Scattered Poems

Jack Kerouac

Over the few years Kerouac wrote, he dashed off a number of poems that managed never to get collected, many of them in letters to Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. City Lights, with help from Ginsberg, compiled a small volume of these poems and released them some thirty years ago.

While a few of the works here (and, in some cases, a line or two within one of the works) shows the power and natural affinity for language that makes Kerouac one of the enduring figures of American literature, Most of what’s here is solid evidence that, where uncollected poems are concerned, there’s usually a reason why they weren’t published in the first place. Perhaps it is the prominence of the author in question, but while reading most of this work, I got a sense of hopelessness, a pathetic (in the classic definition of the term) feeling of emptiness. Unlike both the surrealism and the jazz from which Kerouac and his fellow Beats drew their inspiration, and also unlike the authors from that time who have been incorrectly labelled as Beats (Bukowski, Alfred Chester, to an extent Paul Bowles, etc.), Kerouac’s material seems to lack either the underlying meaning or the sense of immediate purpose that separates the best of the aforementioned authors from their scads of less talented imitators.

One place in which Kerouac does shine here, though, is in a small selection of haiku at the end of the book. Kerouac was one of the first American authors to really grasp the spirit of English-language haiku, as mentioned in a brief intro to the book’s last section. Kerouac quotes a few Basho haiku and bemoans the inability of English to imitate the free-flowing Japanese language, coming to the conclusion that the "seventeen syllable" rule should be dropped for American haiku (as most serious haiku writers and scholars in English have also done in the forty or so years since Kerouac originally composed the works here). In the haiku, where Kerouac is forced to work with tight lines and spare images, his gift comes through. Unfortunately, it does so in far too few other pieces in this book.