Monday, Feb. 23 — Transcription Poetics 1: Jack Kerouac, Lew Welch, Samuel Beckett

Jack Kerouac, Lew Welch, Samuel Beckett

We're returning to our old friend Jack Kerouac, but the work we'll be looking at this time is radically different than the jazz-influenced poetry and prose we read earlier this semester. We'll start with a short excerpt from his posthumously-published novel, Visions of Cody (1972) — one of the finest sustained examples of Kerouac's "spontaneous bop prosody" taken to its most punishing extremes. Specifically, we'll be reading from the novel's long center section, which consists of transcriptions of taped conversations between Kerouac and Neal and Carolyn Cassady (among others). Our selection comes from the fifth and final night: [PDF]

I'd also like you to read "Sea," Kerouac's attempt to onomatopoeically document the sounds of the Pacific Ocean during his retreat at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cabin in the summer of 1960. "Sea" was published as an appendix to Kerouac's novel, Big Sur, which describes its composition. [PDF]

One of Big Sur's main characters is a young poet named Dave Wain, who's more than willing to play chauffeur to Kerouac during his mental breakdown. The real-life Dave Wain was Lew Welch, who gave up a promising career in the ad industry to dedicate his life to poetry, playing a key role in the San Francisco poetry scene's transition from 1950s bohemianism to the 60s summer of love-era counterculture. Welch published several books, collected in a recently-reissued volume titled Ring of Bone, before he (presumably) committed suicide in 1971. Music played a major role in Welch's poetics — the long recording on his PennSound author page has some marvelous passages about taking his stepson (who'd grow up to be Huey Lewis [of "and the News" fame]) to see James Brown in concert — as did an ear finely attuned to the peculiarities of American speech.  Here's a breakdown of the Welch readings, with audio when available:

• Din Poem [introduction: MP3 / poem: MP3 / "Supermarket Song" intro: MP3 / poem: MP3 ]
• You Can't Burlesque It Anymore, — 1956 
• Taxi Suite
• Circle Poems
• Graffiti [introduction: MP3 / poem: MP3]

You should also take a look at the short excerpt from Welch's essay, "Language as Speech" that's on his EPC author page.

Finally, I'd like you to read Samuel Beckett's short play, Krapp's Last Tape, which is not only concerned with the use of audio tape as a documentary tool, but also was composed through the use of transcribed tape recordings: [PDF]