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    The Poetry of Jack Kerouac: Scattered Poems, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, and Old Angel Midnight
    The Poetry of Jack Kerouac: Scattered Poems, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, and Old Angel Midnight
    The Poetry of Jack Kerouac: Scattered Poems, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, and Old Angel Midnight
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    The Poetry of Jack Kerouac: Scattered Poems, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, and Old Angel Midnight

    By Jack Kerouac

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    About this ebook

    From the iconic New York Times–bestselling author of On the Road: Three revolutionary collections of poetry in one volume.

    Rebelling against the dry rules and literary pretentiousness he perceived in early twentieth-century poetry, Jack Kerouac pioneered a poetic style informed by oral tradition and driven by concrete language with neither embellishment nor abstraction. In these three groundbreaking collections, the legendary Beat writer offers a spontaneous, uncensored perspective on everything from religion to the structure of language itself.
     
    Scattered Poems: Bringing together selections from literary journals and his private notebooks, Scattered Poems exemplifies Kerouac’s innovative approach to language. Populated by hitchhikers, Chinese grocers, Buddhist saints, and cultural figures from Rimbaud to Harpo Marx, the poems evoke the primal and the sublime, the everyday and the metaphysical.
     
    The Scripture of the Golden Eternity: During an unexplained fainting spell, Kerouac experienced a flash of enlightenment. A student of Buddhist philosophy, he recognized the experience as “satori,” a moment of life-changing epiphany. The knowledge he gained in that instant is expressed in this volume of sixty-six prose poems with language that is both precise and cryptic, mystical and plain. His vision proclaims, “There are not two of us here, reader and writer, but one golden eternity.”
     
    Old Angel Midnight: A spontaneous writing project in the form of an extended prose poem, this sonorous and spiritually playful book is one of Kerouac’s most boldly experimental works. Collected from five notebooks dating from 1956 to 1959—a time in which Kerouac was immersed in Buddhist theory—Old Angel Midnight captures the rhythms of the universe and secrets of the subconscious with stunning linguistic dexterity.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateJul 11, 2017
    ISBN9781504047166
    The Poetry of Jack Kerouac: Scattered Poems, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, and Old Angel Midnight
    Author

    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. Foto © Jerry Bauer

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      Book preview

      The Poetry of Jack Kerouac - Jack Kerouac

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      The Poetry of Jack Kerouac

      Scattered Poems, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, and Old Angel Midnight

      Jack Kerouac

      CONTENTS

      Publisher’s Note on Poetry

      Scattered Poems

      A TRANSLATION FROM THE FRENCH OF JEAN-LOUIS INCOGNITEAU

      Song: FIE MY FUM

      PULL MY DAISY

      PULL MY DAISY

      He is your friend

      Old buddy aint you gonna stay by me?

      DAYDREAMS FOR GINSBERG

      LUCIEN MIDNIGHT

      Someday you’ll be lying

      I clearly saw

      HYMN

      POEM: I demand that the human race

      THE THRASHING DOVES

      The Buddhist Saints

      HOW TO MEDITATE

      A PUN FOR AL GELPI

      SEPT. 16, 1961

      RIMBAUD

      from OLD ANGEL MIDNIGHT

      MORE OLD ANGEL MIDNIGHT

      Auro Boralis Shomoheen

      LONG DEAD’S LONGEVITY

      SITTING UNDER TREE NUMBER TWO

      A CURSE AT THE DEVIL

      Sight is just dust

      POEM

      TO EDWARD DAHLBERG

      TWO POEMS

      TO ALLEN GINSBERG

      POEM: Jazz killed itself

      TO HARPO MARX

      HITCH HIKER

      FOUR POEMS from SAN FRANCISCO BLUES

      from SAN FRANCISCO BLUES

      BLUES: And he sits embrowned

      BLUES: Part of the morning stars

      Hey listen you poetry audiences

      SOME WESTERN HAIKUS (from BOOK OF HAIKU)

      The Scripture of the Golden Eternity

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      Old Angel Midnight

      Dedication

      Old Angel Midnight

      Editor’s Note

      About the Author

      Publisher’s Note

      Long before they were ever written down, poems were organized in lines. Since the invention of the printing press, readers have become increasingly conscious of looking at poems, rather than hearing them, but the function of the poetic line remains primarily sonic. Whether a poem is written in meter or in free verse, the lines introduce some kind of pattern into the ongoing syntax of the poem’s sentences; the lines make us experience those sentences differently. Reading a prose poem, we feel the strategic absence of line.

      But precisely because we’ve become so used to looking at poems, the function of line can be hard to describe. As James Longenbach writes in The Art of the Poetic Line, Line has no identity except in relation to other elements in the poem, especially the syntax of the poem’s sentences. It is not an abstract concept, and its qualities cannot be described generally or schematically. It cannot be associated reliably with the way we speak or breathe. Nor can its function be understood merely from its visual appearance on the page. Printed books altered our relationship to poetry by allowing us to see the lines more readily. What new challenges do electronic reading devices pose?

      In a printed book, the width of the page and the size of the type are fixed. Usually, because the page is wide enough and the type small enough, a line of poetry fits comfortably on the page: What you see is what you’re supposed to hear as a unit of sound. Sometimes, however, a long line may exceed the width of the page; the line continues, indented just below the beginning of the line. Readers of printed books have become accustomed to this convention, even if it may on some occasions seem ambiguous—particularly when some of the lines of a poem are already indented from the left-hand margin of the page.

      But unlike a printed book, which is stable, an ebook is a shape-shifter. Electronic type may be reflowed across a galaxy of applications and interfaces, across a variety of screens, from phone to tablet to computer. And because the reader of an ebook is empowered to change the size of the type, a poem’s original lineation may seem to be altered in many different ways. As the size of the type increases, the likelihood of any given line running over increases.

      Our typesetting standard for poetry is designed to register that when a line of poetry exceeds the width of the screen, the resulting run-over line should be indented, as it might be in a printed book. Take a look at John Ashbery’s Disclaimer as it appears in two different type sizes.

      Each of these versions of the poem has the same number of lines: the number that Ashbery intended. But if you look at the second, third, and fifth lines of the second stanza in the right-hand version of Disclaimer, you’ll see the automatic indent; in the fifth line, for instance, the word ahead drops down and is indented. The automatic indent not only makes poems easier to read electronically; it also helps to retain the rhythmic shape of the line—the unit of sound—as the poet intended it. And to preserve the integrity of the line, words are never broken or hyphenated when the line must run over. Reading Disclaimer on the screen, you can be sure that the phrase you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn ahead is a complete line, while the phrase you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn is not.

      Open Road has adopted an electronic typesetting standard for poetry that ensures the clearest possible marking of both line breaks and stanza breaks, while at the same time handling the built-in function for resizing and reflowing text that all ereading devices possess. The first step is the appropriate semantic markup of the text, in which the formal elements distinguishing a poem, including lines, stanzas, and degrees of indentation, are tagged. Next, a style sheet that reads these tags must be designed, so that the formal elements of the poems are always displayed consistently. For instance, the style sheet reads the tags marking lines that the author himself has indented; should that indented line exceed the character capacity of a screen, the run-over part of the line will be indented further, and all such runovers will look the same. This combination of appropriate coding choices and style sheets makes it easy to display poems with complex indentations, no matter if the lines are metered or free, end-stopped or enjambed.

      Ultimately, there may be no way to account for every single variation in the way in which the lines of a poem are disposed visually on an electronic reading device, just as rare variations may challenge the conventions of the printed page, but with rigorous quality assessment and scrupulous proofreading, nearly every poem can be set electronically in accordance with its author’s intention. And in some regards, electronic typesetting increases our capacity to transcribe a poem accurately: In a printed book, there may be no way to distinguish a stanza break from a page break, but with an ereader, one has only to resize the text in question to discover if a break at the bottom of a page is intentional or accidental.

      Our goal in bringing out poetry in fully reflowable digital editions is to honor the sanctity of line and stanza as meticulously as possible—to allow readers to feel assured that the way the lines appear on the screen is an accurate embodiment of the way the author wants the lines to sound. Ever since poems began to be written down, the manner in which they ought to be written down has seemed equivocal; ambiguities have always resulted. By taking advantage of the technologies available in our time, our goal is to deliver the most satisfying reading experience possible.

      Scattered Poems

      The new American poetry as typified by the SF Renaissance (which means Ginsberg, me, Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, McClure, Corso, Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, Philip Whalen, I guess) is a kind of new-old Zen Lunacy poetry, writing whatever comes into your head as it comes, poetry returned to its origin, in the bardic child, truly ORAL as

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