The Spools, Loops
and Patches of Jack Kerouac and A.R.
Ammons
AAU Guest Lecture, Sept. 5, 2005
Abstract:
Beat
poet and novelist Jack Kerouac was famous for espousing a poetics of
spontaneity. His poetic practice always included a consideration of
materiality, in the sense that he would select paper formats that
facilitated
speed, flow and amount of writing/typing for his spontaneous
autobiographical
prose (the best known example is the scroll of tele-type paper he used
for one
draft of On the Road). What is less known is his apparently
contradictory practice of imposing length/size restrictions on his
poems or
sketches as he called them, using a metaphor from pictorial art. In his
collections Mexico City Blues and San Francisco Blues one
finds
such poems, where the writing on each sheet of paper in a notepad forms
a
chorus of these ‘blues’. In this paper I want to contrast these two
tendencies
(illustrated also by another volume of poetry entitled Pomes All
Sizes)
in Kerouac’s poetic practice: the expansive and the restrictive forms
of
spontaneous poetry/prose.
As a counterpoint I will discuss the practice of A.R.
Ammons, which features a similar dichotomy. His long poem Tape for
the Turn
of the Year was written on a roll of adding machine paper, which
meant the
line length of each poem was severely restricted, whereas the number of
lines
per entry (one each day) seemed unlimited at least at the start of the
year.
This choice of medium helped Ammons maintain his inspiration over the
full
year. On the other hand Ammons is also a master of the very short
poetic forms,
which in his practice results in poems which variously resemble
aphorisms,
epigrams, haiku, or grooks. Some of these poems are collected in The
Very
Short Poems of A.R. Ammons, and form a striking contrast to the
tapeworm
like expansiveness of the earlier volume.
[Handout]