Old Angel Midnight

Blurb

Old Angel Midnight is a long narrative poem by American novelist and poet Jack Kerouac. It was culled from five notebooks spanning from 1956 to 1959, while Kerouac was fully absorbed by his studies of Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy. Kerouac initially experimented with Old Angel Midnight in 1953 in his diary titled "1953. Notes again." In entries dated from November 20 to December 3, 1953, he made notes on "Lucien Midnight" which was to be originally conceptualized in what he called "book movie" form, when he closed his eyes and projected onto paper a cinematic sense of what he heard. A bookmovie, he explained in Some of the Dharma, is a "prose concentration camera-eye visions of a definite movie of the mind with fade-ins, pans, close-ups, and fade-outs." Kerouac's notes on Lucien Midnight were written while staying in the Lower East Side where he initially heard sounds coming through a tenement window from the wash court below. He then heard voices coming from kitchens of the other occupants in nearby apartment buildings and a man named Paddy arriving home drunk, and even a junky stirring in his bed.