Jack
Micheline, a member of the Beat generation, died from a heart
attack on February 27, 1998. He 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 to do with the creative spirit. Hanging
out in Greenwich Village, in the early 50s, he met and was
influenced by Langston Hughes. He later met Jack Kerouac who
wrote a foreword for his first book of poems, River of
Red Wine, which received a favorable review in
Esquire Magazine. The two became friends and
frequented many of the same Greenwich Village bars. He later
became friends with the late Jazz great Charlie Mingus. The
two performed together in l978 at San Francisco’s California
Music Hall
Born of Russian-Romanian Jewish ancestry, under the name of
Harvey Martin Silvar, 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 the surname of his mother. 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 suffered from
diabetes.
There is little doubt that mainstream publishers found his
outspoken behavior offensive, which probably accounts for why
they never published one of the over twenty books he published
during his life time, all of them by small press publishers.
I was privileged to be a friend of his for over thirty-five
years. If there is such a word as "pure", Jack can lay claim
to it, for sadly poetry has become a business world where
public relations and back-stabbing have become finely tuned
arts, and Jack wanted no part of that 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. Indeed he boasted
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.
Jack 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 similes and
metaphors as we can see from the lines in a poem of his titled
Real Poem: A real poem is not 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.
While living, he never received the recognition Ginsberg or
Burroughs received, not even the recognition of Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, but the body of work he left behind is
considerable, and no doubt will some day earn him his rightful
place in Beat history. And didn’t Kerouac praise his poems for
their power to illuminate the Beauty of the everyday, for his
soulful tender rage, and enormous disappointment with the glut
of American materialism.
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. His poems ring true, because beyond the lines and
stanzas flow the energy of life. His voice was an original
one. No one tried to imitate it, as is the case with Bukowski,
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 real
friends saw through this crusty side to him, and focused on
his genuine love for the common man and woman
Ignored by the poetry establishment and to some extent the
larger alternative presses, he went about the business of
writing, fighting off the bitterness that has overcome so many
poets his age; surviving with the skills of a street fighter.
His words resounding like a hammer on a nail
His poems came from the heart and heartbreak, poems that were
questioning, probing, and often accusing, but always truthful.
His poems came from street life experience, not from reading
Charles Olson, Robert Creely, or William Stafford.
If he screamed poet too often and too loud, perhaps it's
because he was unjustly ignored by the literary establishment.
He saw the poet as a revolutionary whose purpose in life is to
free people from the slavery of stifling jobs and
relationships. He felt the job of the poet was to live poems
and set a fearless example for others. Only in San Francisco
was he afforded some degree of respect, although a few years
before his death he appeared on the "Late Night Show With Conan
O’Brien", and read a poem of his accompanied by a jazz
musician, Bob Feldman.
He was friends with the late Charles Bukowski who said in a
letter to me, “Jack is all right. His poems are total feelings
beating their heads on barroom floors. He is the last of the
Holy preachers sailing down Broadway singing the song. Of all
the people I’ve known, he comes closer to the utmost divinity,
the soothsayer, the gambler, the burning of stinking buckskin
than any man I’ve known.”
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.
One of his proudest accomplishments in later life was winning
a literary prize presented to him by Ken Keasey, for the
“best” live performance at Naropa in 1982. A night where he
made the elite (Ginsberg, Burroughs, Waldman) pale in
comparison. The prize, a bottle of scotch!
It’s sad that his enemies could not concentrate on his poems,
and ignore their personal dislike of him. For the strength of
his work far outweighed any weakness as a human being. His
poems are total feelings charging down at you from the
bullring, where life and death become one, and where the
winner too often is the one with a corrupt soul.
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.
In 2004 I was successful in getting a street in North Beach
named after him, just one block up from Bob Kaufman Alley. Two
old friends who had to die to get the recognition they
deserved in life.
A.D. Winans
09-28-07
