JACK MICHELINE
Jack Micheline, a poet of the Beat
generation, died of a heart attack on Friday, February 27, 1988 aboard a Bart
commuter train. The transit police at
the Orinda Bart station discovered his body, which ominously was at the end of
the line.
Micheline was a "street" poet who
lived out his life on the fringe of poverty, first in the Bronx neighborhoods of
New York, where he was born, and later in San Francisco. He saw the Beat generation as a media-created
fantasy that had little if anything to do with the creative spirit. He hung out in Greenwich Village in the early
fifties where he met Langston Hughes, the legendary Harlem poet. When Hughes was asked why he remained in
Harlem, he said he preferred the company of wild men to wild animals. Micheline would adopt this motto as his
own.
Langston Hughes was but one of many
talented poets, writers and musicians whom Micheline met and associated with in
the fifties while living in New York.
In 1957 he received the Revolt in Literature Award. One of the presenters was the celebrated
Jazz musician, Charles Mingus. This
resulted in a lasting friendship between the two men, and they later performed
together at San Francisco’s California Music Hall. It was around this period of time Jack
Kerouac wrote a foreword for Micheline’s first book of Poems, River of Red
Wine, and Dorothy Parker later favorably reviewed the book in Esquire
magazine, which further enhanced his
reputation.
The fifties were an exciting time
for Micheline, a period in which he met Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Franz
Kline, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Herbert Gold, and other noted poets and
musicians of the Beat era.
He walked the streets of his
hometown writing about the down and out, the losers, and the dispossessed, and
gave the word "street" poetry new meaning.
He was included in Elias Wilentz's Beat Scene and later in Ann
Charters’ Penguin Book of the Beats, which helped further his reputation
as a poet.
Born of Russian-Romanian Jewish
ancestry, under the name of Harvey Martin Silver, he took to the road at a young
age, working at a variety of odd jobs.
It was during this time he changed his name, adopting the first name of
his hero Jack London and, in part, the surname of his mother (Mitchell). He worked for a short time as a union
organizer before devoting his life to poetry and painting. He was 68 years old at the time of his death,
and for the last several years of his life had suffered from diabetes.
It has been said that in his younger
days he had a "bad boy" persona and often took delight in his outrageous
behavior. He would frequently get drunk
and make coarse passes at cultured ladies.
"To go into a café and go boom! Boom! Boom and see some woman spill
coffee on her skirt is a revolution," he declared to Fielding Dawson, a New York
poet friend of his.
There is little doubt that
publishers like City Lights and Black Sparrow Press found his behavior offensive
and probably accounts for why they never published one of the more than twenty
books he published during his lifetime.
All of them were published by small
presses.
His reaction was to say, "I will
never get any awards for how to win friends and influence people. I'm not a politician. I don't kiss ass. I don’t play the game by the rules.”
I was privileged to be his friend
for more than thirty-five years. If
there is such a word as "pure” he can lay claim to it, for sadly poetry has
become a business world where public relations and backstabbing have become
finely tuned arts, and he wanted no part of that kind of world. He refused to bow down
to anyone,
choosing to write poetry for the people; hookers, drug addicts, blue-collar
workers, the dispossessed, and he did it from deep inside the heart.
He frequently boasted to me that he
had never taught a creative writing class, held a residency, received a grant,
or sought the favors of the "poetry business boys," whom he regarded as the
enemies of poetry.
In a 1997 interview I conducted with
him, he talked about the futility a poet faces in finding a large
publisher. He said, in
part:
"I don't want to be published
because I wear the same clothes that others wear, or because I have the same
ideas. I want respect for my own
individuality, but it doesn't work that
way."
He didn't attend college. His university was the streets, where he
majored in street smarts. He wasn't
concerned with semantics, or the carefully arranged use of metaphor, as we can
see from a poem titled “Real Poem”:
A real poem is not in a book
It's a
knockout
A long
shot
A shot in the
mouth
A crack of the
bat
A lost midget turning into a
giant
A lost soul finding its own
way...
I met him in the sixties but it was
not until the early seventies that we became close friends. It was during this time that I was editing
and publishing Second Coming, and he became a frequent contributor to the
magazine.
In 1975 Second Coming
published a book of his poems, Last House in America, and in
1980 I published a small collection of his short stories, Skinny
Dynamite.
He never received the acclaim that
Ginsberg or Burroughs received, not even the recognition afforded Lawrence
Ferlinghetti or Gregory Corso, but the body of work he left behind is
considerable, and I have no doubt that some day he will be given his rightful
place in Beat history. John Tytell, a
professor at Queens College, New York called him an Orphic figure, ”a poet of
urgency and exhortation in the tradition of Jack London and Vachel
Lindsey."
A self-proclaimed lyrical poet, he
frequently drew on old blues and jazz rhythms, infusing the cadence of word
music, while paying tribute to the gut reality of the material he wrote
about. I asked him how much music
influenced his poetry. His
response:
"I was born to a poor family in the
Bronx. I think if I had been born into a
cultured family, I would have been a composer.
I write the music first, not the words for it, before I write the
poem. I hear the music, the rhythms, and
therefore I'm basically a composer, a musician.
I can't remember when music wasn't an important part of my life. Without music there is no
life."
His poems ring true, because beyond
the lines and stanzas flows the energy of life.
His voice was an original one and no one tried to imitate it because it
can't be imitated. He was truly at home
with himself, and loved by both young and old alike. Although he exasperated many people with his
outspokenness, his true friends saw through this facade, and focused on his
genuine love for the common man and woman.
In my 1997 interview with him, he said: "I never wanted to be a poet. I still don't want to be a poet. I just want to live my life. The thing is people don’t understand
poetry. All they have is their football,
baseball, and television. They've never
had a chance to see a real poet that relates to them.
“What they need are poems that
relate to their own way of life. In
America, everything is profit motivation.
“It's the spirit that I relate to.
The church doesn't do the job.
Television doesn't do the job. Everything in America is based on greed, money
and mediocrity.”
Ignored by the poetry establishment
and the larger alternative presses, he went about his writing, fighting off the
disillusionment and bitterness that have overcome so many poets his age. He survived with the skills of a street
fighter, his words resounding like a hammer on a
nail.
His poems were personal poems. Poems that came from the heart and personal
heartbreak; poems that were questioning, probing, and often accusing, but which
always rang out with the truth. They
came from street-life experience, not from reading Charles Olson or Robert
Creeley.
At the age of twelve, he happened
upon a copy of Studs Lonigan, and found eerie comparisons to what he read
in the book and in the cruelty and injustice he saw in the streets he was raised
on. However, convinced that poets were
"sissies,” he didn’t take up writing until the age of twenty-four. When he did begin writing, it was with a
desire to find poetry in the everyday happenings of life. He sensed true poets don't choose poetry, but
that poetry chooses them, and that in the end it’s the way you live your life
that counts.
Walking the streets of the Village
and Harlem, he inherited the richness of the culture, especially the culture of
black jazz musicians. He found himself
drawn to the warmth and humor of the black poets and musicians whom he
encountered in the after-hour Harlem jazz clubs he regularly
frequented.
As a young man, he was a major part
of the Greenwich Village fifties Beat movement, and identified himself with the
street poet Maxwell Bodenheim. Early on
he became friends with Eddie Balchowsky, a classical pianist who had lost his
arm in the Spanish War, and had gone on to become a visual artist.
Balchowsky walked him through the
alleys of New York, pointing out things Micheline had never noticed
before/
"Balchowsky gave me my eyes," he
said, explaining Balchowsky had told him,
"’Before you can see, you must first rid yourself of the misconceptions
that ordinary people accept without question’."
Micheline described Greenwich
Village as a poor, working class Italian neighborhood, where the rent was cheap,
and the people poor, but the center of artistic expression, a place where people
were at ease relating to one another.
Tiring of the New York Village
scene, he left in the early sixties for California and adopted San Francisco as
his new home. It didn't take him long
before he became a force in the North Beach literary
community.
"Poetry was everywhere. We drank
a lot. Every day Bob Kaufman and I read
a poem. It isn't part of history, but I
was arrested for pissing on top of a police car, the same day Kaufman was
arrested outside the Co-Existence Bagel Shop.
We were taken down to the Kearney Street police station and thrown in the
drunk tank, where they beat Kaufman up, and they beat me up
too."
If he screamed poet loud and often,
perhaps it’s because the literary establishment unfairly ignored him. He did, however, achieve his fifteen minutes
of fame when in his later years he appeared on the Late Night with Conan
O’Brien TV show, where he read a poem accompanied on the trumpet by
his long time friend, Bob Feldman.
We don't know much about his years
growing up as a child. We do know he was
born premature; a six-month, two-pound six-ounce baby, who had to fight for
survival, even as he did in later life.
By his own admission, he described himself as a "shy and dreamy" boy who
grew up in the poor section of the Bronx, born to parents who fought like "cats
and dogs."
In his writings, he describes his
mother as a religious woman, who cried a lot, but who possessed a heart of
gold. He paints a portrait of his father
as a
bitter
postal worker who seldom smiled after losing everything he owned in the 1929
stock market crash.
He said as a kid he felt lost in
crowds, and preferred to walk the streets alone "Looking at the lights in the
neighborhood houses," or walking to the Bronx Park, which was miles away from
his home. It was here, at the park, he
was able to find a semblance of peace, listening to the waterfall rushing down
the Bronx River. It became a welcome
relief away from his parent’s constant fighting. He said of those early
years:
"I always seemed to be on edge,
nervous and self-conscious."
He was forced by his mother to
regularly go to the synagogue and take Hebrew lessons. Carrying his Hebrew books under his arms on
his way home from school, he often had to defend himself from neighborhood
Catholic boys lying in wait for him.
He said, "It was not easy being a Jew. I did not know what to believe, or who to
believe in. I did not know my mother, my
brother, or my father. No one seemed
real. Everyone seemed to be acting a
part in a play."
In a short story, he talks about
coming home after receiving a beating by neighborhood bullies, and how his
mother tended his wounds and tried to console him.
"I went to my room and cried. Tears and torment poured out of my head. It was a hell of a world. There had to be a place somewhere where it
wasn't hell, where fear didn't choke you like a knife, where you wouldn't have
to hide in your own skin, and swear at the Bastard
earth.”
In search of that elusive peace, he
began a long trek across America; recording in his notebook everything he saw
and heard, even at the age of seventeen serving a stint in the Army Medical
Corps. By the time he was nineteen, he
found himself in Israel. Then it was
back to the United States where he worked at a variety of odd jobs while
traveling Kerouac's On the Road.
He spent a short time in Chicago,
writing from a cheap $6-a-week hotel room, and described himself as a possessed
man, who slept little, as he wandered the streets at all hours "mumbling to
myself and counting empty
beercans."
But his best creative years were in Greenwich Village and San Francisco's
North Beach.
He saw the
poet as a revolutionary whose purpose in life was to free people from the
slavery of stifling jobs and relationships.
He believed it was the poet's job to live poems and set a fearless
example for others. He was a close
friend of the late Charles Bukowski (Hank) in the days before Hank became
famous. They drank together at Hank’s
pad, and he recalled to me how John Martin
(Black Sparrow Press) would come
over to Hank’s apartment and leave him art supplies so that Hank could create
drawings, which he used to promote his
books.
“We became good friends,” said
Micheline. “We went to the track
together, a few times. He was very
vulnerable, but he changed, like everyone does after they become famous. He had to protect himself. That’s understandable. He had a magic there, and it carried over to
his writing."
The love relationship between them
is evident from a July 16, 1973 letter that Hank wrote
me:
"Micheline is all right---he's
one-third bull shit, but he's got a special divinity and a special
strength. He's got perhaps a little too
much of a POET sign pasted to his forehead, but more often than not he says the
good things --in speech and poem --power- flame, laughing things. I like the way his poems roll and flow. His poems are total feelings beating their
heads on barroom floors.
“I can't think of anyone who has
more and who has been neglected more.
Jack is the last of the holy preachers sailing down Broadway singing the
song. Going over all the people I've ever known, he comes closer to the utmost
divinity,
the
soothsayer, the gambler, the burning of stinking buckskin than any man I've ever
known.”
Their friendship transcended their different
philosophies. Micheline saw poetry as a
holy message to be delivered to the masses, while Hank saw poetry as just
another job that was no different from a carpenter or electrician, and
certainly
saw nothing holy about it. Hank
disliked giving readings, and only read for money. Micheline read for the pure love of it.
In his youth, he was by his own
admission a wild man. One of his
favorite sayings was, "To be a poet is to be mad."
One evening, in New York, after
leaving a literary party, he found himself dancing up West Eighth Street, on his
way to the Cedar Tavern, when two cops attempted to place him under arrest for
being drunk and disorderly. He wrestled
the two officers to the ground, suffering cuts and bruises, and in the process,
bit one of the officer's on the nose. He
was taken to a nearby hospital emergency room, and a doctor who by chance had
heard him read his poems at a local club attended to his wounds. The doctor told the officers that while he
was drunk that he was otherwise okay.
The two officers disagreed and took him to Bellevue Hospital where he was
admitted to the psychiatric wing on a 72-hour
hold.
In a short story, he recalls his
short stay on Ward Nine (the violent ward) as a place for the damned: "The stale smell of antiseptic
prevailed. Everyone was shot up with
drugs."
There is no denying he found a
wealth of writing material from his short incarcerations in jail, and his
experience at the mental ward. He
recalls a man named Doc, who, from his wheelchair at Bellevue, made regular
rounds of the other patients, and a tall, skinny patient named Moe who moved his
fingers up and down on an imaginary saxophone.
These are the kind of people who became subject matter for his
poems. After his release from Bellevue,
he walked
the streets
back down to the East side, "spitting into the darkness of death," vowing that
life must encourage more life.”
"I drank, wept, and pissed and
created in the darkness of a world which seemed bent on destroying itself
through its ignorance, fear, greed, and insensitivity and futility of its
existence."
After moving from New York to San
Francisco, he was again arrested, this time by the San Francisco Police, outside
the Co-Existence Bagel Shop, and charged with indecent exposure, for pissing in
public. He was taken to the Hall of
Justice and forced to spend the night in the drunk tank. The next morning he appeared before the judge
and listened to the charges being read:
"Urinating on the corner of Grant and Green."
When he showed no shame, the judge
became outraged, and ordered him sent to County Hospital for mental
observation. When he next appeared
before the judge, he said he swallowed his pride and apologized to the judge,
who gave him a ten-day suspended sentence.
He remained a wild man well into the
1980s, when he became ill with diabetes, and was forced to give up
drinking. The wild times became but
blurred memories, like the time he visited Hank in Los Angeles, arriving
unannounced at Hank’s apartment, and carrying with him a stack of paintings and
poems. After a day at the races, and a
night of heavy drinking, Hank told him he could sleep overnight, and offered him
his living room sofa. According to Hank,
he sensed that Micheline might vomit, and placed a wastebasket near his
head. He told him if he had to vomit to
make sure he hit the wastebasket.
Hank said the following morning he
got up and drove Micheline to the airport to catch his airplane back to San
Francisco. On returning home, he
discovered Micheline had vomited, had completely missed the wastebasket, and had
wiped up the mess with a magazine Hank had been published in.
It was incidents like this that cost
him more than a few friendships, but his real friends found it hard to stay
angry with him. While there is no
denying he
was
sometimes loud and abrasive, it is also true that what he said was always
honest,
even if sometimes blunt and brutal. If
one could get past his sometimes-abrasive personality, they found he was a force
to be reckoned with.
It had to have hurt him not to
receive the recognition afforded peers like Ferlinghetti, Corso, and McClure,
and he didn't make it any easier on himself by
offending
those in a position to help him. He
would have one believe the slights he received from the literary establishment
didn't hurt him, but I knew better.
In his last years his fight with
diabetes had taken a toll on him. He
looked all his age and then some, but he was still indomitable, giving readings
and presenting art shows throughout the city.
Sharing a cup of coffee with him a
few short months before his death, I looked out the window of the café and saw
two punk rockers walking by. It reminded
me of the time a group of punk rockers came to one of his readings, intent on
hooting him down, but who in the end found themselves wildly clapping their
appreciation. No one, but no one, could
turn around an audience like he could.
He was to many the reincarnated
voice of Walt Whitman; a poet who understood Kerouac's mad genius, a writer who
refused to include an SASE with his work.
He was the ultimate nonconformist.
He believed and lived by the credo that to be a poet in America is to be
an outlaw. His poems were his six guns,
never backing down from anyone or anything.
The steps move the
heart
The heart fuels the
eye
The mirror of the
brain
Listen to the rhythm of your
breath
This is how rare poems are
written
Not with words but with strange
notes
That moves the pen on the
page
This is the eye of the storm
The
earthquake
God's gift to
nature
Immortality.
I’m proud to have been his friend
for over thirty years. To have broke
bread with him; to have gotten drunk with him; to have laughed and cried with
him. There is and was no closer poet
friend I have ever known.
Shortly after his death I submitted
a proposal to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to rename a street in North
Beach after him. On November 18, 2003,
the City of San Francisco honored him by renaming an alley in North Beach after
him. He now joins such noted Beat poets
and writers as Bob Kaufman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth, and Jack
Kerouac, whose names adorn North Beach streets and back
alleys.
a.d. winans
, si vous en
avez le temps, l'envie, le courage. Nous y "postons" quelques informations de
temps en temps
