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*Mexico City Blues. 1959. 244 pp.

From about chorus 88 to 103, for example, Kerouac is really nailing it. The good thing about this book is its heterogeneous quality and its novel approach to extended poetic form. For example, a poem can simply continue to the next chorus with no break, or a cluster of poems can explore a given theme. There is a lot of material here that's not well-written, (duh) but that's part of the heterogeneity of the whole. You wouldn't want just the good poems, would you? If he wants to spend a few poems just summarizing Buddhist doctrine, that's fine with me. He's still being Kerouac when he does so. The hipsterism is just a distraction at worst.

He found a new language here. He may not be the greatest poet, but he's greater than you are (or me).

I tumbled down the street
On a tricycle, very fast.
I coulda kept going
And wound up in the river,
--Or across the trolley tracks
And got cobble smashed
And all smashed so that later on
I cant have grit dreams
of Lakeview Avenue,
And see my father die,
Had I died at two--