Kerouac captures his stream of consciousness/Jazz/beatnik style in poetry form, a lot if it is just observations but they capture the moment without over thinking things. Lots of pretty insightful stuff too and great one liners at times.

Interesting!

A never-before-published book of poems by Jack Kerouac in a deluxe package In 1952 and 1953 as he wandered around America, Jack Kerouac jotted down spontaneous prose poems, or sketches as he called them, on small notebooks that he kept in his shirt pockets. The poems recount his travels New York, North Carolina, Lowell (Massachusetts, Kerouac s birthplace), San Francisco, Denver, Kansas, Mexico observations, and meditations on art and life. The poems are often strung together so that over the course of several of them, a little story or travelogue appears, complete in itself. Published for the first time, Book of Sketches offers a luminous, intimate, and transcendental glimpse of one of the most original voices of the twentieth century at a key time in his literary and spiritual development.

Reading these road-poems, a blur of journalism and diary entries as could only be the case when written propped against the window of a moving car, I really loved some of the language, and the style of reportage. But a lot of them seemed so full of nonsense, or just lost on those highways, never transported into the present day. It was too long...too much words, bro!

I love Jack Kerouac's style of writing, I think it is so unique and beautiful and quirky. In passing, a friend once read me a poem of his about Buddha, or enlightenment, something of the sort, and I LOVED it, and have been trying to find it ever since, which is why I picked up this book. I've listened to/watched many videos of him reading his work on youtube, so it's easy for me to hear his voice narrating these poems as I read them, and I definitely think that is an essential part of the readers experience with this book (and any other, for that matter.)
I will say at times it feels mildly like "I'm cool and I have a following so I'll write whatever I want and people will eat it up as the ramblings of a tortured genius hipster," (for example, a few poems are just random words and exclamations of made up words and sounds... I realize that all writers like to experiment and deviate/avoid falling into writing the same thing over and over again, but this just didn't work right for him.) I guess who knows if at the time he wrote it he ever intended for it to be published? or even read by another person? I like to think of him sitting there scribbling and making up random words and giggling to himself... "God, I'm such a weirdo."

PS I never did find that poem. I believe it was in some sort of anthology, but a publication of his own. Maybe some day I will stumble across it...

I've found a lot of inspiration from this book. Every time I pick it up I feel encouraged to work on my own poetry.

3.5 rating.

This was an unexpected find in my local bookshop a few weeks back, and as I have been gathering and setting aside books written in or about the 50's-60's, this seemed like it needed to be in my pile. I admit that I was completely sold when I found out it was not only all prose writing, but the background story is that the author was challenged by a friend to constantly carry a small notebook with him at all times and to jot down whatever came to mind as he was observing life. As a person who almost always has a notebook on my person, that's the kind of hero I aspire to be!

Fantastic. This left me absolutely speechless.
There are just too many jaw-dropping moments for me to mention.
In fact, even though this book is not a story but a collection of notebook scribblings poured straight onto the page by one of the great literary minds of the 20th century, there is something very magical about this book. Is it the opening description? Hard to say.
Incredibly visual description. As George Condo says in the introduction, this really shows you just how much of a genius Kerouac was.

new york tok to slap paint on

This one took me a while; absorbing Kerouac at his manic best is no easy task. His use of language and pace are unmatched and unimmitatable. Brilliant.

How to pack a rucksack.

“Come Jackson Pollock, Kerouac escogitò un modo per prendere un oggetto che tutti noi contempliamo e utilizziamo quotidianamente trasformandolo in Arte. Il nuovo linguaggio coincideva con quello che noi parlavamo da sempre. Semplicemente, prima di aprire bocca, si trattava di conoscere ciò di cui si voleva parlare.”

“E’ proprio questo a dare incisività agli schizzi: il senso di frattura, quasi di taglio, trasmesso dalle descrizioni. Hai l’impressione che ti puntino contro, ma quando meno te l’aspetti schizzano via in molteplici direzioni, per chiudersi su una nota precisa in qualche modo legata al resto del componimento, eppure imprevista.”

“Jack vedeva attraverso la penna, e fu capace di cogliere lo spirito del suo tempo senza inventare alcunché.”

dall’introduzione di George Condo