ruth weiss’s DESERT JOURNAL: A Modern-Beat-Pomo Performance

Abstract

Few poets—male or female—can be said to embody Beat to the extent of the San Francisco jazz performance poet ruth weiss.¹ And few embody in that Beat such a sweep of twentieth-century aesthetic philosophies and practices. weiss, a contemporary of the first generation of Beat male writers and a self-identified Beat writer, is an artist whose poetic influences reside firmly in pre-and proto-Beat aesthetics that bridge and embrace the postmodern. Over her more than fifty years of artistic production, weiss has written plays, directed films, painted, acted, and published ten volumes of poetry—the first being Steps (1958), the longest and most complex DESERT JOURNAL (1977), and the newest A New View of Matter (1999), an anthology of her life’s work. Despite this proliferation, much of her work is now out of print, available only in libraries or by direct purchase from weiss herself. Although continuing to write and perform, weiss remains relatively unknown outside circles of Beat fans and Beat scholars. As such, she stands on the margins of literary history, a living testament to the persistence of Beat to appropriate, innovate, agitate, and survive.