Jack Kerouac was an iconic American novelist and poet who is best known for his 1957 novel On the Road. He is often considered a key figure in the beat generation literary movement of the mid-20th century.
Kerouac’s writing style is spontaneous, unconventional, and highly poetic. He relied heavily on jazz-inspired improvisational techniques like stream of consciousness and automatic writing. His sentences are long and winding, full of vivid descriptions of images, sensations, and emotions. He employs a colloquial, conversational tone andsyntax in his writing to mimic the rhythms of natural speech. His poetic style can be characterized as:
Free-flowing: He emphasized spontaneity and capturing the immediacy of experience over formal structure and complexity. He wrote quickly, typing furiously on a continuous roll of paper to maintain the momentum of thought.
Musical: He described his writing as “spontaneous bop prosody,” drawing inspiration from the rhythm, tempo and feel of jazz music. There is a lyrical, melodic quality to his descriptions and turns of phrase.
Immediate: He aimed for a transparency of expression that allowed the realities of experience to speak directly through the writing. There is an immediacy and rawness to his verse that conveys a sense of living in the present moment.
Visceral: Kerouac’s writing employs sensual, concrete details and vivid descriptions to evoke an emotional and sensory experience for the reader. There is an earthy, physical quality to his poetic language and meditations on human nature.
So in summary, Kerouac’s poetic style is characterized by its free-flowing, jazz-inspired rhythm; spontaneous and unconventional form; conversational and colloquial tone; and its emphasis on the immediate experience over traditional structures and complexity. He aimed to create “first thought, best thought” poetry that captured life as it was being lived.
Jack Kerouac\
Beat culture, beat poetry, New Journalism, Poet, and author of fictions that weren't always so fictional.
As a youngman I read "Darma Bums" or lasting Poetry Voice? I think so. Most of his New American poetry music was dead on with cadence, and beat.