Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Scattered Poems

By: Jack Kerouac
Pre-order: Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Pre-order for $20.97

Pre-order for $20.97

Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.

Publisher's summary

Just as he upended the conventions of the novel with On the Road, Jack Kerouac revolutionized American poetry in this ingenious collection.

Bringing together selections from literary journals and his private notebooks, Jack Kerouac’s Scattered Poems exemplifies the Beat Generation icon’s innovative approach to language. Kerouac’s poems, populated by hitchhikers, Chinese grocers, Buddhist saints, and cultural figures from Rimbaud to Harpo Marx, evoke the primal and the sublime, the everyday and the metaphysical. Scattered Poems, which includes the playfully instructive “How to Meditate,” the sensory “San Francisco Blues,” and an ode to Kerouac’s fellow Beat Allen Ginsberg, is rich in striking images and strident urgency.

Kerouac’s widespread influences feel new and fresh in these poems, which echo the rhythm of improvisational jazz music and the centuries-old structure of Japanese haiku. In rebelling against the dry rules and literary pretentiousness he perceived in early twentieth-century poetry, Kerouac pioneered a poetic style informed by oral tradition, driven by concrete language with neither embellishment nor abstraction, and expressed through spontaneous, uncensored writing.

©1945, 1950, 1952, 1955, 1957, 1959, 1960, 1960, 1961, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1970, 1971 the Estate of Jack Kerouac (P)2025 Blackstone Publishing
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

What listeners say about Scattered Poems

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.