Mexico City Blues is a long poem by Jack Kerouac, consisting of 242 "choruses" or stanzas. Written in the summer of 1955,[1] it was not published until late 1959. The poem was the product of the author's spontaneous prose technique, Buddhist faith, passion for jazz, and his disappointment at the time with his stalled writing career, especially his inability to publish a second book after his debut novel, The Town and the City (1950).[2] Once the widely acclaimed On the Road came out in 1957, it was possible for Kerouac to find a publisher for Mexico City Blues.
Kerouac began writing the choruses that became Mexico City Blues while living in a Mexico City apartment, upstairs from Bill Garver, a friend of William S. Burroughs. Largely created under the influence of cannabis and morphine, the choruses were limited only by the size of Kerouac's notebook page. The poem incorporates multiple textual sources, including direct quotations; three of the choruses (52, 53 and 54) are transcriptions of conversations he had with Garver, a process that Kerouac later explained:
Old Bill Gaines (Garver) lived downstairs. I'd come every day with my marijuana and my note pad. He'd be high on opium. I had to get the opium in the slums from Tristessa. She was our connection. Bill's sitting in his easy chair in his purple pajamas, mumbling on about Minoan civilization and excavation, I'm sitting on his bed writing poems. And through the whole thing some of his words come in. Like the 52nd Chorus. Just idling all the afternoon. He talked real slow and I could put it all down. He was pleased. I'd show him what I had written and he'd say, "Oh boy, that's good."[3]
Some of the choruses contain onomatopoeia and scenic transcriptions of sounds while others, like the 211th, are meditations on the subject of death:[4]
211th Chorus
The wheel of the quivering meat conception Turns in the void expelling human beings, Pigs, turtles, frogs, insects, nits, Mice, lice, lizards, rats, roan Racinghorses, poxy bucolic pigtics, Horrible unnameable lice of vultures, Murderous attacking dog-armies Of Africa, Rhinos roaming in the jungle, Vast boars and huge gigantic bull Elephants, rams, eagles, condors, Pones and Porcupines and Pills — All the endless conception of living beings Gnashing everywhere in Consciousness Throughout the ten directions of space Occupying all the quarters in & out, From supermicroscopic no-bug To huge Galaxy Lightyear Bowell Illuminating the sky of one Mind — Poor! I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead[5]
The choruses often include references to real figures such as Burroughs and Gregory Corso, as well as religious figures and themes.[6] With his interest in jazz music,[7] Kerouac likened himself to "a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday. I take 242 choruses; my ideas vary and sometimes roll from chorus to chorus or from halfway through a chorus to halfway into the next."[8]
After finishing Mexico City Blues, and while still living in Mexico City, Kerouac wrote the novella Tristessa.[9] Both were added to his growing collection of unpublished works.[10] It was not until October 1957, after he had finally found a publisher for his nearly decade-old manuscript On the Road, that he sent Mexico City Blues to City Lights Books, hoping it would be included in their Pocket Poets series.[11] But City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti was not an admirer of Kerouac's poetry and turned it down.[12] In 1958, following publication of The Dharma Bums, Kerouac's friend Allen Ginsberg tried to sell Mexico City Blues to Grove Press and New Directions Press;[13] it was eventually published by Grove in November 1959.[14]
Critical reception
Rexroth review and other contemporary reaction
Upon publication, Mexico City Blues was subjected to a scathing review by poet Kenneth Rexroth in The New York Times. Rexroth, an early champion of Ginsberg's "Howl" and San Francisco-based Beat Generation poetry, criticized Kerouac's perceived misunderstanding of Buddhism, referring to his portrayal of Buddha as "a dime-store incense burner", and sardonically concluded that he "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."[15] Ginsberg, in observations recorded in Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee's oral historyJack'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."[16]
In his monograph on Mexico City Blues, literary critic James T. Jones describes Rexroth's review as "a model of unethical behavior in print" which, as his standard of a defamatory piece, "consigned one of Kerouac's richest works to temporary obscurity"; he added that it may have been written in retaliation for perceived poor manners on Kerouac's part, or as an indirect attack on the poet Robert Creeley, a friend of Kerouac's who had an affair with Rexroth's wife.[17] Creeley himself had published a more positive review in Poetry,[17] characterizing the poem as "a series of improvisations, notes, a shorthand of perceptions and memories, having in large part the same word-play and rhythmic invention to be found in [Kerouac's] prose."[18]
The poet Gary Snyder, another friend of Kerouac's, called Mexico City Blues "the greatest piece of religious poetry I've ever seen."[19] The poet Anthony Hecht reviewed Mexico City Blues in The Hudson Review, declaring that "the proper way to read this book ... is straight through at one sitting."[20] Hecht argued that Kerouac's professed aspiration to be a "jazz poet", amplified by his publishers, was an imposture, and that the book was in fact greater if understood as something much more "literary", resembling or drawing on the work of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, E. E. Cummings and James Joyce.[21] Hecht concluded that:
there is something valuable and beguiling behind the poetry which is as curiously difficult to get at as if the book were translated from another tongue ... But what seems to me to emerge at the end is a voice of remarkable kindness and gentleness, an engaging and modest good humor and a quite genuine spiritual simplicity...[22]
Later studies
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.[23]
In his critical study, Jack Kerouac: Prophet of the New Romanticism (1976), Robert Hipkiss finds fault with much of Kerouac's poetry, but identifies Mexico City Blues as probably the writer's best work, and praises the 235th Chorus in particular.[24] Hipkiss compares the chorus to Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", and interprets the lines, "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.'"[25] 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."[26]
In other media
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.[27]
References
↑ Charters, Ann (1973). Kerouac: A Biography. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books. pp.226–227, 404. ISBN0879320559. LCCN72095055. Charters asserts that "Jack wrote Mexico City Blues in three weeks, about a dozen choruses a day", and she traces those three weeks to August 1955.
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