(An imprint of Michael Wiese Productions)
Take a journey into the heart and passion of one of the most brilliant voices of the American counterculture movement. ruth weiss innovated poetry with jazz in the San Francisco North Beach scene of the 1950s with contemporaries Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bob Kaufman, and others. For the first time in print, one of the last of the original Beat poets presents two masterpiece long form poems: I ALWAYS THOUGHT YOU BLACK (a tribute to her African-American artist friends) and COMPASS (about a road trip through Mexico).
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What People Say
“‘You’re what jazz and poetry are all about!’ I shouted at ruth weiss, rushing the stage after thrilling to her performance at Stockholm’s 1998 Spoken Word Festival. My first encounter with ‘the Goddess of the Beats’ continues today as she establishes herself as one of the few female giants who led the birth of Beatitude. Names appear—from Ginsberg to Kerouac to Lamantia—but in ruth’s ritualistic and evocative Can’t Stop the Beat, it’s the music tradition of acknowledging ‘personnel’—as she summons the sidemen with whom this feisty innovator crossed swords and arms. Sayin’ it plain: ever the rebel, ruth weiss embodies the sound. Live bebop become bebop. ruth weiss is speaking louder than ever! Listen with your heart!”
— Wanda Coleman, the L.A. Blueswoman, Recipient, the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, Nominee, Poet Laureate, State of California, 2005
“This book is an outstanding read for those who want to illuminate as they create. It’s a journey of an outstanding Beat poet, ruth weiss, who gave birth to her extraordinary talent after surviving extraordinary circumstances . . . It’s a journey of how her artistic spirit grew mixing her free form of improvisational words with the beat of blues and bebop as though she was born directly into the inner world of jazz.”
— Lloyd Clayton, President of the Board of the Mayme Clayton Library and Museum
“Jazz-poet-performer ruth weiss lived the lore of many of her associates in the Beat literary-arts movement. She’s a tenacious survivor and anomaly, being female, foreign born: Berlin (whose family escaped the Nazis by coming to the U.S. of A.), and fiercely independent. This fragmented Memoir-cum-Poetry gives a pungent and moving sense of her life and times.”
— Anne Waldman, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University
“This is a beautiful book, created with reverence for a woman who has lived as an artist for over 60 years, and whose many talents broke down the barriers between word, film, song, painting, and theater.”
— Randy Roark, author of Dissolve: Screenplays to the Films of Stan Brakhage and apprentice to Allen Ginsberg 1979-1997
“The publication of this book is enormously important. It resurrects important details of the life of one of the seminal figures of the beat movement, ruth weiss. Divine Arts presents selections from weiss’ entire oeuvre never before published, including a newly discovered text of the late 1950s. Part travel journal and part surreal dreamscape, no text of the beat era captures Mexico with more authenticity and immediacy than weiss’s 80-page COMPASS. The pages of this book turn themselves. Simply stated, you won’t be able to put it down.”
— Matt Gonzalez, former president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors
“I first heard many of the stories in Can’t Stop the Beat sitting with ruth late nights after a gig in Tommy’s Joynt on the corner of Geary and Van Ness in San Francisco. With beer and food on the table, ruth would pull out her journal and read. I was astounded not only by the words and the jazz inherent in them but also by the history of a generation. ruth weiss was far ahead of most by infusing film and music and poetry in her performances. Her time has finally arrived, especially with the genius that shines through in Can’t Stop the Beat.”
— Earl LeClaire, Poet, Sugar Grove, North Carolina
“Can’t Stop the Beat offers indelible evidence that the beat, indeed, goes on. And who better to demonstrate this dancing continuity than ruth weiss, a pioneer in joining poetry and jazz in a radical vernacular that helped melt the frozen heart of American Cold War culture and blew open new portals for exploration. ruth’s work remains as lucid, instructive, and lush with sensuous delight as it was in 1950. All praise to Divine Arts for refreshing our acquaintance with this neglected American original.”
— Jim Dodge, author of Fup, Not Fade Away, Stone Junction, Rain on the River
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ruth weiss is one of the last living significant poets of the Beat Generation. Born to a Jewish family during the rise of Nazism, she eventually made her way to the United States where she became friends with, and a contemporary of, the likes of Jack Kerouac and many other artists of the 1950s American counter-culture movement of San Francisco (specifically in North Beach). In the 1960s she began spelling her name in lowercase letters in a symbolic protest against “law and order” since in her birthplace of Germany all nouns are capitalized. She continues to perform live in North Beach and at many jazz and poetry festivals around the world. In this age of high-speed information exchange, she still uses her “Loyal Royal” metal typewriter, and lives deep in the Northern California forests of Mendocino County, USA.
i’ve been on the run
i’ve been through flood
i’ve been through fire
flashbacks
1928 born in berlin. 1933 escape to vienna. write first poems. 1938 left for new york. start to write in english. since 1998 — 60 years later — i’m back in europe performing, invited to JAZZ FEST BERLIN 2000. the mayor of vienna awards me a bronze medal in 2006 for literary achievement.
chicago teens. chicago near north side. bohemia & be bop. 1950 hitched to greenwich village. 1950 on to new orleans old french quarter. 1952 san francisco north beach. 1956 put poetry with jazz on the stage at THE CELLAR.
i love movies. have made them, been in them — sometimes fiction, sometimes fact. then come the plays. three of them performed in vienna 2006. since 1965 exhibits of watercolor – haiku.
i’ve barely begun. since 1982 from albion on the california coast in mendocino.
ruth weiss