A. D. Winans Remembers Jack Micheline (part 1)
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 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 fancy, having little if anything to do with the creative spirit. He
hung out in Greenwich Village, in the early 50s, 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 50s 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 in
the seventies at San Francisco’s California Music Hall. It was around this
period of time that 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 50’s 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 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 that 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 to him, 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, which probably accounts for
why they never published one of the more than twenty books he published during
his lifetime. All of them 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.”
A.D. Winans & Jack Micheline in 1976.I was privileged to
be his friend for more than 30 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 metaphors, 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 60s, but it was not until the early 70s
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
flow 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 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.
(To be continued)
