SEE THE VIDEOS Kerouac interviewed by Fernanda Pivano (1966) , Pivano remembers , “September 16, 1961” read by Giovanni De Nava , Kerouac legge “On the Road” , … e “American Haiku” , Johnny Depp legge Kerouac
Florence, March 14, 2023 – Remembering that the day before yesterday occurred the anniversary of the birth of writer and poet Jack Kerouac (12 marzo 1922, Lowell, Massachusetts).
All’television interview made in Milan in 1966 by Fernanda Pivano (a famous interview, as arduous in conducting as it is interesting and amusing in its results, trying is believing) we wanted to combine the I remember that old interview by Pivano herself.
We additionally publish, together with four haiku in Kerouaca nice article by the scholar dedicated to American writer who tragically died shortly thereafter: Kerouac, leading representative of the Beat Generation, author of the legendary On the Roadbut also of many books of verses, from Golden Eternity Writing al Sketch bookal Haiku book. And where then, between prose and poetry, the exact border? Where is the beginning and where is the end of poetry, beyond genres and beyond definitions, in an artist who relies, equipped with his own inspiration, on writing, on words?
They complete the post, in the video section, a poem by Kerouac in Italian interpreted by Giovanni De Nava, two author readings and one by Johnny Depp.
PS Curiosity. When Fernanda Pivano questions the writer about his preferences in terms of Italian literature, after having judged Dante, Leopardi and Petrarch irrelevant on his work, Kerouc declares that among our poets he likes d’Annunzio most of all. That Gabriele d’Annunzio whom we remembered just the day before, born as Jack Kerouac on March 12!
Marco Marchi
Haiku
Trombone jazz,
tmoving ends,
pspring rain.
Perfect moonlit night
ruined
from family quarrels.
Empty baseball field
a robin
jumping for the bench.
Evening falls
the office girl
untie his scarf.
Haiku
The jazz trombone,
The moving curtain,
– Spring rain
Perfect moonlit night
marred
By family squabbles
Empty baseball field
– A robin,
Hops along the bench
Evening coming
– The office girl
unloosing her scarf
(and The book of haiku)
Jack Kerouac, the Orpheus Emerged
Perhaps the mistake was calling it the beat generation: at the time Kerouac set this whole shack in motion it was above all a go generation. Where they went they certainly didn’t know, those sweet insufferable pathetic insolent angel-faced hipsters who zigzagged around the United States like us later our various piazzas of the Duomo, looking for other friends to go with, where, who knows , but go.
For a while a dry, intense and desperate Kerouac tried to defend himself by saying that the beat generation didn’t exist, it was just a lot of noise they had made around one of his sentences, that in reality the beats weren’t just rock and roll teenagers roll but also sixty-year-old drug addicts, who beat meant being hip of the twentieth century, i.e. hip of life and mystical visions.
But even then, in the early days of 1958, while he was being lionized in New York and he was trying to escape the stereotype that would have killed him, Kerouac said in an interview that he was enormously sad, in great despair, because living was a great burden. , a great tiring burden, and he would have liked to be safe, already dead: he would have liked to have the certainty that we are already, really, like empty ghosts in heaven.
Among so many teachers of life who showed him opposite paths, Kerouac killed himself trying to defend the path that he had chosen for himself, that of vital energy, creative energy, expressive energy.
From 1957 to 1967, from On the road a Vanity of Duluozit seems impossible that only ten years have passed: it seems impossible that the face of the world has changed so much in ten years.
It also seems impossible that Kerouac has changed so much and impossible that he has been so aware of the transformation.
The years that passed waiting for that On the road published were undoubtedly his most important, from the point of view of creativity. We all know that he wrote On the road in three weeks and underground in two days and three nights (he later said that at the end of the underground he was pale as paper, he had lost 8 kilos and had seen himself in the mirror with «a strange look»): and that some critics denied that those were novels with the same assurance with which they now affirm that they are his only valid novels.
But certainly the widow will find manuscripts that Kerouac never had time to copy for years. Among these manuscripts, the widow will perhaps find the great unpublished work of this American half century, a more or less detective book that Kerouac wrote together with Burroughs. Ginsberg spoke about it for the first time in an interview: «Burroughs and Kerouac (in 1945, ’45 or ’46) wrote a great detective book together, in alternating chapters.
I don’t know where that book is: Kerouac has his chapters and Burroughs’ are somewhere in his papers…». And Kerouac also spoke about it in an interview: «I wrote a book, now hidden under the floor tiles, together with Burroughs. Is called And the Hippos boiled in their tanks. The Hippos. Because Burroughs and I were in a bar one night and we heard a news report that said, “And so the Egyptians attacked, blah blah blah… and meanwhile there was a big fire in London Zoo and the fire ran across the fields and the hippos are boiled in their tanks! Good night to all!”. That’s how Bill is, he’s noticed. Because he always notices these things.’ Burroughs actually began writing, shall we say professionally, in 1949 (I am referring to Junkiewhich came out only in 1953).
Previously he had only written (in 1938) a short story in collaboration with Kells Elvins, in which he had invented the character of Dr. Benway who would later become the protagonist of grass knot. But again, remember that it was Kerouac who came up with the title of grass knot and to suggest the title of I scream to Ginsberg it would be like going back to talking about community life and the commonality of thoughts that linked the three friends in the years in which they lived together in that now famous house near Columbia University; and return to talk about the great weight Kerouac had – as a writer – in the community.
Ginsberg has never missed an opportunity to talk about Kerouac’s influence on him even though Kerouac has never gladly talked about Ginsberg’s influence on him. On the bus that took him home after his funeral in Lowell, Ginsberg wrote:
“Jack the Wizard in his grave
in Lowell for the first night
that Jack through whose eyes
look
smog radiance light
gold on the spiers of Manhattan
he will never see these smoking chimneys
never again on the statues of Mary
in the cemetery.”
This will probably remain the most moving memory of a writer-poet crushed by his society: it will remain even after the new generations have forgotten this story of the beats and all the rest and have also forgotten his tragic death.
Because even now among so many newspapers that have made the sarcastic and definitive portrait of his character or the smug and conformist slating of his books, no one has thought about the dilemma of his last twenty years; above all, no one has thought of the long solitary minutes, sunk into the abyss no longer of alcohol but of reality, while his own blood strangled him, taking from him minute by minute that life which in all his books has acted as an elusive protagonist in a ambivalence of happiness and despair, of beauty and horror, but of which Kerouac only sang the opening leaps towards vitality and energy.
A life that had little to do with the one that the contemporary world forced him to live, to the point of driving him back like a wounded animal in the ambush of alcohol; in the ambush of something that would deceive him of being able to escape his destiny.
Fernanda Pivano
(and Beat Hippie YippieArcana 1972)
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