Lenore Kandel (January 14, 1932, New York City - October 18, 2009, San Francisco, California) was an American poet.

Kandel was briefly notorious as the author of a short book of poetry, The Love Book. A small pamphlet consisting of four poems, The Love Book provoked censorship with its poem, "To Fuck with Love." Police seized the work as being in violation of state obscenity codes, from both City Lights Books and The Psychedelic Shop in 1966. Subsequently Kandel gained cause célèbre status. ^[1] She herself defended her verse as "holy erotica." ^[2] A jury declared the book obscene and lacking in any redeeming social value in 1967 and sales went up; Kandel thanked the police by giving 1 percent of all profts to the Police Retirement Association. ^[3] The decision was overturned on appeal and the book continued to sell well. ^[4]

Kandel was a student of Zen before she moved from her native New York City to San Francisco in 1960. There she met author Jack Kerouac, who later immortalized Kandel as Romana Swartz, "a big Rumanian monster beauty," in his novel Big Sur (1962). In the novel, she is described as being the girlfriend of Dave Wain, who was based on Lew Welch. "Dave" describes how she walked around the "Zen-East House" wearing only purple panties. Kerouac described her as "intelligent, well read, writes poetry, is a Zen student, knows everything [...]" (Big Sur, p. 75).

Along with Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Michael McClure and others, Kandel was a speaker at the Human Be-In in the Golden Gate Park polo fields on January 14, 1967. The only woman to speak from the stage, Kandel defiantly read from The Love Book. It was her 35th birthday that day, and McClure later stated, "The entire crowd of 20,000 or 30,000 people sang 'Happy Birthday' to her."^[5]

She published her only full-length book of poems, Word Alchemy, in 1967. Other works include An Exquisite Navel, A Passing Dragon, and A Passing Dragon Seen Again, published by Three Penny Press in 1959, although these are not so well known. Several of her poems also appeared along with Walter C. Brown's in Beat and Beatific II in 1959. She appears in the Kenneth Anger film Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), smoking a marijuana cigarette contained in a miniature skull, and she was one of 15 people interviewed in Voices from the Love Generation (Little, Brown and Company, 1968).

In 1970, Kandel was severely injured in a motorcycle accident with her then-husband Billy Fritsch (poet and member of the Hells Angels). Despite her withdrawal from public life during and after her long convalescence, she continued to write. In 2003 a limited edition of her book The Love Book was republished by Superstition Street Press, a San Francisco publishing company.

She died at home on October 18, 2009, of complications from lung cancer, with which she had been diagnosed several weeks earlier.^[6]

In 2012 Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel was published by Berkeley-based independent publisher North Atlantic Books. It features 80 of her poems, many of which had never before been published. ^{[7] [8]}

References[link]

External links[link]

• Table of Contents, Volume 1, No. 1 The Divine Animal
• Introduction to Lenore Kandel
• Lenore Kandel: A Critical Appreciation
• Three poems by Lenore Kandel, from The Love Book and Word Alchemy
• "Gregory..." by Lenore Kandel (in remembrance of Gregory Corso)
• Works by or about Lenore Kandel in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Further reading[link]

By Lenore Kandel

• Lenore Kandel, Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel, North Atlantic Books, 2012, ISBN-10: 1583943722, ISBN-13: 978-1583943724
• Limited edition of The Love Book published in 2003, ISBN 0-9665313-1-0
• Lenore Kandel, Word Alchemy, Grove Press, Evergreen trade paperback, 1967, ISBN 1-299-22275-7
• Lenore Kandel, The Love Book, Stolen Paper Review, San Francisco, 1966, paperbound, 8 pages
• Lenore Kandel, A Passing Dragon See Again, Three Penny Press, Studio City, 1959.
• Lenore Kandel, An Exquisite Navel, Three Penny Press, Studio City, 1959.
• Lenore Kandel, A Passing Dragon, Three Penny Press, Studio City, 1959?.

Anthologies featuring Kandel's work

• Brenda Knight, Women of the Beat Generation (Conari Press, 1996) contains a biographical portrait of Kandel, as well as three of her poems
• Richard Peabody (ed.), A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation (Serpents Tail, 1997), pp 100-103
• Carole Tonkinson (ed.), Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation (Riverhead Books, 1995), pp 260-272.
• Anne Waldman (ed.), Beat Book: Writings from the Beat Generation (Shambhala, 2007)
• Carmela Ciuraru (ed.), Beat Poets (Everyman's Library, 2002)
• David Steinberg (ed.), The Erotic Impulse (Tarcher, 1992) contains "Seven of Velvet," which is not available in other collections
• Alan Kaufman and S.A. Griffin (ed.), The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Basic Books, 1999)
• Jenny Skerl (ed.), Reconstructing the Beats (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), Ronna C. Johnson, chapter 6, contains an essay about Kandel and selections from her poems
• Leonard Wolf (ed.), in collaboration with Deborah Wolf, Voices from the Love Generation (Little, Brown and Company, 1968) hardcover, 283 pages, interviews done in Haight-Ashbury

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (July 2011)

Richard Grossinger (born 1944) is an American writer, anthropologist, and publisher of North Atlantic Books in Berkeley, California.^[1]

Biography[link]

Grossinger (born Richard Towers) was born and raised in New York City, attended Horace Mann School, Amherst College, and the University of Michigan, getting a B.A. in English at Amherst and a Ph.D. in anthropology at Michigan.^[2] With his wife (then girlfriend at Smith College) Lindy Hough, he founded the Io journal in 1964, and created North Atlantic Books in Vermont in 1974.^[3] Between 1970 and 1972 he taught anthropology at the University of Maine, Portland-Gorham, now the University of Southern Maine, and between 1972 and 1977 he taught interdisciplinary studies (including alchemy, Melville, Classical Greek, Jungian psychology, and ethnoastronomy) at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont.^[4] An ethnographer and self described psychospiritual explorer as well as a writer and publisher, he has studied or trained in homeopathic medicine, somatic theory, t'ai chi ch'uan, craniosacral therapy, qigong, Breema, yoga, and psychic healing.^[5] His brother was Jonathan Towers, a poet who committed suicide in 2005.^[6] His daughter is filmmaker, author and performance artist Miranda July.

Bibliography[link]

Books written by Grossinger[link]

This section requires expansion with: name of publisher and ISBN in the books.

• Solar Journal (Oecological Sections) (1970) Black Sparrow Press ISBN 0-87685-011-5
• Spaces Wild & Tame (1971) Mudra ISBN 978-0-685-22801-2
• The Book of the Earth and Sky (1971, 2 Vols) Black Sparrow Press ISBN 978-0-87685-090-9
• Mars: A Science Fiction Vision (1972) Io Books [No ISBN]
• Two Essays (Sparrow 7) (1973) Black Sparrow Press [No ISBN]
• The Continents (1973) Black Sparrow Press ISBN 0-87685-162-6
• The Book of Being Born Again into the World (1974) North Atlantic Books ISBN 0-913028-29-0
• Book of the Cranberry Islands (1974) Black Sparrow Press ISBN 0-87685-211-8
• The Windy Passage from Nostalgia (1974) North Atlantic Books ISBN 0-913028-30-4
• The Long Body of the Dream (1974) North Atlantic Books ISBN 0-913028-28-2
• Martian Homecoming at the All-American Revival Church (1974) North Atlantic Books ISBN 0-913028-21-5
• The Slag of Creation (1975) North Atlantic Books ISBN 0-913028-32-0
• The Provinces (1975) North Atlantic books ISBN 0-913028-31-2
• Unfinished Business of Doctor Hermes (1976) North Atlantic Books ISBN 0-913028-43-6
• Planet Medicine: From Stone-Age Shamanism to Post-Industrial Healing (1980/1990) North Atlantic Books ISBN 1-55643-019-1
• The Night Sky: The Science and Anthropology of the Stars and Planets (1981/1988/1992) North Atlantic Books ISBN 1-55643-142-2
• Nuclear Strategy and the Code of the Warrior (1984) North Atlantic Books ISBN 0-938190-50-4
• Embryogenesis: Species, Gender and Identity (1985/2000) North Atlantic Books ISBN 0-938190-82-2
• Waiting for the Martian Express: Cosmic Visitors, Earth Warriors, Luminous Dreams (1989) North Atlantic Books ISBN 1-55643-051-5
• Homeopathy: An Introduction for Skeptics and Beginners (1993) North Atlantic Books ISBN 1-55643-165-1
• Planet Medicine: Modalities (1995/2003) North Atlantic books ISBN 1-55643-391-3
• New Moon (1996) Frog Ltd ISBN 1-883319-44-7
• Out of Babylon: Ghosts of Grossinger's (1997) Frog Ltd ISBN 1-883319-57-9
• Homeopathy: The Great Riddle (1998) North Atlantic Books ISBN 1-55643-290-9
• Embryos, Galaxies, and Sentient Beings: How the Universe Makes Life (2003) North Atlantic Books ISBN 1-55643-419-7
• On the Integration of Nature: Post 9-11 Biopolitical Notes (2005) North Atlantic Books ISBN 1-55643-603-3
• Migraine Auras: When the Visual World Fails (2006) North Atlantic Books ISBN 1-55643-619-X
• The New York Mets: Myth, Ethnography, Subtext (2007) Frog Ltd ISBN 1-58394-205-X
• The Bardo of Waking Life (2008) North Atlantic Books ISBN 1-55643-700-5
• 2013: Raising the Earth to the Next Vibration (2010) North Atlantic Books 9781556438783

Works edited by Grossinger[link]

• The Alchemical Tradition in the Late Twentieth Century (1970)
• Baseball Diamonds: Tales, Traces, Visions & Voodoo from a Native American Rite (1980 with Kevin Kerrane)
• The Dreamlife of Johnny Baseball (1987 with works by Tom Clark, Jerome Klinkowitz, Grossinger, W.P. Kinsella, Richard Russo, Nancy Willard)
• Into the Temple of Baseball (1990/2000 with Kevin Kerrane)

Select Io Journal editions[link]

• #4: Alchemy Issue. 1967.
• #5: Doctrine of Signatures. 1968.
• #6: Ethnoastronomy Issue. 1969.
• #8: Dreams Issue on Oneirology. 1971.
• #9: Mars: A Science Fiction Vision. 1971.
• #10: Baseball Issue. 1971.
• #12: Earth Geography Booklet No. 1. 1972.
• #13: Earth Geography Booklet No. 2. 1972.
• #14: Earth Geography Booklet No. 3. 1973.
• #15: Earth Geography Booklet No. 4. 1973.
• #18: Early Field Notes From the All-American Revival Church. 1973.
• #19: Mind/Memory/Psyche. 1974.
• #20: Biopoesis. 1974.
• #21 'Vermont: Geology and Mineral Industries, Flora, Fauna & Conditions of Sky (1974)
• #22: An Olson-Melville Sourcebook, Vol. 1: The New Found Land/North America. 1976.
• #23: An Olson-Melville Sourcebook, Volume 2: The Mediterranean. 1976.
• #24: Baseball, I Gave You All the Best Years of My Life (1977 with Kevin Kerrane; 1992 with Lisa Conrad)
• #25: Ecology and Consciousness: Traditional Wisdom on the Environment. 1978.
• #26: Alchemy: Pre-Egyptian Legacy, Millennial Promise 1979.
• #31: Alchemical Tradition in the Late Twentieth Century. 1983/1991.
• #34: The Temple of Baseball. 1985.
• #37: Planetary Mysteries 1986.
• #46: Nuclear Strategy and the Code of the Warrior (with Lindy Hough). 1992

References[link]

External links[link]

• North Atlantic Books
• The Mystery of Incarnation with Richard Grossinger, Ph.D. at intuition.org website
• The Mystery of Creation with Richard Grossinger, Ph.D. at intuition.org website

Gerald Nicosia, born November 18, 1949 in Berwyn, Illinois, is a freelance journalist, interviewer, and literary critic.

He received a B.A. and an M.A. in English and American Literature, with Highest Distinction in English, from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1971 and 1973 respectively.

He has written book reviews for the past 25 years for many major American newspapers including The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Kansas City Star, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Oakland Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times.

Nicosia is probably best known as a biographer of Jack Kerouac.^[1] He has also been an advocate and supporter of the late Jan Kerouac, Jack's estranged daughter.

In 2001 Nicosia's "Home to War" was published. The book covers the problems faced by Vietnam Veterans returning to an ungrateful nation. It also discusses the battle to stop the use of Agent Orange. ^[2]

In January, 2009, Nicosia edited and published Jan Kerouac: A Life in Memory, containing photos and written essays and remembrances about her.

Bibliography[link]

• Memory Babe (Grove Press, 1983, reprint: University of California Press, 1994) ISBN 0-520-08569-8^[3]

• Home to War (Carroll & Graf, 2001, new edition, 2004) ISBN 0-7867-1403-4

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official Website
• PEN Oakland Official Website
• Interview with Gerald Nicosia by Jonah Raskin, The Rag Blog, April 26, 2012

This article about a United States journalist born in the 1940s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Ruth Weiss or better known as ruth weiss (born 1928) is a German-born poet, performer, playwright and artist who made her home and career in the United States, as a member of the Beat Generation, a label she has recently embraced ^[1] and that is used frequently by historians detailing her life and works.

weiss spells her name in lowercase as such as a symbolic protest against "law and order," since in her birthplace of Germany all nouns are spelled capitalized.

Biography[link]

Early life[link]

ruth weiss came from a climate of political turmoil. Born to a Jewish family in the tumultuous years of the rise of Nazism, her early childhood was spent fleeing her home with her parents. Their bid for survival took them from their home of Berlin to Vienna and eventually to Holland, whereby weiss and her family left for the United States. In 1939, she and her family arrived in New York City and from there moved on to Chicago. weiss excelled academically at school in Chicago, graduating in the top 1% of her class. However, in 1946 she and her parents moved back to Germany, this time not as German citizens but as American citizens, as her parents worked for the Army of Occupation. weiss went on to school in Switzerland and spent much time hitchhiking and writing - two skills that would prove pivotal to her future in the American Bohemian Beat scene.^[2] In 1948, weiss and her parents moved back to the United States, resettling in Chicago.

Early Career 1940s - 1950s[link]

weiss left home in 1949, at first staying in Chicago. She originally moved into the Art Circle - a housing community for artists. It was in this community that she began experimenting with poetry and jazz. In 1952, she left Chicago and hitchhiked to San Francisco, where she began jamming and reading poetry with street musicians. Shortly after, several of her friends opened a club called The Cellar, in which she would regularly hold poetry and jazz sessions every Wednesday night. Eventually, weiss felt that she needed a break from city life and took off for California's Big Sur, a place made famous as a Beat center due to Jack Kerouac's novel of the same name. In Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers, weiss details the events at The Cellar following her leave. In regards to the poetry-jazz sessions, she tells her interviewer, "...other well-known poets, whose names I'm not going to mention because everyone knows them, ended up doing the same thing. Only they were very smart. They recorded them and got records out of them. So nobody knows that I did this, innovate jazz and poetry in San Francisco in 1956 at The Cellar." ^[3] During this period in her life, she also began publishing proliferously in the magazine Beatitude, one of the first magazines for Beat writers.^[4]

ruth weiss and Jack Kerouac first met in 1952. They had, in her words, a "fantastic connection on multiple levels." ^[5] It was two years after Keroauc had published his first novel, The Town and the City, though weiss did not yet know that he had written and published a book.^[5] Instead, weiss and Kerouac engaged upon a "haiku dialogue," spending hours over a bottle of wine writing haiku back and forth to one another. Occasionally Neal Cassady would show up and the three of them would drive off, adventuring outwards in California at dangerous speeds up dangerous hills, thriving on the excitement of the ride and one another's presence.^[5]

In 1957, weiss started a "salon kind of situation" in her apartment, creating a gathering space for poets and writers to read and discuss their works.^[6] It was also in that year that she married her first husband, Mel Weitsman, a man who later became a Zen priest. Two years later in 1959, weiss published her book GALLERY OF WOMEN, a book composed in poetry, honoring the female poets who she most admired, paying homage to them by painting their portraits through her jazz-inspired poetry.^[4]

Later Career 1960s - 1970s[link]

In 1960, weiss finished her narrative poem "THE BRINK." Upon reviewing her poem, the painter Paul Beattie asked if weiss could turn it into a film script, a request which she willingly obliged. By 1961, weiss had finished her creation and filming of THE BRINK, incorporating "found objects" into her style and philosophy towards the film.^[7]

However, DESERT JOURNAL is the work that weiss herself describes as her masterpiece and her most significant work to-date. The piece is an exploration of a mind in a desert. The poem's subject spends 40 days and nights in a desert and each day of the desert is limited to a poem of five pages, each day being its own poem within the greater whole. Everyday, the gender-warping subject of the poem has a new area of exploration and revelation, and the poem brings the reader through the highs and lows, the turmoil and the peace, that the disembodied protagonist transverses. weiss began writing this poem in 1961 and spent seven years on it, not completing it until 1968. Finally in 1977, weiss had the poem published.^[8] weiss describes that this poem, like the bulk of her work, is a performance piece, a piece whose meaning she can fully express only through enacting it.^[9]

weiss asserts that the period of the 60s is when she began spelling her name solely in lower case.^[10]

ruth weiss now: 1980s onwards[link]

ruth weiss has published many poems and anthologies in recent years, including Full Circle, a reflection on her escape from Nazi Germany. She continues to perform live in North Beach and at many jazz and poetry festivals. Her work also had a three month exhibition at the San Francisco Main Public Library.^[4]

In 1990, weiss won the Bay Area poetry slam and consequently released recordings of her poetry performance, entitled Poetry & Allthatjazz. ^[11]

In 1996, weiss' film THE BRINK was screened at the Whitney Museum.^[4]

Influences[link]

weiss credits Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, the French New Wave and Djuna Barnes, among many others, as her largest influences.

However, as she primarily considers herself a "jazz poet," she has also credited jazz and bebop as the art most influential upon her own. In Breaking the Rules of Cool, weiss recounts a night in 1949 while she was living in the Art Circle of Chicago. On this night, there was a crowd of people in her building having a jazz jam session downstairs while weiss was preoccupied writing in her room. However, a friend of hers paid a visit, read her work and recommended that she bring it downstairs and read it to the musicians. The musicians, far from halting their music to listen, listened by continuing to jam as she read, and likewise, weiss listened to and communicated with their jazz by incorporating it into her poem. It is that experience that she credits as the beginning of her "whole thing with jazz and poetry." ^[3]

Style[link]

weiss's philosophy behind her work incorporates several interlinking components: being a "street poet," being a "jazz poet," the idea of non-linearity and fragmentation, the idea of discipline and the bare "bones" of language.

Her focus upon succinctness and discipline is epitomized in her focus on haikus. She relishes the haiku for the discipline it imposes upon the writer and the way it forces the "fat" to be cut away from the poem, revealing the most essential elements of language.^[12]

Similarly, this focus upon "cutting out the fat" lies at the heart of her artistic journey with DESERT JOURNAL. One person who reviewed DESERT JOURNAL described weiss as "master of the eraser." ^[12] It is this ability to "erase" that characterizes weiss's work and that she herself finds most pivotal to her style. weiss describes it as epitomizing the process that she goes through with all her work: the idea of non-linearity, of beginning with a core and allowing the essential fragments that develop to become the substance of the piece.

weiss also cites being inspired by the "oral tradition." She explains this in light of her close friendship and artistic connection with the famed poet Madeline Gleason. Her poetry, she says, is a performance, it is something communicated by the voice and body.^[13]

Finally, weiss declares that while she's not a "street poet" in the traditional sense, her work resonates most in "street" settings or other unexpected places. She's found that her work is often most acclaimed, connected with and called for in places ranging from streets to pizza places to gay bars, drawing a large, diverse crowd.^[14]

Works[link]

Her works include:

• Steps (1958)
• GALLERY OF WOMEN (1959)
• South Pacific (1959)
• Blue in Green (1960)
• "THE BRINK" (1960) poem
• THE BRINK (1961) film
• "LIGHT and other poems" (1976)
• DESERT JOURNAL (1977)
• SINGLE OUT (1978)
• A NEW VIEW OF MATTER (1999)
• Full Circle (2002)

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Grace, Nancy M. and Ronna C. Johnson. Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998.
• Knight, Brenda, Anne Waldman and Ann Charters. Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution. Berkeley: Conari Press, 1996.

External links[link]

• http://www.digihitch.com/road-culture/beat-generation/474
• http://www.wireonfire.com/upsurge/interview1.html