Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues contains 242 poems, which Kerouac called “choruses.”
Published in 1959, the book is a long sequence of short poetic units rather than a conventional narrative. Kerouac used the word “chorus” to emphasize repetition, rhythm, improvisation, and the influence of jazz and Buddhist thought. The pieces vary in length and subject, moving through observations, memories, spiritual reflections, and episodes involving friends.
The collection reflects Kerouac’s interest in spontaneous composition, but its numerical structure is deliberate: the book is made up of 242 numbered choruses. Readers sometimes describe the entire volume simply as one long poem, yet the individual sections are separately identified.
Mexico City Blues belongs to the period when Kerouac’s prose and poetry were both shaped by jazz models. Its title also reflects his travels in Mexico, a setting that appears in several of his works and in the broader mythology surrounding the Beat Generation.