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seebrandyread 's review for:
San Francisco Blues
by Jack Kerouac
This is probably the first poetry by Jack Kerouac I've ever read. It's a series of "choruses"--one per page--about San Francisco. In Kerouac's own epigraph, he explains that they're supposed to mimic a jazz blues chorus. He wrote them on a small pocket notebook to limit the amount of space each one could take up (hence the tiny print version). The writing itself has the riff-like, spontaneous rhythm and feel of free jazz.
The poem attempts to capture the city of San Francisco, its people, landscape, sounds, and landmarks. It doesn't idolize the city, but looks at the unseen, the parts we don't like to acknowledge like the dirt and crime, to show that these are part of the whole and that flaws are part of the beauty. I think if I were more familiar with the city I might connect to it more. Many of the references seemed to be about specific but ordinary places that have some sort of significance to the narrator or that are part of his everyday life.
Kerouac stuck very strictly to the page limit for each chorus. Many of them seem to end mid line or thought. Seeing the original hand-written notebook I think would add a lot of insight to the reading experience. Though I'm sure he edited the poem, it has an air of improvisation as though he wrote down impressions he had while walking down the street. Words are chosen for associative reasons which mirrors the associative observations of the narrator.
San Francisco Blues is a quintessential Beat poem. It rejects standard poetic form and illustrates the "real" and "gritty" side of American life. I can see why this style was so cutting edge at the time, though it's lost much of that edge now. There will always be writers pushing against cultural and literary establishments because freedom of expression must be constantly fought for.
The poem attempts to capture the city of San Francisco, its people, landscape, sounds, and landmarks. It doesn't idolize the city, but looks at the unseen, the parts we don't like to acknowledge like the dirt and crime, to show that these are part of the whole and that flaws are part of the beauty. I think if I were more familiar with the city I might connect to it more. Many of the references seemed to be about specific but ordinary places that have some sort of significance to the narrator or that are part of his everyday life.
Kerouac stuck very strictly to the page limit for each chorus. Many of them seem to end mid line or thought. Seeing the original hand-written notebook I think would add a lot of insight to the reading experience. Though I'm sure he edited the poem, it has an air of improvisation as though he wrote down impressions he had while walking down the street. Words are chosen for associative reasons which mirrors the associative observations of the narrator.
San Francisco Blues is a quintessential Beat poem. It rejects standard poetic form and illustrates the "real" and "gritty" side of American life. I can see why this style was so cutting edge at the time, though it's lost much of that edge now. There will always be writers pushing against cultural and literary establishments because freedom of expression must be constantly fought for.