BOOK OF SKETCHES
By Jack Kerouac
Penguin Poets, 413 pages
Available at National Bookstore
Combing the aisles of National Bookstore one day, I came upon a recent title by Beat novelist Jack Kerouac, one that I never even knew existed, but one that fits well with his body of spontaneous poetics. Book of Sketches is a hidden gem, an experiment in trying to capture word profiles of the world around him in short, sharp bursts, like one-minute art studies.
Kerouac wrote it while wandering around from 1952 to 1954 — places like Denver, Colorado, St. Louis, California, North Carolina, Mexico City, Montreal. Perhaps he wanted to duplicate, in free-verse doodles, what Picasso or Matisse were capable of whipping off on paper while strolling through Paris or New York. It shows he always did have an eye toward posterity: documenting his life seemed as natural to Kerouac as it does to today’s bloggers.
And that’s what really strikes me: how close these short little Zen passages seem to fit in with the modern modes of technology. Nowadays, Kerouac’s compact word chunks — not exactly paragraphs, too hurriedly punctuated to be conscious poetry, yet bearing their own unique shape on the page — seem akin to our e-mails: dispatches from America’s lonely landscapes, charged with a rare vision into the soul ticking beneath everyday things.
August senses September
in the deeper light of
its afternoons—senses
Autumn in the brown burn
of the corn, the
stripped tobacco—the
faint singe appearing
on the incomprehensible
horizons—the tanned
tiredness of gardens, the
cooler, brisker breeze—
above all the cool
mysterious nights —
Unencumbered by the need to tell stories, to set down a narrative, Kerouac gets in touch with the essentials — he notices everything, in a way that was all brand new then; his novel On the Road hadn’t broken through yet, nor had Ginsberg read his poem “Howl” to signal the generational shift. I would love to know what Jack was reading at the time, but I have a feeling it was some of his old favorites: Walt Whitman, Thomas Wolfe, Marcel Proust, possibly even D.H. Lawrence and Yeats, whom are mentioned in the book. His sketches of people are no less wondrous, like the passages on Carolyn Blake (Robinson), the Midwest housewife who was probably married to Neal Cassady at the time. He conjures up a recurring theme — the death of his brother, Gerard, as a child — in the “shuffling figure of a man in a derby hat handsapockets… the great soul of my brother in sadness humming over the scene… Friday, I am dying he said to me in Eternity in Montreal years later.” Kerouac was a writer who drew mythology out of his own life, seemingly at will.
They called him “Memory Babe” because Kerouac seemed to have a Babe Ruthian ability to conjure up his past in vivid detail, and hit homeruns on the page. But these sketches seem fresh, laid down wet and left to dry, in the moment; not remembered or fussed over. Nowadays, we have other ways of documenting our memories and experiences on the fly: we have computers and blogs. But the shorthand and blank verse of e-mails and blog entries also share something with Kerouac’s freewheeling methodology. There’s an immediacy here that poets strive for, and bloggers rarely achieve.
The Sea is My Brother—
A figment of the gray
Sea & the gray America,
of my childhood dreams—
At times, the entries can be tedious, as it might become tedious to sit next to a nonstop raconteur on, say, a cross-country Greyhound bus. Or as tedious as it sometimes is to read people’s blog entries. Yet the blog serves a purpose, even if it is only to capture the tedium of a life lived in the public consciousness. To blog is to conduct a personal experiment in watching your life unfurling before you — almost seeing events as serial entries, even while they happen. We all know people who whip out cameras in restaurants or every public place: the daily blogs demand fresh images, fresh entries, more evidence that we are out there, living. Blogs are simply the modern version of the journal (not the more personal, studied entries of the diary; the journal is meant to be a more impressionistic refraction of the day).
But if our lives are bent toward documenting it all on some cyberspace tableaux, there has to be some self-editing going on — even if it’s just an awareness that people, in this day and age, will not sit still for bad Internet poetry. Thank God bloggers do not attempt what Kerouac could spiel off so naturally to the world. Listen:
Everything is alive
The blue glass domes
on tphone poles
The skittering birds
Rippling palm leaves
Waving pine branches
Valley of hope pale
green with dark bushes
Here, in Book of Sketches, Kerouac set down what would become a manifesto for the ‘60s kids a full decade before the fact; and what, fortunately or unfortunately, has become the birth-right cry of every young batch since then: an embrace of personal desires that, more and more often in modern society, have become largely filtered through consumerism and commercialism. We are a slick pack, dedicated to slick merchandise and slick technology with which to properly document our “individualism.”
All is a want
Love when I want it
Rest when I want it
Food when I want it
Drink when I want it
Drugs when I want it
The rest is bullsh*t
So we must take Kerouac with a grain of salt — especially when he pens lines like “I blame God for making life so boring” — and understand that standing in Jack’s shoes back in 1952, pencil and notebook in hand, with nothing but the infinite sky before him to behold, is a lot different from our blogged existence, many galaxies in the future, resting in the firmament of empty supernovas.