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AN EXAMINATION OF THE INFLUENCE OF JAZZ AND BLUES IN JACK
KEROUAC'S MEXICO CITY BLUES.
BY: RODERICK A. WARNER
CONCLUSION:
In this essay, I have attempted to examine the strong influence of jazz and blues on
Jack Kerouac's long poem Mexico City Blues. I would assert further that Kerouac is
grossly neglected as a poet - as much for the undoubted problems that his work poses
to conventional critical interpretation as for the reasons of its relative unavailability
until recently. We still await a complete 'Collected Poems.' Yet if one looks at the
history of jazz, one sees both the pitfalls and possibilities for critical analysis. Jazz
has become almost 'respectable' now - but, with a few isolated and notable
exceptions, is still lacking the comprehensive historical and critical analysis that it
deserves. In the same way, Kerouac's wild, blowing poetic lines, which take so much
of their inspiration from jazz, also await an overall analysis that can deal with them
both on their own terms and situate them, however problematically, within the wider
tradition of American poetry.
It is obvious that a poet who writes in an improvisatory form, such as Kerouac,
following the twists and turns of his mind, while stoned on marijuana and
(occasionally) morphine, is involved in taking risks. He foregrounds these,
incorporating mistakes and the occasions when his thought comes to a sputtering halt,
in a manner that is often amusing, and which, on a deeper level, often questions the
role of 'poet' and 'poetry' in the accepted sense. This could produce a sprawling mess
- but Kerouac's constant inventiveness, his goofy child-like humour, interspersed with
the darker shadows of pain, death and sexuality, and the tension between his native
Catholicism and his acquired Buddhism, held together by the chorus form of the
notebook page, produce a work that has a unity in its diversity, within what I have
termed the 'Beat Aesthetic.' A unity that, as I have stated at the end of chapter four,
arises organically from the influence of jazz on the process of writing, symbolised by
the figure of Charlie Parker. Such a poetry will always produce an extreme response -
even forty years and more after its creation.
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