Blues Poetry Manifesto

PROUD TRUTH ELECTRIC, THE BLUES POETRY COOP OF BOSTON, NEW ORLEANS & MADISON WISCONSIN circa '95

When the Blue Train Afric Plain Yodel

of Feeling and Storied Poetry is Divined

and Exhaled, Then Great God Almighty

It Should Well Be Heard [Down the Line]

in the Awful Lonesome Highway Night,

Sprinkled Hot Foot Powder, Syncopated

Pots and Pans on Wagon Clang ...

When, Listen! ...

Enormous Skies are Crying and Breathtaking ...

Then, Then! ... a Great New Flowering of Poesy

We Will Herald.

Look close, friends, it is the Blues!

The indications of the blues' importance in poetry

-- when finally considered --

are startling in preponderance.

This Blues Poetry Manifesto

seeks primarily here to spotlight the blues

poetry form and to ask poets to learn and absorb ...

and to add blues to their store of central bardic

techniques. The Blues may chase you from tree to tree,

but you shall preach the Blues and it shall set you free.

Blues is a feeling!

The blues tell a story!

Blues has been a close companion of the 20th Century.

Arisen from a people of poetry

who are long in exile, the blues is conveniently relegated to

nights of whiskey and such.

It is past time to recoginize this blues as a Pivotal American Genre!

Blues is poetry. The Blues is the essential form of the era.

Here we will specifically argue that

the blues is a crucial beat form ...

a form that many a poet will come soon to embrace in full or part!

This form is foremost oral.

You sing it! It is to be spoken and heard.

White page paper emanation is

secondary and used for practicality.

The case can be made that blues

is an important subset of beat poetry.

Just as convincing a case can be made that beat is in fact a subset of blues. CNN or Court TV will not devote endless hours to this case.

Neither do you need to ponder judiciously here.

But, note, the defining moment of beat poetry,

Howl and ask,

"How would Howl have happened if not for Jack Kerouac's

Blues Poetry. Ginsberg admittedly was mired in T.S. Elliotatonian,

Delmore Swartzian [ We love them both maddly but this is war]

meanderings of the symbolician, mining a ghost town of

candy lattice forms, and found influence in

Kerouac's Spontaneous Prose, which was much informed by

Kerouackian Spontaneous Poetry! It was Kerouac,

said Grove Press, was renowned as the father of the beat generation!

Realize, Kerouac's poetry, transmitted in the '50s largely in

correspondence and readings, was essential

element in Ginsberg's (Corso's, Snyder's, Others) style

and development. Blues is beat. Beat is blues.

Since 1971, Ginsberg has devoted great energies

to further understanding and evangelizing the

blues form. These efforts, compiled in two liked named

vinyl volumes [ First Blues (1981) and

First Blues (1982) ] were spurred by encounters

with Eric Sackheim, Chogyam Trungpa,

Sam Charters, Bob Dylan, and were

seeded especially by Kerouac.

Of late, Kerouac's blues form dependence

has become most vivid. Richmond Hill Blues (1953),

San Francisco Blues (1954), Bowery Blues (1955),

MacDougal Street Blues (1955), Desolation Blues (1956),

Orizaba 210 Blues (1956), Orlanda Blues (1957-58), and

Cerrada Medellin Blues (1961) have this year together

seen light in Book of Blues (1995).

Parts had appeared in Scattered Poems, Heaven and

Other Poems and Elsewhere. Mexico City Blues was the

only extended set of Kerouac poetry

to appear in his lifetime. Its siblings now are

home in our reader hearts.

Blues as poetry, poetry as

blues -- important to Kerouac.

"The blues [chorus] is limited by

the small page of the breastpocket notebook.."

he inked. "In these blues as in jazz, the form

is determined by time.." he wrote.

This blues Kerouac discovered is a

largely oral form. It is imagistic but not

significantly abstract. Among its greatest practitioners:

Bessie Smith, Charley Patton, Skip James,

Mississippi John Hurt, Tommy Johnson, Robert Johnson,

Muddy Waters, and Howlin Wolf. Include Kerouac,

Ginsberg and these poets too: Paul Laurence Dunbar,

Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes, Abbey Lincoln,

John Sinclair, Bob Dylan and the Last Poets.

How did blues poetry come to be?

Here's a take:

In March 1954, Jack Kerouac

downheartedly left the home

he briefly shared with Caroyln Cassady

and Neal Cassady, having been idly disinvited

by Neal, then his Dostoevskian inspiration.

He moved a short way down to the Cameo Hotel in San Francisco's skid row.

There, with the composition

of the novel On the Road behind him --

but with its publication and the subsequent

public roller coaster still three years away --

he turned his talents toward poetry for awhile.

The founding soul of the literary beats

sat in a rocking chair by a window,

with tea and tokay, and watched his neighbors' --

the world's -- comings and goings.

His approach to poetry not much

different than his approach to spontaneous prose.

The poem, however, limited by the length of his

notebook page. As he noted the blues chorus was

limited only by a metric standard. Kerouac's poetry

sings with his own unique spirituality,

startling rhythmic excursions and

clear observations. His poetry sings

nonunique everlasting blues note too.

Matthew Arnold heard it, "the eternal note of sadness",

and noted that Sophocles heard it. Mama's gotem.

Daddy's got em.

The experimentation of San Francisco Blues

led one year later to Mexico City Blues.

Kerouac shared his poetry with friends. Mexico City Blues,

published in 1959, got up there soon with Howl and

Pictures of the Gone World in the pantheonic strata.

Among a wide Mexico City following, Bob Dylan was notably influenced.

"I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a

long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday.."

Kerouac wrote.

And he nursed it and rehearsed it and gave out

with the dark brown news. Dylan in

Just Like Tom Thumb Blues, Memphis Blues Again,

Temporary Like Achilles, New Pony

and other pieces took the form further again.

Kerouac's spontaneous prose arose

in an era of jazz scat singing that he especially relished.

He was a famous New York jazz fan in the '40s

and he took from the jazz players --

among his favorites were Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, and there above all, Charlie Parker --

a sense of improvisation and rhythmic adventure.

Kerouac closely associated bebop improvisation

with spontaneous composition. In the stripped-down

form of poetry, his use of jazz stylings were most evident.

A form, within jazz is blues.

A form but an essential form.

Kerouac took the blues as a form respectfully,

still, ready to adapt, much as he did the Japanese haiku.

It's silly to count syllables .. he said, in the wrong language.

And he took blues too as a springboard.

Although he did work on crews where workers sang blues,

his real understanding of blues came from jazz.

Blues, the doctors tell us,

arose from field hollers,

levee camps of the rural

and musically unschooled

sometime around before the Great War.

Jazz came more from social marching brass

bands of cities with decidedly more trained

musicianship .. more directly out of ragtime

music where rural folk melodies were treated

about the same as they were by classicists

Chopin and Schuman .. a source.

Louis Gottschalk on these shores in pre-blues

but hurting still days did much the same.

Blues was less varied, but became closely

linked to the immediate emotive act of jazz.

In the first blues, in the black sporting house, the

pianist likely differentiated little between jazz and blues.

It blended. Same with Kerouac's blues.

Kerouac closely associated improvisational

writing with improvisational music -- swinging jazz,

but, most closely linked with the jazz form, blues.

Others too have heard the blues on the street.

Put it to Olsonian meter.

Sinclair, in New Orleans,

has used the blues poesy method

to present the words and lives of

the key bluesfolk. Jack Vaughan,

using bluesman language has,

in tandem with blues great Sunnyland Slim,

on an individual scale, focused on the blues story composition

as well. They have sat at that crossroads.

Blues can be verbatims.

Note Blues has quite usually told a

secular morality tale and blues poets of the

21st Century will not shrink from t

his jettisoned bardic duty.

What can I do in my town to form a Blues Coop you ask?

For many, shrimp and corn fritters may be the first step.

A study of the Memphis Jug Band is suggested.

San Francisco Blues and Romilar may put some

palettes on the floor where your

good gal will never know.

When the preliminary vagaries

are in order,

a ten-step program can inveigh.

• 1. Hear that lonesome whistle blow. It still does.
• 2. Listen to the blues. For dessert isle sojourns Muddy Edgar Allan Poe, TBone Walker and Robert Johnson will do.
• 3. If you live longer, listen to different blues voices. From Will-o-whisp Al Wilson or John Hurt to panther sounds of Howlin Wolf or Capt Beefhart.
• 4. Listen to different meters. There are mule walks, rain on corrugated rooftops, there's the Memphis train and the Sunnyland train etcetera.. Across an ocean like forming hurricane there is Ali Farka Toure doing D iaraby Blues.
• 5. Have conversations with the birds, with Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Otis Rush.
• 6. Listen or just observe blues on the street in a city.
• 7. Rural advice: When, for example, crows flock and land on a new mowed field, listen and describe these conversations. Do not eat a possum that is emerging from a graveyard.
• 8. Read Master Kerouac. Ten rules for Spontaneous Prose. 242 Mexico City Blues Choruses.
• 9. Pray. Study the blue skies.
• 10. Repeat steps 6 through 8.

Jack Kerouac wrote "Poetry is not science -- is not rational."

Kerouac presented his blues through his mirror.

Thelonius Monk's Blue Monk took

the same approach -- laid cubist perspective

( a dream he had on his mind )

on Jimmy Yancey's Mournful Blues.

Jack took Jackson Pollock zoot to wit.

We will take these blues and breathe

them again, dear gang o' mine, and

light joss sticks for Monk, Sunnyland,

Yancey and Jack Kerouac.

Poets! Sooner or later you'll drive a cab.

Sooner or later you must sing the blues. Use the vocal chords in your neck god gave you. Give the beggar a dollar.

Live next to him 20 years and you'll

find out the story. Walk all night long.

Recall that Apollinaire could deign

pictures of Galveston. Find the lung and heart beat.

Pull the car over when Bobby Blue Bland comes on.

Hebrew verse will not deceive you.

Note that: "Snakes are Poor Denizens of Hell..come Through the tall grass To face the pool of clear frogs." [Took me along time to figure out.]

Yours, Jack Vaughan. Herald Traveller with Report.

The Blues Poetry Coop of Boston, New Orleans, & Madison.

Reminding you that Booker T. went to the

White House one day and said it could only

be worse

in Milwaukee.

Last update: 10/4/2003; 5:03:20 PM.