From Michael McClure's "Scratching the Beat Surface"

From Michael McClure's "Scratching the Beat Surface"

..Kerouac is being popularized as an icon of culture - my regret
is that sight of him as an artist will be lost.. We'll know his name and
some
work considered typical. But we'll miss one of the finest, brightest
sensoriums
that has graced verse with intelligence and intellect. This has already
happened to D.H.Lawrence. Lawrence is now known as a novelist - and
remembered
for his more novelistic novels. Lawrence's greatest gifts were as a poet -
in
poems of love, birds, beasts, and flowers - and in his essays of place of
physiological insight and psychophysiological processes. To read the poem
"Bavarian Gentians" or the extended essay "Fantasia of the Unconscious" is
to
know the bright creature who trembles behind the costumed facade of the
novels.
Similarly, Kerouac is best known for his novel "On the Road", but his
masterpiece is "Mexico City Blues", a religious poem startling in its
majesty and
comedy and gentleness and vision.
Kerouac is known worldwide as a novelist. He is sometimes also known as
the
writer of haiku-type poems or intermediate-length poems on the subject of
Rimbaud or Budhism. But Kerouac is little known as the author of several
major
poems which he considered to be blues works. These books include the
unpublished Washington D.C. Blues, San Francisco Blues, and Berkeley Blues.
They range in style from Dos Passos-like descriptive verse to poetrylike
journals. Outstanding in all modern poetry is the epic-length Mexico City
Blues. Kerouac's note on the front of the published edition ssays:

I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam
session on Sunday. I take 242 choruses; my ideas vary and sometimes roll
from
chorus to chorus or from halfway through a chorus to halfway into the next.

The rules of Mexico City Blues were that they should be written on the
pages
of a pocket notebook such as Kerouac nearly always carried. Each page of the
notebook would be a chorus. Eventually, in the developing structure of the
poem, each line becomes a complete, and whole, independent image.
As in the 230th Chorus:

Love's multitudinous boneyard
of decay,
The spilled milk of heroes,
Destruction of silk kerchiefs
by dust storm,
Caress of heroes blindfolded to posts,
Murder victims admitted to this life,
Skeletons bartering fingers and joints...

A further rule of Mexico City Blues was that it must all be spontaneous -
all
a risk - a free, inspired, or noninspired, flowing statement, liberated from
judgements about its value. It was done for itself - as an organism lives
for
itself.