one should read the poems in the latest Jack Kerouac book, Book Of Sketches (Penguin 2006)...
The Book of Sketches, are poems taken from the notebooks that Kerouac took with him in his travels, tucked inside his shirt pockets.
The poems included here were written around 1952-1954, and some poems added in '57, before "On The Road" (the peak of Kerouac's creative prowess).
The book offers a more intimate glimpse of Kerouac than any of his novels, due to the fact that the prose poems included in this collection served as a journal of his personal life and travels across the US to Mexico, his meditations on art and philosophy and his thoughts about his own loneliness and isolation.
The poems are presented in brief but powerful verses as opposed to Ginsberg's very long "Breathes" (Lets say that Kerouac's style here is like Hemingway's while Ginsberg's is more like Joyce or Faulkner, if you know what I'm saying), and the poems are typed as it was written in his notebooks.
The poems are written spontaneously, without any corrections or revisions.
The "Unrevised Method Of Creation", which shows the reader Kerouac's pure uncontrollable mastery of chaos.
And also, keep in mind Jack's note: "Not Necessarily Chronological", a reminder that the boundaries of space and time has been destroyed in this collection.
Through this book one gets to enjoy Kerouac's mastery of painting a mental image using words, "sketching with words rather than a brush", each poem accurately captures the picture of a home, a countryside scene, pool halls, railroads and even everyday conversations and household scenes...He captures the sorrow, the isolation and the bleakness of the docks and anchored oil tankers.
Each vivid description is suddenly distorted by a change of tone or style, a slight variation of the mood but still like a cubist or impressionist painting, even though an image of a vase is distorted the "vaseness" of the vase is still retained; just like how Charlie Parker's Improvisational Jazz solos go through several shifts and mutations, but still stays within the context of the song.
Kerouac's style takes the reader to a new direction which still leads to the thought or the effect he wishes to express, thus showing us that he is the master of spontaneity and endless improvisation...His mastery of chaos...Pure Genius....
I assure you, that this is one of the best poetry books in the market!
So, after reading the book's 414 pages in two days, the only thing that I can say is this:
Nevermind the book's 759.00php price, this book should be treasured, and each page of Kerouac's prose poetry is worth every single centavo that you spend for it.
"Unbroken word sketches
of the subconscious pictures
of sections of the
memory life of an
imbecile genius resting
in the madhouse of his
mind-The word
flow must not be disturbed,
or picture forgotten for
words' sakes, nor the
pictures stretched beyond
their bookmovie strength
except parenthetically " pp 258-259”
j.luna wrote this review Tuesday, February 8, 2011.
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