This chapter explores Kerouac’s poetic output, arguing that he should be considered an important twentieth-century poet and poetic innovator. In particular, this chapter explores Kerouac’s book-length poetic masterwork, Mexico City Blues, and his development of an American form of haiku, as found in Book of Haikus and elsewhere. The poetic forms of Mexico City Blues and Book of Haikus are very different, and yet taken together, they demonstrate Kerouac’s range as a poet. With these major works as its focus, this chapter aims to reassess Kerouac’s poetry by reading its formal and thematic preoccupations in terms of the advent of the mid-century “New American Poetry,” which rebuked the norms of the reigning poetic establishment centered in universities and their associated anthologies and quarterlies.

This chapter examines a central motif that runs throughout Kerouac’s corpus – the desire to capture the events of the past in a literary form that lends them affective force in the present. In novels like Doctor Sax, among many others, Kerouac relied on Spontaneous Prose to infuse the earlier occurrences of his life with renewed vigor and immediacy, resulting in works that challenge the more staid narrative styles of memoir or autobiography. At his best, Kerouac was able to make the past “come alive” again in the present and this sort of intensity has been one of the major reasons for the interest in his work as well as for its longevity. But despite this success, Kerouac’s attempts at writing memory are continually subject to intrusion, indecision, and uncertainty. This chapter shows that Kerouac’s attempts to record memory in a form that retains intensity across time provide insight not only into his literary method, but allow us to reconsider more generally how the events of the past can be usefully brought into the present, and the stakes involved in doing so.

Kerouac considered Visions of Cody his masterpiece. A strange, highly complex work, it is both a radical reimagining and rewriting of some central motifs and characters found in On the Road, and a showcase for Kerouac’s varied theories of writing. If On the Road is “about” the relationship between two friends, a writer and a raconteur, Visions of Cody is about how to best represent this relationship, and so becomes in turn “about” the nature of the writer’s consciousness and his ability to represent or not “the real.” Given such preoccupations, Visions of Cody more closely resembles postmodern metafiction than it does On the Road. This chapter reads it in light of its metafictional experimentations and explorations. In Visions of Cody, Kerouac strives to get down what “actually happened” by turning to sketching, Spontaneous Prose, and even tape recording and transcribing lengthy conversations between him and Neal Cassady. Ultimately, this chapter shows, by reading Visions of Cody as metafiction, we can see how Kerouac created new possibilities and directions for postwar avant-garde writing.