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Number
288
August/September 2001
Visions for the
Tribe
STEPHEN
RONAN
Copyright
© 2001 Poetry Flash
VOICES OF THE LADY: Collected Poems, by
Stuart Z. Perkoff, Edited with an Introduction by
Gerald T. Perkoff, M.D., Foreword by Robert
Creeley, The National Poetry Foundation, University
of Maine, 5752 Neville Hall, Room 302, Orono, Maine
04469, 1998, 486 pages, $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.
the unpainted shamans
of magic eyes
present their visions
for the tribe
(from "Pithecanthropus Erectus" for Charles
Mingus,
by Stuart Z. Perkoff)
As a teen Stuart Z. Perkoff understood Karl
Marx's dictum, "Change the world." He had
encountered another side of the world than the
respectable, conventional home life he had known
when he ventured into a seedy part of town and
found himself in the rough and tumble milieu of a
radical workers' barroom. As a consequence of his
own nature, that of a classroom rebel and
argumentative son, and the influences he picked up
among the old lefties, he joined the Communist
party and began to compose poetry.
In his comprehensive work The Venice
Poems, published at last in Voices of the
Lady: Collected Poems, after having been a sort
of family or tribal legend, he described his
youthful emotions and the revelation he found in
river front St. Louis:
it was called "little bohemia" & we went
there often. the owner
was a young painter with a long slavic name & a
beautiful wife.
the fact that she wore no brassiere & that they
were not really
married was very important to us
as was the jukebox with its beethoven quartet
& its political songs,
as were the arguments the beer, the getting
laid
i wrote poems there which aped patchen badly,
& argued about love &
trotsky with rotted eyed ex-stalinists lost somehow
while
waiting for the hammer to descend
………
it was 1947
our hopes were high
the eerie houses & garbage of the world
were about to be destroyed
"the wall! the wall! the wall!" we shouted
"bring it down
"bring it down"
(pages 273--274)
But he was criticized by these battered old
Comintern culture critics for writing love poems.
He moved on and found there were wider perspectives
available among a larger community of outsiders
once he relocated to New York City.
He was not yet eighteen at the time and before
long seems to have adopted another shibboleth,
Rimbaud's exhortation to "Change life," which the
Surrealists had paired with Marx's "Change the
world." The distinction lay in living out one's
personal insurrection rather than devoting oneself
to the overthrow of the base and superstructures of
society. It would amount to a revolution of
consciousness.
In "The Hidden Revolution," a 1960 CBS news
broadcast by Howard K. Smith (released in 1992 on
The Beat Generation box set from Rhino/Word
Beat), Perkoff is heard in conversation with a
fellow artist who espouses a position close to what
Kenneth Rexroth identified in his essay
"Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation."
Rexroth had written, "[Dylan] Thomas has
certainly wanted to tell people about the ruin and
disorder of the world. [Charlie] Parker and
[Jackson] Pollock wanted to substitute a
work of art for the world." Of course, Rexroth
might have enlisted Jack Kerouac's name with
Pollock and Parker had he not been carrying a
suppurating grudge against him. But the intent of
the essay was to say that Beat artists and poets
had generally followed their example, and Perkoff
was no exception. However, in "The Hidden
Revolution" Perkoff dissents from the apolitical
stance of his companion by insisting, "I've always
been political, Man!"
But by this point his politics might be
described as 'tribalism'. In his book Venice
West, The Beat Generation in Southern
California (Rutgers University, 1991) John
Arthur Maynard accurately delineates the
identification Perkoff made between himself and
Moses. He hoped to lead a tribe of his people out
of captivity in a corrupt empire and into a
promised land of righteous living. In his case, it
was a fiction or fantasy of a promised land called
"Venice West" located in a somewhat ruinous
precinct of the dominant society. He found his way
there after marrying and beginning a family with
Suzan Perkoff in 1949. He found a bohemian
community that accepted him and, more importantly,
fitted him better than the scene in San Francisco
or the one he left behind in New York City.
In Venice he was initiated into another tribal
practice more closely associated with the people of
the pre-Columbian Americas. That was the use of
power substances to obtain the shamanic experience
which he could then bring back to communicate to
the other members of his tribe. From a distance of
half a century, it may be difficult for those who
never experienced the social use of marijuana in
that period to understand just what an exception
from quotidian experience it was. One had to apply
to the group and be sponsored by a member to
partake in a ceremony entirely ritualistic in
nature. Once they had overcome whatever skepticism
there was about a person's 'coolness', he was
allowed to enter a candlelit room to sit in a
circle and pass the sacramental pipe. An unspoken
but firm social etiquette applied to being
'turned-on' and all subsequent activity.
In this new adoptive 'tribe', Perkoff found the
alternative he had been seeking to a repressive,
conformist society. He is perhaps the most
successful of all the poets who came to be
identified as Beat in incorporating the argot of
the subterraneans into his poetry. And his poetics
became a conscious effort to return to the purity
of the primitive, as he wrote, to "recreate a
civilization in simple things on stretched skin and
chewed out hollowed wood." Like all bohemian
communities that had gone before, Perkoff and his
group dedicated themselves to art, to altered
states of consciousness, and accepted the
inevitable voluntary poverty. As Kerouac replied to
a French-speaking interviewer, the designation Beat
meant not only beatitudinous but also
pauvre.
Perkoff's utter dedication to poetry bore fruit
when in 1956 he published his first collection,
The Suicide Room, with Jonathan Williams's
influential Jargon Society press. This sequence of
poems begins the present book, and in it one finds
both the voice and the style that is consistent in
Perkoff throughout his work. Words that appear and
recur here---'knives', 'moons', 'mirrors',
'nights', 'music', 'death', and 'love'---reappear
throughout the book. The apt descriptions and the
haunted metaphors of the poet's analogical method
are evident in "The Wind":
Last night it came, late, and swept
along between the houses, chilled in
the open windows.
Outside
a tin can and a bottle rolled up and down
the rough street. They made a noise
like a horse-drawn wagon,
filled with junk and broken windows.
"I thought
"it was part of the music," she said.
There was only one star in the sky,
and a moon slice.
The world hung suspended from them
in the blackness,
suspended by strings
of bells and Chinese glass, swaying
and ringing
in the wild wind.
There is little of the hip phraseology that
would characterize later work, and there's a type
of leanness and neo-classicism that may originate
in W.C. Williams and Ezra Pound. Among his
contemporaries his work resembles not so much the
poets identified as Beat but their friends and
fellow-travelers, Robert Creeley, Cid Corman, and
Charles Olson. He had appeared with all three of
them in Corman's magazine Origin 2 in 1951,
and Olson had responded with a welcoming letter to
him in the form of a poem:
two poems of yrs belong with us, and are
something neither of us,
or anyone else, can visit as you can such another
hell
that you
move me as the clearest speaking of such things i
have heard in
this half of the false forwarding of like
cause…
I marked this first in a poem in RESISTANCE
about a year ago,
how, your fineness of ear and touch makes it
possible to
reintroduce materials that so many others have
torpedoed, and kept
torpedoing, since the days of---in our language,
I'd say, Dickens…
As his tribal life was still defining itself and
The Suicide Room was published, he came in
contact with an older professional writer and poet,
Lawrence Lipton. Lipton was a sort of Rexroth
manqué with an abundance of
free-floating social theory and was looking for
exemplars like Perkoff and his friends to attach it
to. Maynard writes that Lipton was completely
serious about becoming the literary "antipope" of
southern California, and he liked the fact that
his protégés were "younger and
angrier than Kenneth Rexroth's." In "For Stuart,"
the foreword to Voices of the Lady, Robert
Creeley points to the "social despair" in which
Perkoff's poetry originates. Lipton made good use
of this perceived despondency in Perkoff and his
fellow poets Bruce Boyd, Tony Scibella, Charlie
Newman and others in the rather strident rhetoric
of his book The Holy Barbarians (Messner,
1959). The book's photo essay, which makes a
sideshow of the Beat artists' lifestyle in Venice
West, includes shots of poet-painter Stuart Perkoff
painting and reading.
Lipton had also endeavored to recreate the jazz
poetry movement then thriving in San Francisco,
renaming the genre "jazz canto." He had succeeded
in enlisting Rexroth as an ally and performer by
the time of The West Coast Poetry and Jazz Festival
in early 1958. Perkoff, long a jazz aficionado as
well as a jazz poet, and fellow Venice West artist
and poet Saul White were also part of the bill with
music by Buddy Collette, Bud Shank, Fred Katz and
Shorty Rogers. The jazz-and-poetry extravaganzas
extended over four nights and filled the Los
Angeles Jazz Concert Hall. The LP Jazz Canto
(World Pacific) that Lipton produced later that
year featured poetry including work by Lawrence
Ferlinghetti and Philip Whalen but none by the
Venice poets he championed.
Perkoff had strained his relationship with his
wife by performing at the concerts while she was in
labor, all with negligible benefit to his career.
Looking to support and locate himself in Venice he
formed a partnership with Rudy Croswell to open the
much-storied "Venice West Expresso [sic]
Cafe." He emblazoned on its wall artist Wally
Berman's motto "ART IS GOD IS LOVE." The cafe was
the center of Beat culture in Southern California
until economics and police persecution forced its
inevitable closing, which was as much of an event
as its opening had been.
The title Voices of the Lady refers to
Perkoff's particular understanding of how poetry
came to him, that is, from a muse whom he had to
court and whom he called "The Lady." It is a
time-honored notion that the poetic genius is
exogenous, an entity other than the poet. In a
rationalist, materialist age various psychological
explanations are offered to counter the idea of an
independently existing muse or goddess. That the
male poet is actually accessing the feminine side
of his own personality, Jung's concept of the
anima, might satisfy some. The poet combines
masculine creativity and ambition with feminine
intuition and sensitivity.
While Perkoff pursued his aesthetic and
spiritual quest, the actual feminine persona in his
life, Suzan, seems to have been more concerned with
the material demands of her family and herself.
While he worked various jobs for short periods when
necessary, Stuart devoted his remaining energies to
his art. Suzan eventually broke under the strain
and in an extreme state began to talk non-stop, in
a sense personifying what Perkoff could only
theorize about and approach in his art---the
possessed, spontaneous wordslinger. Perkoff writes
of her oracular seizure in The Venice
Poems:
suzan
desperate after
weeks of struggle with
what was a terrifying combination of
numinous
paranoid
insightful
pressures
& pressures
entered, with a glad relief
&,
(on my part also
prayer
the general hospital
psychiatric unit
………
inflated with the Divine Mother
reliving traumas of her births
searching the wild beds & hatreds of this
world
for her twin
her strength
her unhad power
david, david
the tears that flowed!
that there cd be such tears!
(pages 259--261)
Following this period of crisis, Perkoff and his
friends rode the wave of publicity and notoriety
the Beats began to attract in the national media.
The proximity of the Venice Beats to the media
capital of Hollywood led to what may be seen as a
symbiotic relationship. Whenever 'Beatsploitation'
films or television productions wanted to cast
'beatniks' they turned to Venice for mise en
scène and to hire extras. The poets and
artists of the scene then did their best to counter
the inevitable misrepresentations. Perkoff himself
appeared on "You Bet Your Life," hosted by Groucho
Marx, an excerpt from which is seen in the Beat
documentary, The Source (Chuck Workman,
1999).
Jack Kerouac had indicated the iconic status
Groucho and family held for the Beats in his poem
"To Harpo Marx" and in "Origins of the Beat
Generation" in which he states that "it goes back
to…the ravings of the Marx Brothers (the
tenderness of Angel Harpo at harp, too)." That
Perkoff shared these feelings is obvious from the
twinkle in his eye as he traded witticisms with the
master (a twinkle not due solely to the medicines
he had ingested, one expects). When he denied being
a beatnik, Groucho asked him, "What is a
beatnik?" Perkoff succinctly explains the
philosophy of the Beats: "…their way of life
implies getting along on a minimum of money, and a
belief in their ability to work out their own
problems without external coercion, so long as they
don't harm anyone."
Perkoff won $300, including a bonus for saying
the "secret word." The entirely sympathetic Groucho
subsequently donated money to the Gas House, a
loose collective of Venice Beat artists. Happily,
for once Perkoff was able to provide for his wife
and children from whom he had by then separated.
His performance was impressive enough that he was
hired as a Beat spokesman for a local television
talk program, a gig that was predictably
short-lived. This occurred in 1960, the same year
that his work appeared in Donald Allen's epochal
anthology The New American Poetry
1945--1960. His poetry---"Flowers for Luis
Bunuel," "The Recluses," and "Feasts of Love,
Feasts of Death"---thereby reached the widest
readership of his lifetime. "The Recluses"
evocatively presents his acute perceptions of his
particular subculture:
They paper the walls of their world
with their strange rhythms, visions.
They have within their deepest eardooms
fragments of freshest wildness.
………
They live there.
They have their own dark lines.
they are always
inside.
But the "external coercion" was never far off,
even at this time of his fruition as a poet and as
a figurehead of his community. Chagrined by the
influx of posturing hangers-on and dismayed by
Lipton's willingness to pontificate over them,
Perkoff left Venice for a sojourn in Mexico where
drugs were cheap. On his return he was strung out,
and although he never ceased making art, talk of
service to "The Lady" increasingly became mere
lip-service amid the ruins. Finally, an ill-advised
method for maintaining his habit, scoring for
others for a cut of the drugs, led to his arrest
and imprisonment in 1967. Fortunately the arrest
was for trafficking in marijuana, not heroin, but
it still drew a five year sentence.
When he was paroled in 1971 at the age of forty,
he was the proverbial changed man. Gone was the
small, wiry, alive figure he cut on "You Bet Your
Life," and there instead was the heavy, long-haired
and bearded, dragged-out man we see on the cover of
Voices of the Lady. Settling in Marin
County, he took a job in a textile mill and even
reunited with his wife for a time. Though he did
take part in the pot-smoking, acid-dropping scene,
he stayed off hard drugs and saved his money to
eventually open his own bookstore, Wolf River Books
in Larkspur.
Ironically, though he was distant from his
youthful, zealous devotion to poetry, it was in
this period that he published the most, four books
before his death from cancer in 1974. They included
Eat the Earth (1971), Kowboy Pomes
(1973), and the mature, confident poems of
Alphabet (1973), which featured a cover by a
fellow L.A. artist, mystical Jewish Beat Wallace
Berman. Each poem in the sequence follows a letter
from the Hebrew alphabet; the following example is
entitled "CHETH":
from his perception of the fact of existence,
man deduces
purpose, visualises direction. a consecrated
journey. he
is driven by the hunger for its culmination. but he
cannot
devote his energies solely to its achievement.
………
two hands must carry many tools. all concerns
insist upon
absolute care & the equilibrium of craft
skills.
the gestures of reality demand attention. there
is no lens
thru which the patterns themselves are revealed.
there is a
flow from need to need. the sum of its actions is
its own
completion.
its arithmetical number is 8
All of Stuart Z. Perkoff's books, which include
three posthumous volumes, all his periodical
appearances, and a treasure trove of unpublished
works are included in Voices of the Lady:
Collected Poems. It is a formidable book,
representing the life's work of an important and
too little read American poet. Its publication will
undoubtedly bring him a new generation of readers
as well as provide all the missing pieces of his
substantial oeuvre.
In his introduction to Love Is the Silence:
Poems 1948--1974 from 1976, his friend and
editor Paul Vangelisti concludes, "Enough, I think,
of Perkoff's talent was sacrificed to fantasy." Yet
his "fantasy" is inextricable from his poetics, or
as Perkoff himself puts it in "Letter to Jack
Hirschman," "I will accept nothing less than
miracles."
Stephen Ronan was an editor and Beat
Generation specialist at City Lights in the
eighties. He co-produced three box-sets of Beat
literary recordings for Rhino Records and served as
a historical consultant for the documentary film
The Source. In 1998 he delivered his paper,
"The Visionary Road: Rimbaud, Kerouac, Dylan" at
the Stanford University Bob Dylan Conference. He
has just published his tenth chapbook of poetry,
Ghost Nature.
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