With the rise of the Beat movement and writers like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, women writers of the generation were often overlooked and ridiculed. But, in the conformist 50s, there was a group of women fighting against the constraints of family and culture as independent writers and artists. As Brenda Knight wrote in Women of the Beat Generation, “Women in the fifties in particular were supposed to conform like Jell-O to a mold. There was only one option: to be a housewife and mother. For the women profiled here, being Beat was far more attractive than staying chained to a brand-new kitchen appliance.”
Protestor by Name
ruth weiss was born in Berlin in 1928. Her Jewish family escaped to Vienna in 1933 and in 1939 fled to Holland on the last train allowed to cross the Austrian border and boarded a ship for the United States. Much of weiss’ extended family died in the Nazi concentration camps.
Once in New York, weiss was placed in a children’s home to prevent her from wandering the streets alone, since her parents were forced to work long hours. She wrote her first poem at the age of five.
Eventually, the family moved to Chicago. In 1946, they returned to Germany. weiss spent two years in Switzerland at the College of Neuchatel and hitchhiked through the countryside. Her family returned to Chicago in 1948. Here, weiss moved into the Art Circle, a rooming house for artists on the Near North Shore, where she gave her first reading to jazz in 1949.
In 1952, she hitchhiked from Chicago to San Francisco’s North Beach, moving into an apartment that was later occupied by Allen Ginsberg. She wrote poetry and began to hang out in the Black Cat, a bar two blocks away, the Fillmore at Bop City and Jackson’s Nook.
weiss published in the majority of the early issues of Beatitude, one of the first magazines to give voice to the Beat Generation.
weiss’ first marriage was to artist Mel Weitsman in 1957. They split up in 1963. Her second marriage was to sculptor Roy Isbell in 1966, but less than a year later, Roy, imprisoned on a drug charge, was murdered in prison by guards. She met her life partner, artist Paul Blake, in North Beach in 1967.
weiss spells her name in lowercase as a protest against "law and order," since in her birthplace of Germany all nouns are spelled capitalized.
She has run various poetry series in San Francisco, including Minnie’s Can-Do Club, Intersection, and a poetry theatre, Surprise Voyage, at the Old Spaghetti Factory. Some of her written works include Steps, South Pacific, Light and Other Poems and 13 Haiku.
American Beat Poet from Britain
Denise Levertov was born Oct. 24, 1923 in Essex, England. The daughter of an Anglican priest, she was privately educated by her mother.
When Levertov was twelve, she sent several of her poems to T.S. Eliot. “Far from thinking her cheeky, the great poet wrote back two pages of ‘excellent advice’ and encouragement to continue writing based on what he deemed to be great promise,” Knight wrote in Women of the Beat Generation.
At 17, Levertov was published for the first time in Poetry Quarterly.
During World War II, Levertov spent three years in London rehabilitating war veterans. At night, after working in the hospital, she would write poems and, in 1946, she published her first book of poetry, The Double Image.
In 1948, Denise married American writer Mitchell Goodman and moved to the United States and the couple lived mainly in New York City.
In the fifties, Robert Creeley began to publish Levertov’s work in the Black Mountain Review and Origin. In 1957, she made a trip to San Francisco just as the hype of Ginsberg’s Howl was hitting the city.
Levertov and Goodman divorced in 1972. She died Dec. 20, 1997 at the age of 74.
Denise Levertov is one of the most acclaimed and highly awarded poets in literature. She has taught at a number of institutions, including Drew University, CCNY, Vassar, UC California, Stanford, and Tufts University. Her poems are part of many poetry curricula in America.
Some of her works include Here and Now, Life at War, Footprints, Candles in Babylon, Breathing the Water, and The Stream & the Sapphire: Selected Poems on Religious Themes.
Beat Writer, Black Mountain Poet and Zen Buddhist
Joanne Kyger was born Nov. 19, 1934. At five, she published her first poem in the literary and news magazine of Naples Elementary School in Long Beach, California.
As a young woman, Kyger went to the University of California, where she studied poetry and philosophy.
“In 1957, she moved north to San Francisco, where the ‘Howl’ obscenity trial was in full swing. She became immediately immersed in the city’s blooming poetry community, meeting, among others, Gary Snyder,” wrote Knight in Women of the Beat Generation.
Kyger married Gary Snyder in Japan in 1960. She lived in Kyoto for four years, writing poetry and practicing Zen Buddhism. In 1964, she returned to San Francisco and participated in the Berkeley Poetry Conference. In 1965, her first book of poems, The Tapestry and the Web, was published.
Her other works include Places to Go, Desecheo Notebook, Japan and India Journals 1960-1964, and The Dharma Committee.
These women, and many others like Diane di Prima, Joanna McClure, Hettie Jones, Carolyn Cassady, Elise Cowan, Joyce Johnson and Anne Waldman, began a revolution that redefined American literature.
Jennifer Berube - I am a freelance writer based in Victoria, B.C. I graduated from the Humber College Journalism program and have worked as a reporter for a ...
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