Reading Kerouac in Denver

What do you read to the audience when the evening's biggest draw has been dead for almost forty years?

On the evening of September 20th, The Tattered Cover, an independent bookstore on 16th and Wynkoop in downtown Denver, hosted a reading and discussion featuring John Leland, author of Hip: The History and most recently Why Kerouac Matters, and me, the representative for The Original Scroll publication of On the Road.

When I was a faculty member at Dickinson College, I attended department-sponsored readings of the very-much-living Ian McEwan and Tobias Wolf that had smaller audiences than all the Kerouac events I have participated in since becoming connected to this project. From this, I have learned a few lessons.

First, the very name Kerouac can fill a room, can convince three hundred people to walk for three hours in calf-high snow through downtown Denver to see the location where Neal Cassady's father swapped haircuts for baked goods. Second, when you are the emissary from the Kingdom of Kerouac, you should keep your mouth shut and let his words do the talking. Even better? Let the audience do the talking.

People attend literary readings for any number of reasons: to be in the presence of a favorite author, to be read to, to have a book signed so you can flip it on eBay, to get in out of the cold. But moreover, people want to ask questions, want to offer their opinions, want to interact with others who care about the same things that they themselves care about.

Bakhtin praises the novel for functioning as a site of heteroglossia, a myriad of interwoven voices that occur simultaneously and uproot the theories of those who find the novel to be the juggernaut of normative ideology. The novel speaks, and its name is Legion. Kerouac was adept at writing narratives that give voice to the voiceless; in his work, the heterogenous articulation that is society speaks in its multiple voices. Kerouac's work is cacophony, is a John-Cage-like requiem, and for this reason so many hear themselves in those pages. When we ask questions after the reading, we speak a non-vocalized declarative below the interrogative utterance; we say, I am here with you.

As a person lucky enough to be asked about Kerouac—and for that asking to occur in fabulous rooms filled with people who care at least as deeply as I do about the work—I try to remember that the question is in (the largest?) part a request to be allowed to speak one's mind about Kerouac's work. And so the dogma of academia, the posturing that says I must answer definitively and leave no doubt, has to be wrestled into the back seat so that I might ask, What do you think? You tell me.

Denver is Lonesome for Her Heroes

The course Jack Kerouac Wrote Here, a sociology course taught by Dr. Audrey Sprenger at SUNY-Potsdam, is based upon the work of Jack Kerouac, and the literature courses are primarily taught by Penny Vlagopoulos and Joshua Kupetz, with Adira Amram teaching the texts as the basis for performance.

The seminars focused on Kerouac's poetry and prose through two assignments: Sketches of New York and DharmaPops on Avenue A.

Sketches of New York

Penny Vlagopoulos and Joshua Kupetz, two of the four co-editors of the forthcoming scroll manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and Adira Amram, a New York City-based actor and performance artist, conducted literary seminars and performance workshops aboard the California Zephyr and the Lake Shore Limited. The workshops explored the development of Kerouac’s narrative technique through the more-conventional prose in On the Road to the spontaneous prose techniques in Visions of Cody.

While the courses focused on close reading and the ways that Kerouac uses grammar and syntax to convey meaning, students also considered how those intentional styles affect cognition, and how that cognition effects performance.

Based upon these discussions, students completed both conventional and spontaneous narrative assignments, culminating in Sketches of New York, spontaneous prose descriptions of people and places in Kerouac’s New York which the students will perform at Goodbye, Blue Monday in Brooklyn, January 11, 2007, at 7:30 p.m.

DharmaPops on Avenue A

Penny Vlagopoulos and Joshua Kupetz, two of the four co-editors of the forthcoming scroll manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and Adira Amram, a New York City-based actor and performance artist, conducted a literary seminar on Kerouac’s use of spontaneous prosody in his “Western haikus,” a form that he felt “must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery.”

After examining a selection of Kerouac’s haiku, or “dharmapops,” students composed their own dharmapops on the streets of New York and workshopped them at the Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, at the foot of First Avenue between Houston and Bleecker.

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Penny Vlagopoulos is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She holds an M.A. and M.Phil. in English from Columbia. Currently, she is an Adjunct Professor at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study and is working on her dissertation, which examines the underground in post-World War II American Culture. She is also, along with Howard Cunnell, PhD, George Mouratidis, and Joshua Kupetz, editing Jack Kerouac's scroll manuscript of "On the Road." It will be published by Viking Penguin in 2007.

Adira Amram is a New York based actress and performance artist. After graduating from the State University of New York at Purchase she appeared in the Off-Broadway production of "Door Wide Open" as the young writer Joyce Johnson, a play based on the letters between Joyce Johnson and Jack Kerouac. This year she debuted in "The Sopranos" as Stacey in the season finale. She can be seen in the feature film "Some Kind of Awful" set to be released August 2007. She is a fixture of the NYC downtown alternative comedy scene. Her CD "Me & Bill," out on Northstreet Records, received a rave review from "Jane Magazine" as well as interviews with National Public Radio, "WBAI," "backstage.com" and "The Gothamist." She is currently in production with a new CD due out in 2007.

All Your Doors Are Open

David Amram slept on the floor of the Blair-Caldwell branch of the Denver Public Library, his coat folded into a pillow and Pull My Daisy¹ projected on the white wall at the head of the room. He needed sleep after four days in San Francisco with students from the class Jack Kerouac Wrote Here: Criss-crossing America Chasing Cool. Artie Moore, stand-up bass bandleader sitting in with Amram while Jack Kerouac Wrote Here occupied Denver, lounged out in the hall with Tony Black, a drummer with a flair for the martial that stretched through the weekend, also light with brushes, who uses his elbow to distort the tom head, wringing new notes out of the old blue tub.

The room was set for two hundred, but the librarians and event planner had to pass more chairs into the room like a bucket brigade, while kids had sat on the floor and flat-backed on walls. Amram looked across the crowd, already at capacity, twenty minutes before the event’s scheduled start, so he gave a nod to Moore and Black and they played a number to pass the time, Amram switching from a keyboard to winds, his jazz French horn with the bell whanged out by some past drop, his tin whistles that he will play two-at-once, his great head bobbing with the rise and run of his sets of notes.

And the room kept filling. Kerouac was back in town, "Denver at last!" indeed.

Beat crowds have a certain look in the east—teenagers in Salvation Army couture, middle-aged men in bajas, a few turtlenecked, bespectacled elders in long white hair—but this beat crowd in Denver looked like Denver—men and women in fleece, straight-legged blue jeans or khakis that drooped to hiking boots rimed with salt from the snowy archipelagos of sidewalks.

The crowd came to honor Kerouac and to hear Amram, jazz musician and arranger, Kerouac’s first musical collaborator, and the crowd always goes loose from Amram’s music—his original compositions and repertoire of jazz standards, the tables littered with wind instruments and drums. Yet, most people who see Amram are most taken by the man’s erudition—he speaks knowingly and lovingly about music from classical to rap, and he tells stories that highlight what Amram identifies as beat, often quoting Kerouac’s should-be-famous phrase “Live your lives out? Naw, love your lives out”².

In this, the 50^th anniversary year of On the Road, the focus of these celebrations is on Kerouac and his life’s work, yet as these events accumulate—the longer I take my place beside academics like Audrey Sprenger and Penny Vlagopoulos, beside icons like Ed White and John Cassady³, I realize that Amram is the jewel-center of this contemporary quest narrative.

When Amram invites his daughter, Adira, to perform, her scat jazz vocals reach moments of the golden treble in the heart’s center—the audience feels it the way shower-stall vocalists feel those notes that float beyond them, the notes that if sung would say all the ideas and purge all the feelings the singer has carried around since the last exultant phrases.

And only Amram’s words of pure encouragement, not a put on or a false up-with-everything mock beatitude popular among those who seek justification for their excesses, can gird Elijah, a nineteen year old from upstate New York, for a room full of ears attuned to Amram’s band’s professional polish and free ideas, and allow Elijah to stumble through a few bars of freestyle before finding it, the pocket, and to let his words tumble in the harmony of an August rain, drops so heavy and rhythmic with the variations from a shifting wind.

When Amram, with Artie Moore and Tony Black, blow the final notes after the screening, the crowd is rapt and they want more, and Amram has to be told to stop, to keep some in the tank for tomorrow and the next nine days of travel across the country, where he will keep improvising on his horn, his whistles and flutes, proselytizing the spirit and accompanying the multitude.

The people will keep coming.

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¹Pull My Daisy is, according to Amram, “a kind of a home movie” based, loosely, on a script written by Jack Kerouac and starring Amram, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, among others, and filmed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie.

²From “Beatific: Origins of the Beat Generation” (Good Blonde).

³For a complete list of the many talented people who are making Jack Kerouac Wrote Here possible, visit the website.

Chasing Cool

The first friend I made in Denver, Steve, has a dog named Japhy. We met at a picnic hosted by our partners' work, and after everyone had eaten and the rockies were climbing toward the sun, someone produced an Ultrastar¹ and we wound up in the grass throwing long forehands to one another. When he called for his dog, a single "Japhy!" I answered "the greatest Dharma bum of them all" across to him. Steve seemed surprised that I knew the source of his dog's name and said that people always asked him about it.

After tomorrow, Denver may not need to ask Steve that question again.

On January 6, 2007, the scroll manuscript of Jack Kerouac's On the Road will go on display at the Central Branch of the Denver Public Library, and Denver's finest publications—from the glossy 5280 magazine to the hip Westword, Denver's answer to the Village Voice—plan to run articles about it. A perennially newsworthy author, Kerouac will once again steal the limelight during this, the 50th Anniversary year of On the Road's publication.

A huge tourist destination in its own right, Denver will this weekend experience the influx of a roving band of academics and students, all part of Dr. Audrey Sprenger and David Amram's course "Jack Kerouac Wrote Here: Criss-Crossing America Chasing Cool," offered in conjunction with SUNY-Potsdam. The course is designed to introduce Kerouac's literature in terrains where it takes place: the San Francisco of The Dharma Bums², the Denver of On the Road, the New York City of The Town and The City³, the Lowell of the oeuvre, as much a sociological study as a literary one.

Dr. Sprenger asked me to participate, so when the cohort arrives—scheduled on a Friday morning flight from San Francisco, while Denver is again beset by heavy snowfall and the cattle are starving, ranchers cut off from their herds by four feet of snow and eight-foot drifts—I will join them for a week-and-a-half train trip east and through history and fiction.

Along the way we'll converse with musicians, painters, writers, literary agents, and Kerouac's friends and loves, and we'll read On the Road, the Dharma Bums, and a selection of his poetry.

For daily updates, please visit the Lowell Sun, Kerouac's hometown newspaper, and this blog, which I will attempt to update daily as we move east, toward "the great and final city of America" (Road).

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¹Flying disc manufactured by Discraft, the official disc of the Ultimate Players Association.

²& The Subterraneans & Visions of Cody &....

³& Vanity of Duluoz &....

Meditations on the Western Haiku

Jack Kerouac wrote San Francisco Blues, his first published collection of poetry, in 1954. In those seventy-nine choruses, Kerouac develops what he calls his "blues poetry form"; Kerouac's title for the form is misleading--one only need compare Kerouac's blues poetry with Langston Hughes' own blues-inspired poems--for Kerouac's poems were really in the spirit of jazz, improvisations on a theme, the only limit (a limit that would famously be used in the 1951 composition of the On the Road scroll manuscript) being the size of the "small page of the breastpocket notebook in which [the SFB choruses] are written, like the form of a set number of bars in a jazz blues chorus" (PJK 453).

Readers who know Kerouac's poetry are perhaps more familiar with Kerouac's Western Haiku poems--Kerouac's love of haiku are immortalized through Ray Smith and Japhy Ryder's Matterhorn climb in 1958's Dharma Bums, as well as through the recent publication of new collections of Kerouac's verse, such as Book of Haiku (2003).

In preparation for Dr. Audrey Sprenger's cross-country Kerouac course on a train, I have begun thinking about Kerouac's poetry for the lectures I have been asked to deliver while on board. The students will be using On the Road and The Portable Jack Kerouac as their primary texts, so I have been studying the poems in the PJK. As an ardent Kerouac reader, I have only recently considered Kerouac a skilled poet (although I have always considered him a prose-poet, as Kerouac himself did, defining prose as "an endless one-line poem"), and upon consideration of the poems in the PJK's, I have come to understand why--poor selection (PJK 451).

Until the publication of Book of Haiku, which provides a reader with the full breadth of Kerouac's haiku output, including the "clinker," readers relied heavily upon editors to cull handfuls of poems from the hundreds of possible pieces. In the selection in The Portable Jack Kerouac, few of the selected haiku live up to Kerouac's more restrictive definition of a Western Haiku, which states that "above all a Haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi Pastorella" (PJK 470)¹.

For example, consider the haiku:

Nodding against
the wall, the flowers
Sneeze.

In these three lines, Kerouac commits two instances of the act of poetic trickery known as personification--here, the flowers are capable both of nodding and of sneezing. Throughout his work, Kerouac uses "nod" in multiple ways--nodding affirmation, nodding off as in sleep, or being on the nod in junk-related parlance--so here the reader is lead to several possible interpretations, none which are indicated by the actual attitude of the flowers Kerouac perceives, nor is the action of sneezing. Both of these instances of personification prescribe a limited range of readings from which the reader may choose. Here, Kerouac (intentionally or unintentionally, it does not matter) imposes his will on the reader (to say nothing of the flowers, the things themselves).

One need look no further than "nodding" and "sneezing" to see Kerouac violate his own restrictive precepts². Here, the dominant critical position would be to call Kerouac a poetic charlatan (although he rarely was afforded such a gentle moniker), as I have done in the past. But if one were to look at the examples Kerouac uses to preface his own haiku, and if one continues to cull Kerouac's most exemplary haikus from the collection at large, one would see a learned and capable writer of the western haiku, a poet who can capture both the spirit of the eastern haiku in the loose form Kerouac claims for western practitioners of the verseform³.

Such a selection, however, runs counter to Kerouac's belief in his own work and in contemporary poetry and prose, so the editor is left with a dilemma (if dilemma is not too strong a word to use when writing about the selection of poetry). In The Portable Jack Kerouac, Charters practices ethical scholarship by including so many obvious "clinkers" in the selection of haiku, a practice that in many ways buttresses the negative reputation Kerouac's work still engenders.

The dilemma of the contemporary Kerouac scholar rests in her or his willingness to continue this practice of comprehensive publication⁴. One wonders at the ramifications of honoring the dying wishes of Emily Dickinson (few would argue that the best outcome would be to have burned her papers), yet Kerouac's devotees slavishly promote the chaff alongside the wheat. I think it is time that so-called critics and intellectuals shift focus--instead of honoring Kerouac, we should be honoring literature and his contribution to it. That contribution is ample and it is profound--one hardly imagines the state of American literature had Kerouac not urged William S. Burroughs to write or helped him type and arrange Naked Lunch, had Allen Ginsberg not borrowed some key phrases from Kerouac for "Howl," had Kerouac himself not worked slavishly at his craft over decades, opening a multitude of doors that American literature is still discovering and tentatively stepping through⁵.

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¹ While these rules might not seem particularly "strict," one might compare it to his more nebulous proposition "that the 'Western Haiku' simply say a lot in three short lines in any Western language" (PJK 469).

² Although in a sympathetic moment one might think of George Orwell's edict at the conclusion of "Politics and the English Language," when he implores writers to break rules if it will eliminate the "barbarous" (Citation forthcoming; I'm on vacation and away from my Orwell).

³ It is perhaps not coincidental that the haikus that come closest to Kerouac's own vision of the western form also adhere to the fundamental precepts of the eastern form--minimal language, unadorned ("objective," if such were possible in writing) description, a reference to the natural world, a reference to the seasons. For example:

This July evening
a large frog
On my door sill.

⁴ Perhaps lessons might be learned from studying this practice with respect to popular music--we would do well to ask what is ultimately gained by the release of boxed-sets of demos (as in the case of Nirvana) or re-mixed "mash ups" of iconic tracks (as in the case of the Beatles' Love). As counterpoint, however, one might look to Daniel Johnston for an example of the benefits of releasing otherwise "unrefined" tracks to the public (one imagines that Kerouac might enjoy Johnston's work, if not the high-brow renditions of his work on Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered).

⁵ One thinks of the "revolutionary" David Eggers, but when one looks closely, one sees the transcriptions from Visions of Cody in Eggers' fictional Real-World tape in A Heartbeaking Work of Staggering Genius (let alone the plot and development of And You Shall Know Our Velocity^a as a tracing of On the Road via airplanes).

^aOr whatever title the novel currently enjoys.

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Kerouac, Jack. The Portable Jack Kerouac. Ann Charters, ed. New York, Penguin: 1995.