I  guess I am privileged. I know, have published, have interviewed and exchanged  letters with a well-known North Beach poet, who harks back to the days of  Kerouac, Ginsberg, and others of that ilk, A.D. Winans. Winans, poet and friend  to the late, great Beat poet, Jack Micheline, sent me a collection of  Micheline’s poems, “Sixty-Seven Poems for Downtrodden Saints.” Charles Bukowski  said of Micheline in a letter to A.D. Winans:

”  Jack loves the sun…and the horse and the streets, and he loves the strong and  the common people. Jack is the last of the holy preachers sailing down Broadway  singing the song…He’s fought hard…sleeping on people’s rugs, sponging,  playing the clown for a night’s sleep, a piece of stale bacon…”

From  reading Micheline’s work it seemed that the Buk hit it right on the head. His  work is generously laced with booze, “broads”, the horses and hounds, the  down-and-out, the gone-to-seed, the neer-do-well, the wail of the sax and sex,  in short, a long funny/mournful  Blues  song.

Micheline was concerned with the  plight of the common man. He was in the tradition of Kerouac, living as the  vagabond-bohemian bard. He never pandered to the academics, and his poetry  lacked any hint of pretense.

Jack  Micheline (aka Harvey Martin Silver)  was  born on Nov. 6, 1929 in the Bronx, N.Y.  During the 1950’s he spent years traversing the country and working Blue  Collar jobs. He  was everything from a dishwasher to a street singer. His first poem published  under the Micheline name was STEPS in Le Roi Jones’ magazine YUGEN (1958). He  was included in two early Beat anthologies, THE BEATS by Seymour Krim and THE  BEAT SCENE edited by Elias Wilentz. He had several collections of poetry  published including: I KISS ANGELS (1964) and NORTH OF MANHATTAN: 1954-1975. He  self-published his first collection of stories: IN THE BRONX AND OTHER STORIES  in 1965. In June of 1997, Micheline’s book, SIXTY-SEVEN POEMS… was published  by FMSPW in San Francisco, his home for many years. In 1998 Micheline died from  a heart attack on a Subway in the same city.

The  poems in this collection have a stong sense of setting. They take place in  mostly urban settings, where the working-stiff and the marginal characters tend  to hang. Micheline constantly celebrates the outsider looking in at the  absurdities of the mainstream. In POEM TO THE FREAKS, he writes: ” To live as I  have done is surely absurd,/ in cheap hotels and furnished rooms,/to walk up  side streets and down back alleys,/talking to oneself/ and screaming to the sky  obscenities…/ Drink to wonder/Drink to me/ Drink to madness and all the  stars…”

Contrary to popular notions,  Micheline raises a defiant cup and embraces the life of an often-indigent poet.  IN CHASING KEROUAC’S SHADOW, Micheline again sets himself up as a downtrodden  bum, only to come back and celebrate the fact:

” I  am the gray Fox some schmuck The old pro chasing the mad dream The crazy  Jew himself, I only know when the cock rises and the crow howls, To eat,  to drink, to take a leak,… Let’s sing a song, For those who chase the  night For those that dance with light… The road The vagabond The dreamers, the dancers, the unsung, Fuck the Gung  Ho!”

It  seems evident in every poem that Micheline knew where he was from, and would not  let the reader forget it. He was a street kid from the Bronx, a stumble bum from  ‘Frisco, and a snake oil salesman. In SOUTH STREET PIERS, the poet describes the  setting in where he hopes to have his ashes scattered to the wind:

“…the red brick warehouse stands the stevedores haul the rigs to the masts the kids fight in the  streets… the cleaning girls are scrubbing Maiden Lane, the smoke pours  stacks from the Brooklyn shore– the fog horn tickles my belly I hear  the drums beat throw my ashes from the pier when I die.”

This  collection of poems (many of them unpublished before), are not all stellar.  Often they are raw, violent and vulgar. Yet, they are a fitting tribute to a man  who represented a vanishing breed of poets. Throughout the book are photos of  the poet and his friends, and samples of his prolific body of artwork. It is  also an important historical and artistic document of an era and a movement,  that will be a great interest to scholars, students, and readers in years to  come.