Pomes all sizes (City Lights Pocket Poets Series #48) -

Jack Kerouac

City Lights Publishers

2001

175 páginas

5h 50m

ISBN-13: 9780872862692

" 'Develop a pure / lucid mind' " instructs Kerouac in "Gatha," a poem in this miscellany of what Ginsberg ( Howl ) calls "notebook jottings and little magazine items" spanning 1954-1965. The poem's lines and title, referring to Zoroastrianism, signal the influence of Eastern philosophies on Kerouac's ( On the Road ) work. Stylistically, this influence displays itself in his uses of the verb "to be." Lines like "Enlightenment is: do what / you want / eat what there is" have a calm, decisive tone and play a defining role, as if uttered after long, disciplined meditation. Another aspect of Kerouac's style directly clashes with this emphasis on clarity, however. He free-associates into a kind of linguistic clutter: "ole Hotsatots dont footsie / down here bring my gruel, I'll / be cruel." Underlying this volume's hodgepodge, then, is the drama of Kerouac the mystic, with his urge toward control, at odds with Kerouac the freewheeling Beat and, on a personal level, Kerouac the alcoholic. Yet as Ginsberg observes in his introduction, division--the sense of life as "both real and dream"--is the pervasive "spiritual intelligence" of the Beats. Given that, this is a perhaps ironically representative volume.