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A review by versmonesprit
Mexico City Blues by Jack Kerouac
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
0.25
After reading Lonesome Traveler, I felt myself yearning for more of Kerouac’s poetry, so I thought; what better than an actual poem?
To say I’m shocked by how terrible this is would be an understatement. Kerouac, concerned with breath and attaining the rhythms of jazz in writing, somehow manages to destroy both. I’m shocked precisely because he does it occasionally in his prose!
So what went wrong? First of all, it’s the line breaks. They don’t make sense. They interrupt the breath, you pause while reading, and poof, the breath is lost, it’s now many breaths, none of which create a likeness of jazz (or blues) or even have any sort of rhythm!
Does it at least have wordplay that can replace rhythm? No, not at all. Every entrancing turn of phrase present in his prose is for whatever reason absent from Mexico City Blues. The pseudo-wordplay is just a mockery, adding the letter ‘y’ at the end of words does not make them rhyme or create a musical sound.
For comparison, I’ll share two quotes from Mexico Fellaheen, Lonesome Traveler. The first:
To say I’m shocked by how terrible this is would be an understatement. Kerouac, concerned with breath and attaining the rhythms of jazz in writing, somehow manages to destroy both. I’m shocked precisely because he does it occasionally in his prose!
So what went wrong? First of all, it’s the line breaks. They don’t make sense. They interrupt the breath, you pause while reading, and poof, the breath is lost, it’s now many breaths, none of which create a likeness of jazz (or blues) or even have any sort of rhythm!
Does it at least have wordplay that can replace rhythm? No, not at all. Every entrancing turn of phrase present in his prose is for whatever reason absent from Mexico City Blues. The pseudo-wordplay is just a mockery, adding the letter ‘y’ at the end of words does not make them rhyme or create a musical sound.
For comparison, I’ll share two quotes from Mexico Fellaheen, Lonesome Traveler. The first:
What a Victory, the Victory of Christ! Victory over madness, mankind’s blight. ‘Kill him!’ they still roar at fights, cockfights, bullfights, prizefights, streetfights, fieldfights, airfights, wordfights – ‘Kill him!’ – Kill the Fox, the Pig and the Pox. Christ in His Agony, pray for me.
The rhymes here are quite in your face too, but they’re not done in a manner that feels inorganic, forced, childish. This is filled with emotion, fervour, rhythm!
And the second:
And the second:
At the coffin the littler boy (three years old) touches the glass and goes around to the foot of the dead and touches the glass and I think ‘They understand death, they stand there in the church under the skies that have a beginningless past and go into the never-ending future, waiting themselves for death, at the foot of the dead, in a holy temple.’
Look at the rhythm of the sentence, the uninterrupted breath, the flow of the words!
How can someone write like this in his prose, and completely miss anything remotely poetic in his actual poems? And to think I had really enjoyed the haikus in Lonesome Traveler! It seems being given too much space for his poetry makes Jack a dull boy.
How can someone write like this in his prose, and completely miss anything remotely poetic in his actual poems? And to think I had really enjoyed the haikus in Lonesome Traveler! It seems being given too much space for his poetry makes Jack a dull boy.