Michael McClure: Who We Are

It is possible that in all art we remember WHO WE ARE— and also celebrate who we are. One of Kerouac's biographers, Gerry Nicosia, informs us that in 1958 Olson called Kerouac "a great poet." It is not surprising that Olson, as well as the Beats and the San Francisco poets, was able to recognize Kerouac so clearly so quickly. Energy in poetry was important to all.

Kerouac is being popularized as an icon of culture—my regret is that sight of him as an artist will be lost. We'll know his name and some work considered typical. But we'll miss one of the finest, brightest sensoriums that has graced verse with intelligence and intellect. This has already happened to D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence is now known as a novelist—and remembered for his more novelistic novels. Lawrence's greatest gifts were as a poet—in poems of love, birds, beasts, and flowers—and in his essays of place and of physiological insight and psychophysiological processes. To read the poem Bavarian Gentoams or the extended essay Fantasia of the Unconscious is to I know the bright creature who trembles behind the costumed facade of the novels.

Similarly, Kerouac is best known for his novel On the Road, but his masterpiece is Mexico City Blues, a religious poem startling in its majesty and comedy and gentleness and vision.

Kerouac is known worldwide as a novelist. He is sometimes also known as the writer of haiku-type poems or intermediate-length poems on the subject of Rimbaud or Buddhism. But Kerouac is little known as the author of several major poems which he considered to be blues works. These books include the unpublished Washington D. C. Blues, San Francisco Blues, and Berkeley Blues. They range in style from Dos Passos-like descriptive verse to poetrylike journals. Outstanding in all modern poetry is the epic-length Mexico City Blues. Kerouac's note on the front of the published edition says:

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.

The rules of Mexico City Blues were that they should be written on the pages of a pocket notebook such as Kerouac nearly always carried. Each page of the notebook would be a chorus. Eventually, in the developing structure of the poem, each line becomes a complete, and whole, independent image. As in the 230th Chorus:

Love's multitudinous boneyard
of decay,
The spilled milk of heroes,
Destruction of silk kerchiefs
by dust storm,
Caress of heroes blindfolded to posts,
Murder victims admitted to this life,
Skeletons bartering fingers and joints ...

A further rule of Mexico City Blues was that it must all be spontaneous—all a risk—a free, inspired, or noninspired, flowing statement, liberated from judgments about its value. It was to be done for itself—as an organism lives for itself.

In the early fifties, when Kerouac began the poem in Mexico City, he had recently read and been impressed by Ezra Pound's Cantos. There is no doubt Kerouac wanted to emulate the experience of writing the Cantos and create his own equivalent work. He had been evolving ideas of a spontaneous bop prosody and apparently he simply began to let the poem flow like bop (not that bop is simple). He was writing voices he had overheard into the bodies of the choruses and he was writing the structure of his passing thoughts. He approached the idea of Sunyatta—of Nothingness Buddhism—and of our ignorance of it.

1st Chorus
Butte Magic of Ignorance
Butte Magic
Is the same as no-Butte
All one light
Old Rough Roads
One High Iron
Mainway

Denver is the same
"The guy I was with his uncle was
the governor of Wyoming"
"Course he paid me back"
Ten Days
Two Weeks
Stock and Joint

"Was an old crook anyway"

The same voice on the same ship
The Supreme Vehicle
S.S. Excalibur
Maynard
Mainline
Mountain
Merudvhaga
Mersion of Missy


2nd Chorus

Man is not worried in the middle

Man in the Middle
Is not Worried
He knows his Karma
Is not buried

But his Karma,
Unknown to him,
May end—

Which is Nirvana

Wild men
Who kill
Have Karmas
Of ill

Good men
Who love
Have Karrnas
Of dove

Snakes are Poor Denizens of Hell
Have come surreptitioning
Through the tall grass
To face the pool of clear frogs


So it is to be a Buddhist poem—a "Mersion of Missy," as he tells us in the first chorus—about karma and liberation.

Thus, he begins simply—almost effortlessly—an easy chorus, but one which shows a master ear and master skill carrying over from earlier complex works in prose and verse. As the choruses continue through clouds of morphine, and overhearings, and spontaneous expressions, and perceptions, and word games, and insights into Buddhism, they focus on the retelling of his long-dead brother Gerard's mystical visions preceding his early death. As Kerouac's cool mind, hand, and ear extend the poem it becomes the channel for great energy. There is a mammalian, powerful force moving through the soft lines of the poem as it flows from dippy to beatific as it extends itself. Kerouac is tremendously involved in his emotions about Gerard. That emotional involvement begins to power the already flowing choruses. The energy moving through the systemless system acts to organize the system with its own self-invented rules. In our Euro-American universe of discourse we believe that if something is serious it is witnessably big and gloomy— and realistic. Kerouac made joking reference to "big serious gloomy poets"—poking at the rigid cant of literary self-investment. Kerouac was writing a big, serious poem, but it was not gloomy overall; it was not realistic; and it smiled at itself and laughed at the world outrageously. The poem is like ourselves at our unchained moments when we are able to move from our established self-investments and stride on new stepping-stones to a point of risk, growth, change, or maturity. Kerouac was writing a mystical (in its hope), anarchist, epic-length, and open-ended poem.

This great self-organizing act of verse-energy as it flows on and on, becoming more diverse, stronger in its self-supporting complexity—like the systems described by H.T. Odum in his remarkable Environment, Power and Society—begins to create a fundament that never existed before. The beautifully controlled energy of the poem—like the serene energy of Mark Rothko in his contemplative canvases—creates a substrate-creates a new world, place, ground, or nourishing energy, in which a vision may come into being. A similar thing happened when I wrote my long poem Dark Brown—when I believed the poem had ended I found, instead, that I had laid back the space, as if I were stepping into a cave behind a waterfall, and in the space a liberating sexual ode appeared. When the ode was written, another sexual vision appeared in the base it had created. I began to understand that there is never a final mystery—there is always a quark within the quark—always a structure reflecting itself in Indra's net.

In Kerouac's Mexico City Blues a self-created substrate—a surpassing religious vision was born—or was blown, as one blows a saxophone! It is the surpassing religious visionary poetic statement of the twentieth century.