7 Comments

  1. Harry Boggs
    August 29, 2020 @ 12:13 am

    Run amok again with a real dumb launch pad date at the cape during post Cold War sniffles of Denver hot shot engineers that all lost the Beat of the solid state fuel once poured over Grant Street bohemians like Paul and The Jacks and Diane and ruth. Why don’t I just personally defend and roll up, the Apollo ethic and cursed pitiable Sunshine State sea oat chiggers. They only bite disillusioned rubbernecking NASA fan boys; but my kink, is hanging from a King Pao rooster rack on Stockton, not off a corny Valencia juice ball here below the smoke of dispensed rocket fuel and no rocket bebop to beat it outta hell-sworn U. S
    . Space Corps Purple Onion hilarity.
    ;Rhoade, at the Cape… Of no good hopes………

  2. Sharon Doubiago
    August 9, 2020 @ 12:02 pm

    ruth Weiss August 7, 2020
    ruth weiss lived on G Road South on Albion Ridge, (Mendocino),California when I lived on G Road North and was just becoming a poet. She had recently moved from here, North Beach, SF where I live now, where she is legendary. She was on that legendary “last train out of Vienna” before the Nazis closed the trains down. She was 13. When she made it to Chicago she dyed her hair green (or blue), and hitchhiked to San Francisco and got work in one of the nightclubs here in North Beach, danced nude and learned English by writing poems. She gave a fantastic reading here at the Beat Museum for her 90th birthday. She and the band were great, truly great. Her hair was blue (or green). She was an extraordinary human being. She called me when Janice Blue died In Fort Bragg on the Mendocino Coast not very long ago. Janice asked ruth to call me as soon as she died. I am honored to have known these awesome poets and what they came through, what they survived, how magnificent they were. (Janice did 9 years in prison for killing a big union man here in North Beach as he was severely beating his girlfriend. Her girlfriend. She told me that after she was released from prison that she could never return to North Beach, her beloved home, because she’d be killed. The poetry of these two women is very fine. I was just thinking of ruth the other day. I like to think that I was somehow present as she died.

  3. a.d.winans
    August 5, 2020 @ 4:03 pm

    I knew Ruth for over five decades. I published her in my Magazine, Second Coming, read with her, and socialized with her and mutual friends over that period of time. The below poem I wrote for her 88th Birthday and read it at a birthday celebration for her held at an art gallery in North Beach.

    POEM FOR RUTH WEISS

    she shadowboxes with father time
    day time night time bebop jazz time
    she dances with timeless time
    all rhythm no rhyme
    birds in flight flap their wings
    copulate with the wind
    feed off the flesh of the other
    in roller coaster freeze stop motion
    she sings her song day time night time
    bitch slaps father time
    Kaufman son of jazz in her heart
    Micheline in her blood
    jazz in the Fillmore
    jazz on Harlem rooftops
    full moon rising
    with poems that dig into my bones
    lubricate the gears of my mind
    lost in a haze of motionless motion

  4. Adrian Apollo
    August 4, 2020 @ 3:07 am

    How incredibly special it was to meet her at the documentary premier at the signing table. I mentioned to her that I felt guilty for asking her to sign two things, and she quickly replied: “Don’t feel guilty, because that’s how people control us.” I was a bit flabbergasted that she could interact with me in such a way as if she had known me already for 20 years. I was lucky enough to have decided not to wait too long in sending her a letter via snail mail on July 7th. What a privilege it was to have known her, albeit briefly.

  5. Alice Rogoff
    August 3, 2020 @ 1:19 pm

    I’m so sorry to hear ruth weiss is no longer with us. Her spirit and her poetry stays with us. I met ruth when she was the emcee at Minnie’s Can Do open mic in the Fillmore when I was in my 20s. She liked one of my poems and asked me to read at the Spaghetti Factory. That was something I always appreciated. Years later, ruth was a guest poet at a writing workshop I held at the the Mendocino Environmental Center in Ukiah. Then again, we met celebrating the poet Phyllis Holliday, a mutual friend, all going back to us having been at Minnie’s Can Do. ruthfest (with Hal) and the documentary were wonderful, as were as were all the recent performances I got to. As she allowed me to use her work from her book full circle, there is a piece about being a child in a home for children in the most recent Haight Ashbury Literary Journal. My mother also lived in Vienna as a child .

  6. Michael Wilcox
    August 3, 2020 @ 1:02 pm

    beat goddess, yes, a true original. rest in peace, dear ruth. “can’t stop the beat” is such a beautiful book.

  7. Elisabeth P. Montgomery
    August 2, 2020 @ 2:18 pm

    I met ruth weiss through The Beat Museum’s unique “take a poet to lunch,” a bidding fundraiser. I won the honor of a lifetime friend when I snagged that bid! As a teen growing up in Chicago, I loved the Beat Generation poets and developed a passion for the era since it connected to what I was living through in the late 1960s. I worked at Jane Addams Center Hull-House, a settlement rooted in American social democratic tradition, and a place that archived our immigrant ebbs and flows.
    Decades later, the Beats’ women poets became my favorites after discovering them honored at the Beat Museum. I then worked in San Francisco at the Hospitality House, a Tenderloin neighborhood settlement. We focused on healing using open art spaces.
    When I went for my North Beach lunch date with ruth, we had so much in common: Chicago, word jazz scenes, the Beat poets (I adored Diane DePrima and Gregory Corso), American folktales and oral history, China!, and her ex-husband Paul Blake, a Hospitality House art participant!
    Near ruth, I always feel like the only person in the room. Just by her slight turning toward me and eagerly encouraging, “go on, tell me your story.” Under her beautiful blue-eyed gaze, I transform into her endless tales of togetherness. One day, in 2018, we turned on the camera, and the film ruth weiss: The Beat Goddess emerged. And that legendary beat goes on.

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