Mexico City Blues: 242 Choruses

by Jack Kerouac

Overview

Kerouac's most important poem, Mexico City Blues, incorporates all the elements of his theory of spontaneous composition. Memories, fantasies, dreams, and surrealistic free association are all lyrically combined in the loose format of the blues to create an original and moving epic. "I want to be considered 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." "A spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature." - Allen Ginsberg; "Kerouac calls himself a jazz poet. There is no doubt about his great sensitivity to language. His sentences frequently move into tempestuous sweeps and whorls and sometimes they have something of the rich music of Gerard Manley Hopkins of Dylan Thomas" - The New York Herald Tribune

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802130600
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	01/12/1994
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	1,137,942
Product dimensions:	5.75(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

JACK KEROUAC was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922. He won a scholarship to Columbia University, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. On the Road, published in 1957, epitomized to the world what became known as the “Beat generation” and made Kerouac one of the best-known writers of his time. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Mexico City Blues:

“A great masterpiece, a singing religious poem.”—Michael McClure 

“A series of improvisations, notes, a shorthand of perceptions and memories, having in large part the same kind of word-play and rhythmic invention to be found in his prose.”—Robert Creeley, Poetry

“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.”—Anthony Hecht, Hudson Review

Praise for Jack Kerouac:

“The first clear development of the American Romantic prose since Hemingway, Kerouac’s writing is full of mad sex, comedy, widescreen travel writing, and long lyrical evocations of American childhood and adolescent memories.”—Times (UK)

“Kerouac’s work represents the most extensive experiment in language and literary form undertaken by an American writer of his generation.”—Ann Douglas

“Each book by Kerouac is unique, a telepathic discord. Such rich, natural writing is nonpareil in the later twentieth century.”—Allen Ginsberg

“An outsider in America, Jack Kerouac was a true original.”—Ann Charters

From the Publisher