Heaven and Other Poems

By Jack Kerouac

Book Overview

Donald Allen, the late great editor of the Evergreen Review at Grove Press and editor of the seminal anthology The New American Poetry, first met Jack Kerouac in 1956 when he and Allen Ginsberg came to visit at his West Village apartment. At the time, Allen was working on the "San Francisco Scene" issue of the Evergreen Review, and Ginsberg and Kerouac brought him manuscripts and news of developments on the West Coast.

Over the next three years, Kerouac would send Allen poems for various projects, along with letters in which he discussed his poetry, his life, and the work of his young contemporaries. The unpublished poems are collected here, as are the letters, a comic strip drawn for the Cassady children, and Kerouac's self-penned poetic biography.

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was a principal actor in the Beat Generation, a companion of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady in that great adventure. His books include On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, Lonesome Traveler, Visions of Cody, Pomes All Sizes (City Lights), Scattered Poems (City Lights), and Scripture of the Golden Eternity (City Lights).

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0912516313
• ISBN13: 9780912516318
• Release Date: January 1977
• Publisher: Grey Fox Press
• Length: 70 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Writings of an icon - era bound but still interesting

When I think of the beats Ginsburg, Whalen, Snyder, DiPrima, Ferlinghetti, Burroughs and Kerouac are the names that come to mind. This book pulls these and many other literary figures of the era together. For example, the title poem "Heaven" includes the lines "Phil Whalen will be / a blue cloud / anytime he wants".The poems in this volume include poems including a series of his blues poems - San Francisco Blues; MacDougal Street Blues; Orizaba Blues; Orlando Blues - and a letter on his theory of jazz poetry. It includes two short autobiographies and a series of letters between Kerouac and a publisher.The latter gives real insight into his writing: "I would like everybody in the world to tell his full life confession and tell it HIS OWN WAY" from a letter; or his essentials for modern prose which includes "telling the true story of the world in interior monologue" and " remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition".The poems themselves show an interesting mixture of Catholic childhood, exposure to Buddhism, and an "in your face" telling it like it is. They are very much a product of their time which don't survive time well except as icons of their time - and some interesting seeds for era-specific equivalents for our time.I highly recommend the book as a reminder of the beats and what they stood for (and against).