Mexico City Blues: 242 Choruses
By Jack Kerouac
3.5/5
()
About this ebook
One of the renowned Beat writer’s most formally inventive books, Mexico City Blues is Jack Kerouac’s essential work of lyric verse, now reissued following his centenary celebration
Written between 1954 and 1957, and published originally by Grove Press in 1959, Mexico City Blues is Kerouac’s most important verse work. It incorporates all the elements of his theory of spontaneous composition and his interest in Buddhism. Memories, fantasies, dreams, and surrealistic free association are lyrically combined in the loose format inspired by jazz and the blues. Written while Kerouac was living in Mexico City, and with references to William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Bill Garver, this exciting book in Kerouac’s oeuvre is an original and moving epic of sound, rhythm, and religion.
Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) es el novelista más destacado y emblemático de la Generación Beat. En Anagrama se han publicado sus obras fundamentales: En el camino, Los subterráneos, Los Vagabundos del Dharma, La vanidad de los Duluoz y En la carretera. El rollo mecanografiado original, además de Cartas, la selección de su correspondencia con Allen Ginsberg, y, con William S. Burroughs, Y los hipopótamos se cocieron en sus tanques.
Read more from Jack Kerouac
Lonesome Traveler Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Town and the City: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Big Sur Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Subterraneans Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Good Blonde & Others Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Satori in Paris Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsScattered Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Scripture of the Golden Eternity Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Big Sur (Annotated) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Truth and Beautiful Meaningful Lies: A Collection of Jack Kerouac Quotes Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBig Sur Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Doctor Sax Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Poetry of Jack Kerouac: Scattered Poems, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, and Old Angel Midnight Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDesolation Peak: Collected Writings Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOld Angel Midnight Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pic Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBook of Dreams Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Mexico City Blues
Related ebooks
Doctor Sax Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Silence in the Snowy Fields: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5New Selected Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Satori in Paris Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTruth and Beautiful Meaningful Lies: A Collection of Jack Kerouac Quotes Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Poetry of Jack Kerouac: Scattered Poems, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, and Old Angel Midnight Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOld Angel Midnight Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Scripture of the Golden Eternity Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The First Third Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Desolation Peak: Collected Writings Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsScattered Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Go: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gone Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTales from the Eternal Cafe Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTarantula Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso in Paris, 1957-1963 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHowl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Get Home Free: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ferlinghetti: A Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBook of Dreams Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsConversations with Allen Ginsberg Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNeal Cassady: The Fast Life of a Beat Hero Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Beat Haiku Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Beerspit Night and Cursing Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Selected Poems, 1968-1996 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The God of Loneliness: Selected and New Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Essential Ginsberg Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWriting Beat and Other Occasions of Literary Mayhem Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Poetry For You
Inward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iliad: The Fitzgerald Translation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beowulf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iliad of Homer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Prophet Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dante's Inferno: The Divine Comedy, Book One Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Way Forward Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Canterbury Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Love Her Wild: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Odyssey Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tao Te Ching: A New English Version Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Daily Stoic: A Daily Journal On Meditation, Stoicism, Wisdom and Philosophy to Improve Your Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dream Work Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leaves of Grass: 1855 Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Twenty love poems and a song of despair Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gilgamesh: A New English Version Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beyond Thoughts: An Exploration Of Who We Are Beyond Our Minds Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (ReadOn Classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Collection Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Letters to a Young Poet (Rediscovered Books): With linked Table of Contents Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related categories
Reviews for Mexico City Blues
108 ratings1 review
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5“I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday.” Says the author himself!The result is this book, with 242 choruses, or poems. Unfortunately, I'm not a fan of Kerouac's poetry. And this collection was no exception. Just not for me, I guess.
Book preview
Mexico City Blues - Jack Kerouac
MEXICO CITY BLUES
Other Works by Jack Kerouac
Published by Grove Press
Dr. Sax
Lonesome Traveler
Satori in Paris and Pic (one volume)
The Subterraneans
MEXICO CITY BLUES
Jack Kerouac
Copyright © 1959 by Jack Kerouac
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 1001 orpermissions@groveatlantic.com
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in Canada
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: January 1959
First Grove Atlantic paperback edition: June 1970
This Grove Atlantic paperback edition: March 2023
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.
ISBN 978-0-8021-6244-1
eISBN 978-0-8021-9568-5
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com
MEXICO CITY BLUES
MEXICO CITY BLUES
NOTE
I want to be considered a jazz poet
blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam
session on Sunday. I take 242 choruses;
my ideas vary and sometimes roll from
chorus to chorus or from halfway through
a chorus to halfway into the next.
1st Chorus
Butte Magic of Ignorance
Butte Magic
Is the same as no-Butte
All one light
Old Rough Roads
One High Iron
Mainway
Denver is the same
"The guy I was with his uncle was
the governor of Wyoming"
Course he paid me back
Ten Days
Two Weeks
Stock and Joint
Was an old crook anyway
The same voice on the same ship
The Supreme Vehicle
S. S. Excalibur
Maynard
Mainline
Mountain
Merudvhaga
Mersion of Missy
2nd Chorus
Man is not worried in the middle
Man in the Middle
Is not Worried
He knows his Karma
Is not buried
But his Karma,
Unknown to him,
May end –
Which is Nirvana
Wild men
Who kill
Have Karmas
Of ill
Good men
Who love
Have Karmas
Of dove
Snakes are Poor Denizens of Hell
Have come surreptitioning
Through the tall grass
To face the pool of clear frogs
3rd Chorus
Describe fires in riverbottom
sand, and the cooking;
the cooking of hot dogs
spitted in whittled sticks
over flames of woodfire
with grease dropping in smoke
to brown and blacken
the salty hotdogs,
and the wine,
and the work on the railroad.
$275,000,000,000.00 in debt
says the Government
Two hundred and seventy five billion
dollars in debt
Like Unending
Heaven
And Unnumbered Sentient Beings
Who will be admitted –
Not-Numberable –
To the new Pair of Shoes
Of White Guru Fleece
O j o!
The Purple Paradise
4th Chorus
Roosevelt was worth 6, 7 million dollars
He was Tight
Frog waits
Till poor fly
Flies by
And then they got him
The pool of clear rocks
Covered with vegetable scum
Covered the rocks
Clear the pool
Covered the warm surface
Covered the lotus
Dusted the watermelon flower
Aerial the Pad
Clean queer the clear
blue water
AND THEN THEY GOT HIM
The Oil of the Olive
Bittersweet taffies
Bittersweet cabbage
Cabbage soup made right
A hunk a grass
Sauerkraut let work
in a big barrel
Stunk but Good
5th Chorus
I am not Gregory Corso
The Italian Minnesinger –
Of the Song of Corsica –
Subioso Gregorio Corso –
The Haunted Versemaker
King
Of Brattle Street.
In streets of snow
He wove the show
And worried in tunnels
And mad dog barked
KIND KING MIND
Allen Ginsberg called me
William Burroughs
Is William Lee
Samuel Johnson
Is Under the sea
Rothridge Cole parter
Of Peppers
Is Numbro
Elabora
If you know what I
p a l a b r a
6th Chorus
This Thinking is Stopped.
Buddha’s Secret Moonlight: – is
the Ancient Virtue of laying up
and thinking happy & comfortable
thoughts – This, which modern
Society has branded Loafing,
is
made available to people now
apparently only by junk.
Self depends on existence of other
self, and so no Solo Universal Self
exists – no self, no other self,
no innumerable selves, no
Universal self and no ideas
relating to existence or non-
existence thereof –
The Greatest, Who Has Undertaken
to Comfort Innumberable Beings
The Kind One
The Art-of-Kindness Master
The Master of Wisdom
The Great Ferryman
The Great Vehicle Being
7th Chorus
He Who is Free From Arbitrary Conceptions
of Being or Non-Being
The Genius of the Elephant
The Destroyer of Elephant-Trainers
by Death
The Destroyer of Elephants by Death
The Destroyer of Death
The Destroyer and Exterminator
of Death
Exterminator of Being and Non-Being
Tathagata
The Essence Master
The Womb
The Manifestor
Man’s Made Essence
Essence’s Made Man
The Maker of Light
The Destroyer of Light
8th Chorus
Mysterious Red Rivers of the North –
Obi Ubang African Montanas
of the Gulchy Peary
Earth –
Lakes of Light – Old Seas –
Mississippi River, Chicago,
the Great Lakes –
The Small Rivers like Indiana,
the Big Ones
Like Amazon.
Joliet flew.
Alma, the River of Snowy Love
– Amida, of Brightest
Perfect
Compassion
The Tamiyani Trail across
the Everglades –
Ai la ra la
la rai la ra –
Singing breasts of women
of earth receiving
Juicy Rivers – red earth
9th Chorus
We’re all taking short cut
Through Death Valley
The Volcanic Mountains
And the Lizard Ice
And the Lice of Sand
– Lhasas of Weedblack
Cock Rock Philtrite –
Redwoods so Huge
They climb passes by God –
The Giant Angels
In the Washington D C Blue Sky
– – The Heroines of Cathedral
Fellaheen Mexico –
Commenting on the Great Cities
of the World,
The Blue Marvel of New Orleans
(land a swamps)
Ingers had done windows
with penal Australia
too – pear Attantisatasa
the Central Essential
Indy Portuga
coit
10th Chorus
The great hanging weak teat of India
on the map
The Fingernail of Malaya
The Wall of China
The Korea Ti-Pousse Thumb
The Salamander Japan
the Okinawa Moon Spot
The Pacific
The Back of Hawaiian Mountains
coconuts
Kines, balconies, Ah Tarzan –
And D W Griffith
the great American Director
Strolling down disgruntled
Hollywood Lane
– to toot Nebraska,
Indian Village New York,
Atlantis, Rome,
Peleus and Melisander,
And
swans of Balls
Spots of foam on the ocean
11th Chorus
Brown wrote a book called
The White and the Black
N a r c o t