Stuart Perkoff — Collected Poems

July 29, 1930, St. Louis, Missouri–June 1974, Venice, California

Stuart Perkoff made Venice West speak in a voice at once wounded, comic, erotic, furious, and hungry for revelation. He helped open the Venice West Café in 1958, read through the night in storefronts and apartments, and entered the national record through Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, 1945–1960. Yet his work never stayed inside the public idea of Beat poetry. The Suicide Room established an inward lyric of extremity; the poems following his imprisonment turn hard experience into social anatomy; Kowboy Pomes dismantles the mythology of the American West; Only Just Above the Ground tests language against murder, madness, and human limitation; and Alphabet builds a late cosmology from Hebrew letters. This Collected Poems restores the books and recoverable magazine work, presenting a poet of streets, rooms, beaches, heroin, Jewish memory, American violence, and stubborn spiritual possibility.

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Catalogue

Venice West and the New American Poetry

Associations

Beat and New American Poetry Law and Civil Liberties Venice West

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Bibliography

Perkoff, Stuart. The Suicide Room. Jargon 22. Jargon Society / Jonathan Williams, 1956.

———. Poems from Prison. Bowery Press, 1969. Broadside.

———. Eat the Earth. Black Ace / Bowery Press, 1971.

———. We Carry Our Crises within Our Heads. Croupier Press, ca. 1971. Date requires confirmation.

———. Song for Max Finstein. Cranium Press, 1973.

———. Kowboy Pomes. Croupier Press, 1973.

———. The Moonwash Sea. Black Ace / Croupier Press, 1973.

———. Only Just Above the Ground. The Smith, special issue 28. Generalist Association, 1 Mar. 1973.

———. Alphabet. Red Hill Press, 1973.

———. Love Is the Silence: Poems 1948–1974. Edited by Paul Vangelisti, Red Hill Press, 1975.

———. Visions for the Tribe. Black Ace / Temple of Man, 1976.

———. How It Is, Doing What I Do: Poems and Drawings. Black Ace / Bowery Press / Temple of Man, ca. 1976–77. Catalogues differ on date.

———. Voices of the Lady. Edited by Gerald T. Perkoff. Preface by National Poetry Foundation, 1998. ISBN 0943373484; OCLC 39876939.

Allen, Donald M., editor. The New American Poetry, 1945–1960. Grove Press, 1960. Includes “Flowers for Luis Buñuel,” “The Recluses,” and “Feasts of Death, Feasts of Love.”

Works About the Author

American Film Institute. AFI Catalog of Feature Films: Guns of the Trees. Cast record for Perkoff’s appearance as a poetry reader.

Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. “The Jargon Society.” Includes the publication record for The Suicide Room.

Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission. Venice West Café, Historic-Cultural Monument Application. 2010.

Maynard, John Arthur. Venice West: The Beat Generation in Southern California. Rutgers University Press, 1991.

Metzger, Joyce. “The Third Page: Voices of the Lady.” Empty Mirror, 2001.

Mohr, Bill. Hold-Outs: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance, 1948–1992. University of Iowa Press, 2011.

Smithsonian American Art Museum. “Stuart Perkoff.” Artist record used for authority control and related collections.

Timm, Christine. Review of Voices of the Lady. American Book Review, July–Aug. 1999.

University of California, Los Angeles, Library Special Collections. Stuart Z. Perkoff Papers, ca. 1952–1974, collection 1573. Six boxes; approximately three linear feet.

University of Southern California Libraries. The Venice West Café and the Beat Generation. Lawrence Lipton papers, interviews, and audio recordings.

Vangelisti, Paul. “Stuart Z. Perkoff.” The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America, edited by Ann Charters, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 16, Gale Research, 1983, pp. 446–48.

“Voices of the Lady.” Publishers Weekly, 29 Dec. 1997. Review of the National Poetry Foundation volume.

Stefans, Brian. “Los Angeles Poetry from the McCarthy to the Punk Eras.” A History of California Literature, edited by Blake Allmendinger, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 260–80.