A Conversation with ruth weiss
By Walker Brents

Photo Wm Westwick

The original Beat Revolution long outlived its proverbial fifteen minutes and entered the world of legend. Brenda Knight's book, Women of the Beat Generation, brought a previously neglected aspect of the Beat epic into the light. ruth weiss, hailed by Herb Caen as the "Beat Generation Goddess," stood at her own artistic brink long before many of us were born. Now her books appear in more than fifty special collections at libraries and universities from coast to coast. Her work with filmmaker Steven Arnold premiered at Cannes in 1969. Her film, The Brink, screened in 1996 at the Whitney Museum in New York, the Pacific Film Archive, and the Venice Biennale Film Festival. A gracious poet and a generous being, ruth weiss exemplifies the Beat ethos of uniqueness, spontaneity, and truth well told.

Walker Brents: To the general reader, the "Beat Generation" means Ginsberg and Kerouac and all that. But what stories still need to be told? What is your own place in relation to the figures we already know?
ruth weiss: Well, I arrived in San Francisco in l952, hitchhiking from Chicago. So I was there before that whole thing happened. I went to North Beach, so I was right in the center of all that when it did happen, which was in the mid-Fifties. My own place? Well, one of the things I think that I was central to was that I actually innovated poetry to jazz. A year after I got to San Francisco, I ran into a friend of mine from New Orleans, a keyboard player named Johnny Elgin. He said, "You know, I'm married to this lady, and she lives up on Church and l9th Street. There's a place there we call Hillhaven, and a lot of musicians are living there. We jam in the boiler room four or five times a week. Why don't you come over and join us?" So I did that, and sometimes I'd just listen, and sometimes I'd make up sounds. Sometimes I'd throw a poem in, one I'd improvise or one I'd made up before. We were just having jams; it wasn't for an audience or anything. When The Cellar opened up on Green Street, I was working there as a waitress. Wednesdays were poetry and jazz night. The musicians had no idea what I was going to do, but I had set up for myself a program of poems. I'd give them some hints or notes, and maybe direct which sound I wanted, but it was an improvisation as far as our connection. The musicians were never in the background. It was a dialogue, and I do this today even more than then.

Music and words—where does one leave off and the other begin?
I think you just have to hear it. I love bebop. I was connected to it back in the Forties in Chicago. That was my kind of sound. There are many kinds of jazz, but my poetry really worked well with that. In l949 in Chicago, I was living at a place called The Art Circle, down in the basement. A painter named Ernest Alexander came down the stairs and said, "Come up and listen to this jam." I said, "I'm busy," but he grabbed the poem I was working on from my hand and said, "Oh, they've gotta hear this." So he pulled me upstairs, and I'm standing there with paper trying to read to them and instead of sitting and listening, the musicians just started jumping in and playing behind me. So that was the first time I did that, though the first time in public was at The Cellar in '56.

It is told that Kerouac once said to you, "You write better haiku than I do."
You wanna know how that happened? Well, I lived at the Hotel Wentley in '53 or '54. Kerouac was in San Francisco at that time. He'd come by usually at two, three, or four in the morning. He always had his bottle of "dago red," we called it, and I drank my beer, and we'd sit down and write haiku and just try to have fun with that. We were not lovers; we were just buddies, which is why he treated me so well. His women he didn't treat so well. Then he'd usually pass out, and Neal would come by. By then it was maybe an hour until dawn. He'd have a car with him, which we would call a "short" in those days. It's a known story that there was no car that could be locked from Neal. He would pick it with I-don't-know-what. What he would do is steal a car, run it until the gas ran out, leave it, then pick another car. He wasn't interested in stealing cars; he just wanted a ride. You see what I mean? Anyway, he'd wake up Jack and get him in the car. Jack would be in back, and I'd be up front with Neal. Then we'd go over to Potrero Hill from North Beach. You know the sun rises from over the Bay, and you can really see it from there. There's a street and it's about a block and a half long, and it winds like Lombard, but it's unknown. It was a two-way street in those days, and he would gun that car up, and zoom down that hill. If there ever had been a car coming the other way, I wouldn't be here now. I don't do that kind of stuff anymore. I didn't know Neal too well; it was Jack I saw more often. Jack would say, "You write better haiku," and I would say to him, "You're the novelist." You know, today, we start talking about ourselves, facts of our lives, where we grew up, but in those days we didn't do any of that. We would talk more of the moment. I don't think people knew I'd escaped Nazi Germany; it never came up. We didn't know of each other's brothers and sisters or if we'd gone to universities, or grown up in Hell's Kitchen.

So people tended to talk more about their perceptions of that moment or that day?
Yeah, exactly. Or ideas. We were always high on ideas.

A line in your poetry struck me: "The eye a reflection of stars / what put us here? / The self of course."
That sounds familiar. That's a poem from around '95, and I wrote it in Mexico. It's a reflection of all my friends, most of them poets, who had died or wanted to die in Mexico. Paul [her partner of 34 years] and I had been camping on the beach down in Baja, and we decided to stay one night in a hotel. I stayed up all night there in the room and wrote the poem, remembering my friends.

Has the "self" put us here? Here now?
Well, I really believe in rebirth. Paul and I have known each other many lifetimes. We met in '67—the Summer of Love. I had no idea there was ever going to be any romantic involvement, but in September of that year we moved down to L.A. He was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, and he had to be there to finish up his stint working in the psych ward at Los Angeles General. Anyway, I definitely believe in rebirth. I also believe we choose our own parents. I believe we choose where we are to be reborn and as what. Our soul does, for certain lessons. Most people, including myself, wonder why we were born to the parents we were born to. When you're of a different element, you wonder what am I doing in this family? I believe there are personal searches; our soul needs to learn certain lessons. Planet Earth is a school. Okay, that kind of gives you a concept. Through my poetry I've found the truth of this, looking for my own answers. It wasn't through my Jewish religion, or joining the Buddhists, or anything like that. My own search—that's my belief. I wouldn't put it on anybody else. So I think that's where the line you quoted came from.

Do you think our lives are stories or poems? Are our stories all interconnected?
I believe in synchronicity. I think there are reasons certain circumstances happen. I don't think it's all set up. I'm not a fatalist. It isn't that the whole map of your life is laid out and you're only supposed to be doing this or that. There are choices all along the path.

I think of life as an improvisation, in a way.
Right, exactly. It's like hitting that right riff.

Jack Hirschmann said, "Verbal motion becoming harmonious with a universe of rhythm is what her work essentializes."
That's an apt statement. My biggest compliment—it's happened again and again—is that musicians consider me a musician. If you heard the same poem of me just reading, and then to jazz, it's completely different.

It's a great mystery to me—rhythm, music, and the word—and how they interrelate, changing from moment to moment.
Bebop is a lot of riffing; it wasn't written down. I'll tell you this: I arrived here as a refugee from Vienna in 1939. I was one of the lucky ones. My mother and father and I managed to get out. All of my mother's relatives except one uncle died at Auschwitz. I have no brothers or sisters, and of course my parents are gone now, so my one family is Paul, and I consider his family my family. Anyway, when I arrived in the United States my parents put me in a children's home. Well, nobody there spoke German, so here I am in a strange land and a strange place, and nobody is speaking my language. So the way I learned English was by sound—through osmosis—the way a baby learns. This is the way I learned, and I think it came out years later in jazz. I will meet musicians and prepare for a performance. I'll always let them know, don't worry about the meaning, just listen to my voice. Just treat me like an instrument, and it's going to work. Usually it does.

You went to a Catholic boarding school for eighth grade?
My mother was in Yugoslavia during the first World War, 1914 to 1918. Even though she was Jewish, her parents had put her in a Catholic boarding school for safety. Well, she loved it. So my parents put me in a Catholic boarding school for eighth grade. And I hated it, locked up, so to speak. But it turned out that my teacher, Sister Eulogia, really recognized my writing skill, and she clearly encouraged it, so that when I was twelve I wrote a novel and several volumes of poetry, which I don't have anymore. This nun, Sister Eulogia, said something I will never forget: "You have a wonderful lyric sense, and I love your poems, but the thing is you always talk about nature; you never talk about people." She could see that I was feeling alienated from people. So I started looking for a way for people to enter into my work. I often did haiku-type things, which I didn't know were called haiku, where I just had a few words. You see, I believe in understatement.

ruth weiss will perform her poetry with jazz accompaniment at the Upper Grant Avenue Fall Art Fair (between Green and Filbert) on Sunday, September 22.