Kerouac and Freezing Fog ... oh my.

Winter tends to come and go here in South Central Indiana and it looks like its fighting its way through the fog of the Hoosier Hills today. Everything is coated in a beautiful sheen of ice and the air is heavy with the smell of the nearby woodstove. All the benefits of living across from an antique woodshop. Actually, it's quite beautiful and reminds me of fall visits to the Smokey Mountains as a kid.

Being trapped inside (self-imposed of course) I've taken to listening to Billie Holiday and reading over some long neglected Kerouac that I've been meaning to. I received a copy of his City Lights publication a week or two back and finally got around to reading it. Kerouac's Scattered Poems is just that, poems collected from his scattered wanderings around the world. Everything from hymns to haiku to collabrative bits with Ginsberg and Cassidy are in the collection. It's an interesting collection only in so much that it offers a vantage point into the poetics of Kerouac. Much of the poems I can do without, but he seems to have learned at least a couple of things from Snyder when it comes to haiku. These tiny jewels might be the best part of the book. Not in the traditional poetic sense of haiku, but more out of the sense of seeing roots in his fiction and his construction of myth. Kerouac is more prose writer than poet, but certain aspects are fairly enjoyable.

I tend to like poems about craft, so here's a reproduction of his piece entitled "Poem" and dealing in large part with the craft of writing poetry.

Poem

Jazz killed itself
But dont let poetry kill itself

Dont be afraid
of the cold night air

Dont listen to institutions
when you return manuscripts to
brownstone

dont bow & scuffle
for Edith Wharton Pioneers
or ursula major nebraska peose
just hang in your own backyard
& laugh play pretty
cake trombone
& if somebody give you beads
juju, jew, or otherwise,

sleep with em around your neck

Your dreams'll maybe better

There's no rain
there's no me,
I'm telling ya man,
sure as shit.

1959

See not the most poetic but still interesting. It's more a book for huge Kerouac fans and freezing fog days in places like Indiana.