Kerouac and the Outsider – A Puzzle

[mjp]

hoochmonkey9 retweeted this the other day, and I thought it was worth posing here.

Kerouac and the Outsider – A Puzzle

Apparently Webb published many different versions of a Kerouac poem in Outsider 2, even after Kerouac told him not to change anything...

Over the following couple of weeks, I was able to monitor the poem in twenty different copies of The Outsider #2. Four more variant lines were discovered in the process, and the occurrence of each was as follows:​

​

"... of Ciardian poetry" (4)​

"... of civilized poetry" (4)​

"... of chamber poetry" (4)​

"... of Beatnik poetry" (4)​

"... of drawing room poetry" (2)​

"... of Ciardi poetry" (1)​

"... of Chinese poetry" (1)​

​

That's pretty incredible.

 

[hoochmonkey9]

I meant to post that here when I saw it on Twitter, but I got sucked in to one of those Buzzfeed quizzes that figures out what type of salad dressing I am.

Balsamic vinaigrette. Obviously.

But yeah, the Kerouac changes were crazy.

 

[Pogue Mahone]

Let the autopsy begin!!! Go for it boys!!! This is really interesting. Don't forget 101 year old Lou is still around and has solid long term memory... even if she doesn't remember lunch...

 

[Purple Stickpin]

Jon Webb was a bit rough around the edges, no? It sure looks as if he read Kerouac's "instructions" to him and that pushed his buttons enough to mess with things.

 

[mjp]

Well there should be enough different copies of Outsider 3 in the hands of people around here to see if anything like that was done with Bukowski...

 

[Short Bus]

And this is why I love this place!

 

[LickTheStar]

One of the Kerouac City Lights poetry books had the same poem printed eight or ten different ways with only minor adjustments, so I figured it would just have been Kerouac being Kerouac.

God that book was awful...