The Beat Goes On : Books: A collection of poetry is the first major work by Jack Kerouac to be released posthumously by his estate.

SAN FRANCISCO —  At City Lights Bookstore, the literary mecca of the beat generation, black-garbed clerks still point pilgrims to the Jack Kerouac section.

Kerouac last lived here in the 1950s and, 22 years after his death in Florida, the man synonymous with beat writing is still honored in this city that has even named a street after him. Kerouac fans flock here from around the world to walk the streets he walked and linger in City Lights, the cramped avant-garde bookstore between Chinatown and peep-show row in North Beach and owned by Kerouac’s fellow beatster, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

In what is sure to stoke even more interest in Kerouac, City Lights has just published a new collection of his poetry, “Pomes All Sizes.” It is the first major work to be released posthumously by Kerouac’s estate.

Four more books are due from Viking Penguin within the next two years, including “Book of Blues,” a poetry collection of travel impressions and a companion volume to the author’s 1959 “Mexico City Blues.” The others are a book of philosophy, “Some of the Dharma,” “The Portable Kerouac Reader” and “Selected Letters,” containing correspondence from Kerouac’s college years to his last days.

After Kerouac died in 1969, his widow, Stella Sampas Kerouac, sealed his remaining unpublished works away in various safes. Kerouac had given “Pomes All Sizes” to his friend, writer Allen Ginsberg, to pass on to City Lights for publication. But Stella, who died two years ago, never granted Ferlinghetti permission to publish.

“Why? I don’t know,” Ginsberg says in a phone interview from his home in New York City. “She said, ‘So that Ph.D students would have something to do.’ ”

Ferlinghetti says he pleaded with Stella Kerouac. “She considered all his beat friends evil companions who led him astray. She wasn’t a very literary person. She just couldn’t be bothered. She was very standoffish.”

Kerouac biographer Ann Charters, who is editing a collection of Kerouac letters and edited Viking’s recently published anthology “The Portable Beat Reader,” defends Stella Kerouac. “She didn’t have any experience whatsoever in any literary matter. She did the right thing by not doing anything hastily and keeping everything safe.”

Stella Kerouac’s six siblings inherited the rights to Kerouac’s work, and her brother, John Sampas, 58, oversees the estate. He has given the order to publish everything available. The amount that will be paid for the Viking books is still in negotiation, senior editor David Stanford says.

Sampas, a retired researcher for the Department of the Army who lives in Lowell, Mass., the writer’s hometown, says his sister “just sort of withdrew and left it to her heirs to take care of. I’ve assembled all this stuff over the last couple of years. I didn’t know what we had. I’d like to get all of this out while I’m alive.”

Kerouac, whose manic writing defined the beat generation, is best known for “On the Road,” the frenetic, unorthodox 1957 novel about his trek across the United States. The word beat signified despair and a search for new meanings in life. Kerouac’s writing greatly influenced American pop culture--the beats are considered the forerunners of the flower children of the ‘60s--and inspired such artists as Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison and The Doors.

He wrote and compiled “Pomes All Sizes” between 1954 and 1965. The collection contains on-the-road observations and somber grapplings with faith. “It spans the last years of his life,” Ferlinghetti says. “He became more and more alcoholic, and there’s evidence of that in some of the poems.”

The manuscript, which had been stored in a small upstairs safe at City Lights, is haphazard. “In fact,” says City Lights editor Nancy Peters, “some poems were interrupted by other poems.”

Kerouac considered himself a poet first, and “Pomes All Sizes” belies his image as carefree wanderer. “The poems show Kerouac’s spiritual struggle,” Peters says. “They show a side of him people don’t think about. His sensitivity to the sadness of life is really apparent in this book. People who knew him say he was very serious and shy. Somehow a legend has painted him in completely different colors.”

In addition to the new “Pomes All Sizes,” which is stirring worldwide interest, in 1970 City Lights published “Scattered Poems,” a collection of writings that previously appeared in magazines, and “Book of Dreams,” a 1961 transcription of Kerouac dreams.

His works sell exceptionally well, Peters says. “Pomes All Sizes” has a first printing of about 8,000 copies. “Scattered Pomes” is in its 12th printing.

“The idea of being on the road has always been attractive to the American imagination,” Peters says. “Jack Kerouac was always hopping from one end of the country to the other. Jack London was traveling about on trains and freight cars. There’s Mark Twain on the Mississippi.”

At City Lights it is not uncommon to find a bevy of young “beats”--the American and foreign students mingling around the Kerouac section. “Forty years after he wrote ‘On the Road,’ kids are still excited about it,” says biographer Charters. “That’s an odd phenomenon.”

At City Lights, Ferlinghetti, his jeans splattered with paint, sits in a creaky wood chair in his second-floor office. From his window, he can see barkers across Columbus Avenue as the sex shops drum up business. A copy of “Pomes All Sizes,” its cover an abstract portrait of Kerouac painted by Ferlinghetti, rests on his roll-top desk.

“It’s like he’s writing about an America that doesn’t exist anymore, especially in ‘On the Road’ . . . dusty old, broken-down Greyhound bus terminals in the outback,” Ferlinghetti says. “There’s an enormous nostalgia for that America.”

Kerouac published his first novel, “The Town and the City,” a conventional book and minor critical success, in 1950. “He got very much into Buddhism, and one of the first principles of Buddhism is, ‘First thought, best thought,’ ” says Ferlinghetti. “The idea was not to revise. He wrote straight from his consciousness and didn’t edit to make it look good or sound good. In other words, the unedited subconscious.”

Truman Capote called Kerouac’s style “typing.” Even reviews for “On the Road,” which landed briefly on bestseller lists, triggered a “long, slow execution” of Kerouac’s work by critics, writes Santa Barbara writer and critic Tom Clark in his 1984 biography “Jack Kerouac.” They attacked the book as “plotless” and “a blend of nihilism and mush.”

Later “On the Road” was called misogynistic.

“You do hear the objections that the beat movement was a man’s movement and there is a misogynist strain in it,” says Albert Gelpi, a Stanford University professor and specialist in American poetry. “Its social dynamics were based on male bonding. Women who entered that world were often used as objects of lust.”

“I’m sure there will be good and bad reviews,” Ferlinghetti says of “Pomes All Sizes.” He adds: “Poetry is back to where it was before Allen Ginsberg published ‘Howl.’ It’s become very academic--lots of poetry about poetry. There will be a lot of critics who will attack this book and say this really isn’t poetry. But I wouldn’t have published it if I didn’t think it was valid poetry. It’s direct observation, fresh observation.”

In the introduction to “Pomes All Sizes,” Ginsberg laments that Kerouac’s poetry has yet to be included in major American college anthologies. “The minor critics and poets of his day didn’t realize the enormous intellectual distinction of his poems,” Ginsberg says. “He was doing something that was quite ancient and classical . . . rediscovering principles of spontaneous conversation that are characteristic of other, older cultures, China, Japan.”

Gelpi says one of the reasons for this is that very little Kerouac poetry has been published. “He’s mostly known as a prose writer. Jack’s poetry is hard to read because he’s really trying to write much more out of this idea of spontaneous writing that comes directly out of the imagination. He’s working off musical analogies, trying to find the verbal equivalent in poetry to the emotional skatting you get in jazz and blues music.

“Undergraduate students have always been fascinated with Kerouac, but now interest in him is surging among scholars,” Gelpi says. “I hope he’s going to be given a kind of serious literary reading he never got during his lifetime. He was always considered a prankster or a clown instead of a serious writer of literature. Now they are seeing the real depth and complexity that’s in the novels as well as the poetry. The psychological depth, religious depth--there’s a lot of stuff there.”

“ ‘Pomes All Sizes’ ” is a very substantial book. It’s tremendously important,” says Joseph Donahue, a poet and critic who presented a paper on Kerouac’s “Mexico City Blues” to the American Literature Assn. conference in San Diego last Sunday. “What needs to be done is a good scholarly collection of his poems. It’s amazing that you have this guy who’s one of the most influential literary figures in the last 40 years who continues to be a source for experimental writing and there hasn’t been any major collection so we can see the breadth of his work.”

Kerouac died at age 47 in St. Petersburg, Fla., after stomach hemorrhaging brought on by excessive drinking.

“What happened to his consciousness is exactly what seems to be happening to the consciousness of the young today--brainwashed by television,” Ferlinghetti says of the writer’s tragic slide. “He ended up watching television all day long in the cottage in Florida. Drinking beer and watching television.”