So Jack Kerouac is of course deservedly known best for his fiction, for his novels, in particular, On the Road. But the Jack Kerouac who's particularly influential in the world of contemporary poetry and poetics. For instance, many of our Chapter 9 poets are very interesting, Kerouac is the sound poet. The guy who write Proe's poetry. The guy who writes what has been called babble flow. And particularly there is a poet Clark Coolidge who's written brilliantly on babble flow. So what we're going to do now, is look at three instances of the sound poetry pros of Jack Kerouac. And the first one is a little easier, the second one's a little harder, and the third one is kind of impossible. So let's see how we can do it. The first is a favorite piece of mine. It's really an essay story more in the tradition of the novels. It's called October in the railroad earth, and we've read the first section of it. So, Dave, what should we notice first about the writing here in this section? >> The paragraph is all one single sentence. >> It's one single sentence, which is kind of hard to do. And the way Jack reads it. And what kind of reader is Jack? What's it like when you listen? Allie? >> It's very soothing. >> Soothing, anybody else? >> Smooth. >> It's jazzy almost. >> It's jazzy. >> And he's very charismatic. >> He's a terrific reader. Clark Coolidge, whom I just referred to, the poet, says something like, once you listen to Jack you can never get voice because it's subvocal. I think he sort of means he knew it's under your skin, it's unconscious. Okay, so we have this piece, October In The Real World Earth. What's the setting? Where are we? Max, what's the setting? >> We're round the southern Pacific station in San Francisco. >> Yeah, the Southern Pacific was a railroad. Yeah. >> 3rd and Townsend station. And this seems to be a convergence, first of all what time of day is it? >> It's late afternoon. He says the commuter frenzy is impending. >> Mm-hm, good. What's the commuter frenzy? >> Rush hour. >> Rush hour. >> So it's like about to be rush hour. >> So do you have some phrases that indicate who's coming home? From work. >> Neat neck tie producers. >> Neat neck tie producers and commenters of America, and steal civilization rushing by with San Francisco chronicles. What does that mean? >> The newspaper. >> They're holding newspapers like commuters do, yeah. Does Jack have a, does he hate them? Seems to just be observing them. Sort of detachment, a little interest, maybe some amusement. >> They don't even have enough time to be disdainful. They, and I'll ask you in a minute who they're disdainful of, don't have enough time to be disdainful of. But he doesn't even have enough time to be disdainful of him. They're not him What is he doing by the way? What does Jack do? What's his job? >> He writes >> He's a writer. He's working on a book we can see in this passage. He's a writer. But what does he do to gather his material? Does he commute to work? >> Seems like he's just hanging out at the station observing >> He hangs out at the station. Ron Silleman Of the chapter nine poet who's also San Francisco based, or was. Really does a lot of work with the convergence of classes that you get around a railroad. In Ron's case, it's BART, the rapid transit. But in this case, it's the It's the railroad station. Said who's there? There are two kinds of people there. Who are they? Amyris? >> Well we have I guess the men in flannel suits who are employed. And too busy to take notice of their surroundings which is very much in contrast with Jack. Who allies himself with the bums and Negros. And truck drives, he says, who sort of stand in the shadows. >> There's a lot of them there. Against the wall and Jack doesn't have work. He does use the word work. Working if not working on boat. But he swims out of it in afternoons. He's lazy. Drowsy lazy. So, what is it about this kind of writing that somehow reinforces the content which is hanging around the station at the time of commuting? Who wants to try this? This is a hard question [INAUDIBLE] If you're in the frenzy of commuting, how are you supposed to write? He's got this drowsy, lazy afternoon. He can just sit back, he can observe, he can watch, and he can just kind of be and let that being turn into writing. Since he's got the presence of mind of just being in the moment instead of racing to capture next train. So an alternative American way of life, an alternative American way of working right? We saw this in too, right? No layoffs from this condenser. It seems to necessitate a different way of writing, and of hearing American voices. So what are some of the details of that different way of writing. Molly? >> Well, I think the lack of sentence separation, a lack of punctuation, kind of mimics that constant movement, where it's not necessarily chaotic, but it's incessant. >> Nice. >> It's like a stream of consciousness. >> Yeah. >> Yes, it's a phrase everybody should be fined $5 when they use it, because it's so misleading. It's not wrong, I'm not saying you're wrong, it's just very misleading. But there is a flow here. And I want to quote Clark Coolidge on this topic. Clark Coolidge says that his favorite statement by the French theorist, Maurice Blancheau is the following. And I'll say the quote and then you can try to translate it. Good luck. Here it is. One can only write, this is Coolidge's essay about one can only write if one arrives at the instant towards which one can only move through space opened up by the movement of writing. And in the context of Kerouac's Babble Flow, Coolidge says that that statement is not a paradox. And so Clark says Coolage says so here's whizzing along and picking up. And there's something special too about what you pick up when you're moving fast about the kind of attention that you can develop. So does anybody want to take a stab at this? Max you can do it man [LAUGH] You've got the beret. >> I have the beret. >> You can do it man. >> That's a tough one. >> One can only write if one arrives at the instant tort which one can only move through space opened up by the movement of writing. That's not a paradox, he says. >> It's >> it's does seem like a paradox. >> Alright if it's a paradox go ahead. Explain a paradox. >> Places you can only begin to write once you've sort of opened up the space with your writing. It does seem sort of paradoxically. But there is definitely a sense to it, and Molly was talking about movement, that's what made me think of this. >> Sure. >> Molly, want to say that again. >> Well I was talking about sort of the form of this piece lacking punctuation. And being constant and mirroring, or mimicking the movement of the commuter station. If American life is characterized by going from A to B, or in this case going from A to B and back to A, A B A B, but really career is you progress. That's why narrativity is something Stein said about beginnings, middles and ends. Hands and the American addiction to that. So, the narrative is, you start here and you move to there and it is a progress. Jack is doing something else, he's doing something non-narrative, but he's also lowering our expectation of the semantic sense, so that we begin to listen to these American voices. And these American voices in the spirit of Whitman, these American voices include hobos and African Americans who were unemployed who are hanging around the station. It includes also not trashing the commuters. They are all part of the mix here. It was the fantastic drowse of drum hum of lum mum afternoon nothing to do. Ole Frisco with end of land sadness, the people, the alley full of trucks. Nobody knew, or far from cared, who I was all my life. Allie, when we were listening to Jack a few minutes ago, I almost heard the shivers. You liked it. What does it mean to you when he says these things? He goes from a very specific observation to this end of land sadness. >> Yeah, that was a specific line and I, >> You loved it, why? >> I definitely [SOUND] at. [LAUGH] Well, I don't know, to maybe demonstrate why. It's just so evocative, and even though End of Land Sadness doesn't, it's one of those things that you'd be like, what does that mean? You totally get it. There's maybe a kind of loneliness End of Land, but also just the way that he can, if you just look a little above the way that in seven lines he can go from talking about the very specific, the commuters with their Chronicles, and then the specific trains. And then all of a sudden, there's mention of high in the sky, the magic stars ride above the following. Just this kind of cosmic image, and then all of a sudden it's all of this is in California. It's all a sea, I swim out of it in the afternoons. >> So, I agree with you, I feel the same way. And I'm just going to use as a transition to our next passage, I'm going to use the phrase aural, A-U-R-A-L, aural continentalism. It makes me think of Whitman. There's a way in which he got his ear to the American ground. So, the next passage we're reading is from a book called, Old Angel Midnight. This was a book length poem, prose poem. A book length poem that Kerouac modeled on James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. So, there you have a direct connection to modernism and it's what Kerouac called an endless, automatic writing piece which raves on and on with no direction or no story. And I'll read the little passage, and then good luck, we'll see if we can talk about it. I'll just introduce a word that Michael McClure, a San Fransisco-based poet and a very close friend of the Beats, used to describe this book, Old Angel Midnight, and that's inconsequenciality, okay? So, I'll read the passage and then you can talk about it as best you can. And I know Jack, so, Allie, I don't know if you're going to feel the goosebumps. >> [LAUGH] >> Boy, says old angel, this amazing nonsensical rave of yours wherein I spose you'd think you'd in some lighter time find hand be almin you for the likes of what you devote yourself to, pah. Bum with a tail only means one thing. They know that in sauerkraut bars, God the chew chew and wall lips and not only that, but all of them indescribable paradises, aye, angel my boy. Jack, the born with a tail bit is a deal that you never dream to redeem, verify, try to see as straight. You won't believe even in God, but the devil worries you. You and Mrs. Tourian. Great Gazas and leaf be scoured with the leaf rust as. Here it is, poetizing horse shit everywhere. I want to hear the sounds through the window you promised me when the midnight bell on Seventh Street did toll bing bong. And Burrows and Ginsberg were asleep and you lay on the couch. And in that timeless moment in the little, red, bulb-like bus and saw drapes of eternity parting for your hand and begin. And so as you could affect and effect the total turning about and deep revival of world rogue flowing literature til it should be something a man'd put his eyes on and continually read for the sake of reading. And for the sake of tongue, of the tongue. And not just these insipid stories writ in insipid aridities and paranoias bloomin and why yet the image. Let's hear the sound of the universe, sun, and no more part twaddle. And don't expect nothing from me, my middle name is Opprobrium, Old Angel Midnight Opprobrium. Boy O, M, A, O, A, M, O. Perily, perily. Sweet, slide, sway, tack tick birds and fire wood the dream is already ended and we're already awake in the golden eternity. Okay, who wants it? Amaurice, what do you have to say about this? Anything. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but what does it do for us? >> This is clearly a lot more babble than- >> More babble flow than October in the Rail Road Earth, yeah. >> Right, but I loved it, I loved the musicality of it. And I think as Molly was saying before, the lack of punctuation just frees us from this sort of machinic stop and start that the railroad represents. And here instead in your reading of it, which I really enjoyed. >> Thank you. >> We followed your breath, those natural rhythms that are created in the language, particularly the consonance, I was drawn by describable paradises. And the bing bong and burrows, and even the believed Eve, in God. Just those, you just focus in on those sounds. >> Apparently Jack rented a lower east side Manhattan flat and wrote, I think he wrote only after midnight and only with pencil. And most of what he wrote, he heard sounds of people, the sounds swimming through his open window. So, in a way this is a kind of collage of people overheard. Do you have any sense of that in the reading of it, or no? Max, how does that help? >> Well this seems to be compared to the piece that we just discussed- >> October in the Railroad Earth. >> Yes, October in the Railroad Earth. This seems to be a lot more voices, a lot more fragments, more non-sequiturs. And October in the Railroad Earth is a scene in daylight, so there is that clarity of California that he talks about. So, even though it is very associative and it has its flow, it's still sort of defining a scene whereas this is if it's supposed to be like Finnigan's Wake, it's more of a book of the night. And so, these are voices in the darkness and this is what happens when you're in a dream state where images and people are coming at you. >> Molly? >> There's something very holy about it. Max said dream state. I almost heard it as being sort of not quite prayerful, but not quite speaking in tongues. Like something very trance like. You have God and the devil, and the midnight bell is tolling, and the drapes of eternity. And there's something very sort of- >> Very late night, midnight after dark, and, of course, you said tongue, speaking in tongues. He's hoping that we will read for the sake of reading and read for the sake of tongue, capital T. >> Yeah. >> It's as if speaking in tongues was speaking with the tongue. Speaking With the importance of sound. What about Michael McClure's word, inconsequentiality? Anna, can we do anything with that? >> Well, inconsequentiality, I mean, something that's inconsequential is something that just kind of occurs and appears. >> Something inconsequential is not consequential. It has no consequence, it's not important. >> Yep. >> But what else does that word mean? >> Inconsequential? >> Mm-hm. [CROSSTALK] It has the word sequence in it. >> It's non sequential, so it's non-chronological. >> So this is non-narrative writing. It's also unimportant. Writing look at the beginning, we have this meta statement. Boy, this is amazing nonsensical rave reviewers wherein I suppose you'd think, he's basically telling us, amazing, nonsensical. >> What I love about that, I mean we talked about sort of more in the opening chapters of the course about how all of these writers are in some way going to challenge how we think about reading and how we read. And when he says reading for the sake of reading, that's kind of exactly what this is. And he talked about this a little bit at the beginning, that once you kind of let go of wanting to make sense of it, and once you make narrative of it, you get to just kind of revel in what it says. >> Sound of the universe, right? Don't expect nothing from me. Just when you don't expect anything from writing, you're in the sense that Blanche means, you're ready to have writing, essentially, be written. So that's a good transition to our last piece, which is real babble flow. I mean, this is pretty extreme babble flow. This is a piece, a paragraph that's quoted by Clark Coolidge in that terrific essay that he wrote about Kerouac's babble flow. And I'll read it, and this is really hard. But if what we just heard was the sound of the universe, I have a feeling that this is sort of the sound of America in a Walt Whitman sense, so here it is. Rust, rust, rust. Rust, die, die, die. Pipe, pipe, ash, ash. Die, die, ding, dong. Ding, ding, ding, rust, cog, die, pipe, ash, rust, die, words. I just rather be permaganted in Rusty's moonlight roar is beak permeated in this bio art of pantalair where act before she rush crunches my tired idiot hand. Lord, I is coming to you soon as you'se ready as can ready's buying maslaca and heroes point out Mexico and all your rhythmic bay fisherman. Don't hang fish eye socket in my rom a dom gives digarette sock of Arab squat the berber types that hang fartels on their women. Back wood as Leaf Erickson's son with blady matter. I guess is woop a mule in sing song pathetic mule jump field buy quite fluff smoke North Carolina near Weldon Railroad Bridge. Roanoke millionaire, high ridge, high party, high fi, million dollar finned writer, skin, fish, rod, tong, apple, finder, john, son, ford, goodbye, paw, mule, America, song. Emily, what are you going to do with that? That's just sound, isn't it? Nonsense. >> Yeah, but. >> Can you do anything? Is close reading possible of such a thing? >> Perhaps, I mean there are enough words that we could try [CROSSTALK] [LAUGH]. But. >> What are you going to do with it? >> I guess you read these things to close read, and the first thing that I latched on is America's Song. And it's hard not to read that as a sort of both an ellipsis of how this could continue as some sort of America's Song and is a description of what has gone before. >> I said oral continentalism. How does that work if that a good phrase? Do you see some geography here? Do you have a feeling that we're rushing across America? We have North Carolina. >> You do. >> Bay fishermen could be San Francisco. >> We seem to have a pun on Lief Erikson back wood as Lief, I as Leif which is a way of saying I'd as rather, I'd as Lief rather some son. There's Erik. Lief Erikson, what does that mean? >> You get the idea of an explorer, of this frontiersman, that's very American. >> But not Columbus. You get a sense of original, quote unquote discovery, certain focus on origins. >> Well, and also with Mazatlan heroes point out Mexico's. I mean I think of Cortez and conquering, and Central America. >> [CROSSTALK] You get Cortez and you get John Ford, the great American. A director of films, Americana, westerns. And then you get Pa, as in Pa, as in father. And then you get mule, and then you get American song. So what does that add up to? Is this the sound of America the way, the midnight writing was about the lower east side sounds coming, swimming through the window? Is this Is this that much broader Dave, what do you think? >> I think it is, I think heard from the beginning it's so disorienting it puts you in the mindset you can't really read this and parse it specifically. You just have to step back and listen to the cacophony and I think it does try to describe all that parts of America. >> In some ways, this paragraph that we have here is almost more encompassing. And dare I say a little more successful than Whitman's whole song of myself which takes pages and pages and pages and catalogs and catalogs and words and words to try and get it exactly what Kerouac's doing here. >> Is it possible to say that this is the sound of what Whitman was wrapping his arms around? I mean, Kelly? >> I don't think Kerouac, and I shouldn't even say that, but I don't think it's the sound that Whitman was trying to wrap his arms around. I think it's just one of I think it's just kind of a collection of many of the, it's one kind of frame of the sound. I think it does what Whitman does, just kind of more condensed. >> If this is a cure or a therapy or a hedge against something, we've been talking about Ginsburg as someone who did his little medicine stint and then needed to go somewhere who felt the ground in Kansas. How does that work here? Dave? >> Well I think he's rejecting convention in a whole lot of ways. Like I said before it's disorienting and you're really in tune with the fact that he's not using formal constructions of words, of sentences. He's rejecting all of it. And I think it puts you in this really receptive mindset. Like one of the things he said be receptive to everything. >> And he's not being unallegiant, if I can put it that way. I believe he's embracing America. He's not ridiculing the commuters. He's just making sure that there is a socioeconomic and racial context that's much broader and that has more interesting sounds. This what I've called oral continentialism is meant as I do believe, I feel powerfully that it is meant as a cure or a tonic or a hedge against the fear of the day that language would finally and totally become semantic content, which is that Madison Avenue fear that Ginsburg feels. That narrative became getting some where for everybody. That American language became a commuting from home to work, home to work, home to work. A to B, A to B, A to B. And that this kind of writing is a stay against the day that the music died. The American music, this is the American Song. This is what Kerouac thinks is the American Song. And I do feel that The Beets had felt that the music had died. Or that it was in danger of dying, so they went out there to discover the sounds. With possibly a fantastical and flawed theory of language that could just come, that language can be transparent, but a motive that is much admired by the poets that come after them.
