Never mind Dylan
Thomas. There’s a really, really,
really cool Beat poet named Ruth
Weiss—not here but in San Francisco. She and Jack Kerouac are friends, and
she has a lot of other friends too who are poets like Bob Kaufman.
I think she was born
in Germany and they say she escaped with
her family in 1939 on the last train allowed out of there. Someone told me
that she and her parents are the only members of her family to survive the
Holocaust.
Weiss and Kerouac
wrote a lot of haiku
poetry, which is a Japanese style of poem that use 17 syllables only. This year,
I heard she started a kind of salon in her apartment, where writers and poets
go to read and discuss their work.
A salon, by
the way, is a group of people that are supposed to be kinda-sorta like-minded,
whether it’s about painting or poems or fiction or whatever, and they get
together and read, talk, write, argue, eat, talk and write some more. It used
to be mostly rich people went to a salon but Beats aren’t rich and it doesn’t
matter!
The only thing that
matters is how you think. And write.
Never mind Paris! I
need to go to San Francisco. !!!
Here in the Village we see all
these guys, and sometimes women poets too, but barely. Just knowing there’s
this amazing woman who’s writing poetry and talking about it makes me, just…
you know. Hopeful.
I haven’t met Ruth
Weiss, but I’m just excited right now to know she’s in the world. That I can go
to San Francisco and meet her. That she writes poetry and that she’s a Beat.
I have to imagine what she looks like 'cause I don't have a picture.
In her honor
today I’m writing my first haiku.
Calling
City on a hill
North Beach, San
Francisco
Calls me to the dance
Haiku 2:
Door Talk
Opening my door
Inviting the sun inside
With a beggar's smile
Anyway. This morning I woke up and thought, what would have happened if she couldn’t get on that last train? What happened to all those people who missed it? What other poets did we lose?
With a beggar's smile
Anyway. This morning I woke up and thought, what would have happened if she couldn’t get on that last train? What happened to all those people who missed it? What other poets did we lose?
Just the tiniest
things matter, and maybe they end up mattering most, you know? Like haiku.
--Ruby
T.
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