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]