Overview

Just as Jack Kerouac upended the conventions of the novel with On the Road, he also revolutionized American poetry in this ingenious collection. Bringing together selections from literary journals and his private notebooks, Jack Kerouac's Scattered Poems exemplifies the Beat Generation icon's innovative approach to language. Kerouac's poems, populated by hitchhikers, Chinese grocers, Buddhist saints, and cultural figures from Rimbaud to Harpo Marx, evoke the primal and the sublime, the everyday and the metaphysical. Scattered Poems, which includes the playfully instructive ""How to Meditate,"" the sensory ""San Francisco Blues,"" and an ode to Kerouac's fellow Beat Allen Ginsberg, is rich in striking images and strident urgency. Kerouac's widespread influences feel new and fresh in these poems, which echo the rhythm of improvisational jazz music and the centuries-old structure of Japanese haiku. In rebelling against the dry rules and literary pretentiousness he perceived in early twentieth-century poetry, Kerouac pioneered a poetic style informed by oral tradition, driven by concrete language with neither embellishment nor abstraction, and expressed through spontaneous, uncensored writing.

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Reviews

"""Kerouac was a breath of fresh air when he came on the literary scene. He was also a force, a tragedy, a triumph, and an ongoing influence, and that influence is still with us."" -- ""Norman Mailer, praise for the author"""

""Kerouac was a breath of fresh air when he came on the literary scene. He was also a force, a tragedy, a triumph, and an ongoing influence, and that influence is still with us."" -- ""Norman Mailer, praise for the author""

Author Information

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was an American novelist and poet who influenced generations of writers. He is recognized for his spontaneous prose style and for being a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Andrew Eiden is an actor and winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award for narration. He has been acting since the age of four, working at regional theaters, in national commercials, and on numerous television shows.

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