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Jack Kerouac: Pomes All Sizes |
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Tuesday, 24 January 2006 06:52 |
Jack Kerouac
Pomes All Sizes
Introduction by Allen Ginsberg
City Lights Books (Pocket Poets Series #48)
By John Sinclair
Kerouac sees himself as the Prophet
and Charlie Parker as God."
Herb Gold (c. 1958)
As I write this it is exactly 23 years since Jack Kerouac left our humble planet for places unknown. It is also the 75th birthday of the still very much alive John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie, born in 1917. Kerouac's birthdate, March 12, 1922, coincides with the death of the great Charlie Parker, one of Jack's idols and prime artistic influences, on March 12, 1955.
It is not at all strange that these three contemporaries, born within a five-year period, should be linked by their vital dates on the great wheel of karma. Together they forged a complete revolution in the sound of modern music and prosody .The shift in verse and prose forms which moved American writing after World War II followed the rhythmic and harmonic revolution in jazz forged during the war years by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke.
Kerouac, first attracted as a student at Columbia University to the sound, intelligence and drive of tenor saxophonist Lester Young, was a frequent habitue of the after-hours sessions at Minton's Playhouse and Clark Monroe's Uptown House in Harlem, where he heard Monk, Bird, Dizzy, Max Roach and other young jazzmen wrestle nightly with the problems involved in moving the music to a higher level of complexity, intellection and rhythmic thrust. He spent the rest of the 40s trying to infuse his own writing with the wild methodology of bebop, finally succeeding in 1951-52 with Visions of Cody, On the Road and Dr. Sax.
Adding the poets Charles Olson and Robert Creeley to this front line of great innovators active between 1942-1952, the changes in rhythm, stance, structure, attitude and syntax wrought by these men opened up a creative space so wide and deep that it continues to define the shape of creative music and poetry to this day.
Indeed it may be said that the power and scope of their artistic achievements and the strength of their impact on every aspect of music- and verse-making in the ensuing 40 years has remained unequaled. In short,
they set a standard so high
we are still trying to reach it
In popular music during the same period only T-Bone Walker, Louis Jordan, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf could be said to have exerted comparable force. These prime innovators of the post-war period described in their work the dimensions of a new universe of rhythm, structure, harmony, syntax and feeling.
While there have been many extensions of their strategies into previously unexplored areas of that cosmos, nothing has replaced the basic blueprint proposed by their artistic activity in the way their own concepts superseded and reshaped everything that had come before.
So Herb Gold was, finally, right: Kerouac was the Prophet of 'spontaneous bop prosody' Charlie Parker, the perfect master of bebop, was God! And Kerouac, the Great Rememberer, Memory Babe as his boyhood friends called him, by letting Bird's music shape the flow of his incredibly detailed recollections and propel him through great flights of imaginative fancy, comes down to us as "a major, perhaps seminal, poet of the latter half of U.S. XX Century," as Allen Ginsberg asserts in his valuable introduction to this little collection of occasional verse and American haiku which Kerouac assembled for City Lights Books before his death.
Ginsberg also laments the lack of recognition accorded Kerouac as a poet, but part of it must have to do with the relative slightness of his published verse in contradistinction to the size, weight and relentless rhythmic thrust of his prose.
Kerouac, of course, made little distinction between the two, attacking narrative writing as an exercise in epic poetic composition driven by the imperatives of an improvising bop saxophonist to make it happen, say something and make it swing.
"You guys call yourselves poets, write little short lines, I'm a poet but I write lines paragraphs and pages and many pages long," Jack Kerouac insisted in a letter from Mexico City to Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen in Berkeley, mid- 50s, written during the time he was composing his extended work in verse, Mexico City Blues.
Later, in 1959, asked by Donald Allen for a statement on his poetics, Kerouac stated it more baldly: "The rhythm of how you decide to 'rush' your statement determines the rhythm of the poem, whether it is a poem in verse-separated lines, or an endless one-line poem called prose... (with its paragraphs). So let there be no equivocation about statement, and if you think this is not hard to do, try it."
Let there be no equivocation about statement. Say something, brother man, and make it swing. If you think this is not hard to do, try it. Bird made it sound so easy, but you can hear hundreds of players every night, 50 years later, all over the world, still trying to get inside of and master Bird's sound.
The same is true for Kerouac and that's what made them so great! To paraphrase the magnificent Lord Buckley, "When they laid it... Wha-loom! They laid it!"
You can best hear Kerouac's sound on his recordings, which were miraculously restored to contemporary usage by WordBeat/Rhino Records in 1990 in the form of a three-CD set called The Jack Kerouac Box. Included in their entirety are three albums issued in 1958-59: Poetry for the Beat Generation (with pianist Steve Allen), Blues and Haikus (with tenor saxophonists Zoot Sims and Al Cohn), and Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation, on which he is unaccompanied.
There are also some extra added attractions, including outtakes with Al & Zoot, the soundtrack of a Kerouac/Steve Allen collaboration on Steve's NBC-TV show, and Kerouac's performance at a November 1958 "forum" called Is There a Beat Generation?
Listening to Blues and Haikus is hearing Kerouac's sound for real: relaxed, surrounded by saxophones, actually sung sometimes, but always pulsing and sparking with musical energy. And, like my daughter Chonita used to say, it finds out that Kerouac's "American Haikus" are set not against the white space on the page but the sound of two tenor saxophones improvising gentle bebop lines between the poems.
On "Hard Hearted Old Farmer," where the title rhythm reads like a Dizzy Gillespie composition, Kerouac vocalizes his poem over Al Cohn's piano, sounding like nothing more than a James Moody solo set to verse by Eddie Jefferson. And on "The Last Hotel" the supreme musicality of his verse and delivery flows seamlessly through the little arrangement devised by Al & Zoot, swinging softly and with great precision.
But the 14-minute exposition of "Poems from the Unpublished Book of Blues," prefaced by Jack's "I'd like them to play behind me while I read," provides the ultimate key to understanding Kerouac's prosody: it has saxophones behind it. They are playing bebop, swinging like crazy, and Kerouac's verse riffs along with them, whether it's notated in "little short lines" or in "lines paragraphs and pages and many pages long."
Bird and Dizzy and Monk are playing inside Kerouac's ears as he writes; sometimes he's a tenor saxophone player (dig his fantastic scat solo between takes of "Old Western Movies"), other times he's the singer (take two, ditto, and on the opening section of "Conclusion of the Railroad Earth"), then again he might be the drummer whacking and boomping away beneath the horns. But the music is always there, in the writing, and all around it, defining it, all ways, always there.
If only Pomes All Sizes could be heard! These verse comments and observations, composed between 1954 and 1965, are as Ginsberg summarizes them, "notebook jottings, little magazine items containing lovely familiar classic Kerouacisms, nostalgic gathas from 1955 Berkeley cottage days, pure sober tender Kerouac of your yore, pithy exquisite later drunken laments and bitter nuts and verses."
Listen for the ghostly horns that sounded in the poet's mind as he scribbled these slight verses into his omnipresent notebooks then they will be complete.
For the real P-Funk of Kerouac's poetry turn to Mexico City Blues, or the long blowing sections of Visions of Cody, or the incredible passages of wildly imaginative writing in On the Road and Dr. Sax. There you will find the perfect poet of thought and action, jamming his brains out like Bird & Dizzy at 5:00 o'clock in the morning at Minton's Playhouse.
Here in Pomes All Sizes you discover the contemplative Kerouac, musing on the quiet meaning of things or thinking of friends in other places, casting his thoughts into "little short lines" and stopping exactly where the first thought stopped.
There is delight to be gained here, poetic delight and a fuller picture of the great Kerouac persona which has relentlessly been reduced over the years to the well-known caricature of the graceless drunken beatnik lout. Bullshit! Kerouac, my friends, was full of grace, and a "great creator of forms that ultimately find expression in mores and what have you."
This was what Charlie Parker said when he played:
'All Is Well.' You had the feeling of early in the morning,
like a hermit's joy, or like the
perfect cry of some wild gang at a jam session
Wail! Wop!
Yes, All is Well. Or like the end of the Blues and Haikus session, when producer Bob Thiele asks Kerouac if he can get home okay. "Yeah," Jack says. "We got a car."
"Oh, good."
New Orleans
October 21-24, 1992
(c) 1992, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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