JANINE POMMY VEGA WAY! ~

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JANINE POMMY VEGA POEM ~

 

Happy Birthday, Jim

JANINE POMMY VEGA ~THE BEAT SCENE (BURT GLINN) ~

 

Unfortunately unidentified as a photograph in this

marvelous book of the Beat era — this is

a very young Janine Pommy Vega —

perhaps in a bar sitting next to Jack Kerouac

who she did meet when she was fifteen years old.

It's the lonesome traveler's profile.

It's Janine's soulful search.

[ BA ]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JANINE 

TODAY 

5 February 1942

T H E     B E A T     S C E N E

JANINE POMMY VEGA ~ POEMS TO FERNANDO ~

 

Janine Pommy Vega (1942-2010) was born February 5 in Jersey City and grew up in Union City, N.J., the middle sibling of three. She graduated from high school as class valedictorian in 1960 and had already become intimate with major players in the Beat Generation. Gregory Corso became her liaison to life-long-friends Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, who became her lover. She remembers as a teenager meeting Jack Kerouac asleep under a table. Her life as a poet, teacher and traveler was forever a spiritual quest for transcendence which originally took her on the road at age sixteen to New York’s Lower East Side, later a marriage and early widowhood to the Peruvian painter Fernando Vega, who died of a heroin overdose in Ibiza, Spain in 1965. Her first book of poems Poems to Fernando was one of the earliest Pocket Poets (#22) by a woman author published by City Lights Books in 1968. Her posthumous book Janina would document this restless time period for the poet between Europe, the Middle East and America. By the early 1970s Janine would spend two years as a hermit on the Isla del Sol on Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. Her prose book Tracking the Serpent has been described as a feminist “On the Road” journeying with the poet on her visits in the 1980s to matriarchal worship sites in Ireland, England, France, Nepal and the Amazon. She trained herself to become a skilled hiker throughout the Catskill Mountains which was her primary dwelling for the last forty years of her life. A devoted teacher and activist for the rights of prisoners and children, Janine made her name and legend in the New York prisons and school system. The last ten years of her life were tough, a struggle with many medical maladies, but the poet persisted, reading her poetry to the public, often with music, wherever invited. Janine Pommy Vega died of a heart attack at her home in Willow, New York on December 23, 2010.

                                                                                                    

                                                                                — Bob Arnold

_________________________________

Janine Pommy Vega

Poems to Fernando

Longhouse, 2021

__________________

perfect-bound

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JANINE POMMY VEGA ~

 

 Today is

Janine Pommy Vega's

Birthday

( 1942- 2010 )

and this

Spring

we will celebrate

Janine

with a

new book of

vintage

poems —

watch this

post

for

details ~

Happy

Birthday !

Janine

__________

drawing by bob arnold

VISITING JANINE ~

 

The other day we went down to the Catskills to take care of Janine Pommy Vega’s grave site. Ten years ago already we chose the red Vermont granite for her stone, and I asked that “Poet” be all there was on the stone other than her name and date. She looks awful alone there, friends.  Susan noticed that, a woman to woman eye thing. I then took Susan to Philip Guston’s grave, Musa beside him. Now the PC crowd have canceled his very large and important exhibit of art work spanning a life time because it will include his dizzy Klansmen. Wait until 2024 the artsy legislatures command. To see one of those paintings, and I have in backwater Hanover, NH, is something to behold. In the cemetery all is equal so very early in the morning in the rain.

[ BA ]

Grasshopper, good singer!

Take care of my tomb

when I die

Janine loved this poem by Issa

translated by Nanao Sakaki

_______________________

UPDATE: GUSTON

photographs: bob arnold 

VISITING JANINE ~

 

The other day we went down to the Catskills to take care of Janine Pommy Vega’s grave site. Ten years ago already we chose the red Vermont granite for her stone, and I asked that “Poet” be all there was on the stone other than her name and date. She looks awful alone there, friends.  Susan noticed that, a woman to woman eye thing. I then took Susan to Philip Guston’s grave, Musa beside him. Now the PC crowd have canceled his very large and important exhibit of art work spanning a life time because it will include his dizzy Klansmen. Wait until 2024 the artsy legislatures command. To see one of those paintings, and I have in backwater Hanover, NH, is something to behold. In the cemetery all is equal so very early in the morning in the rain.

UPDATE: GUSTON

photographs: bob arnold 

JANINE POMMY VEGA & BETTY MACDONALD ~

click on, then use the link to 
you tube ~
don't miss it

HARD PRESS ~

There were 12 postcards designed and released by the poet Rochelle Kraut
in this series and here are a handful  —  
all drawn from poets who were moving 
through the East Village of New York in the 1980s.

STONE HUT ( 14 ) ~

The cairn Bob built for Janine Pommy Vega in our woodlot

48

When our close friend, the poet Janine Pommy Vega died at the age of 69 outside of Woodstock, New York (Willow), she had left a defined Will, and in that Will she made me the executor of her estate. She also stated that Susan and I would receive the copyright to her name. In short order, I met what was left of her immediate family: brother, nephew, and two nieces, and also some of Janine’s great extended family of friends around the world — many of them poets, singers, teachers, musicians, hustlers, working-class joes and janes, outsiders, professionals, publishers, neighbors, and mountain climbers, like Janine, who had scaled peaks from the Catskills, up into the Andes, and the mysterious reaches of Nepal. Yes, quite a woman.

I’m not ready to write extensively about Janine, that will come, but more about a stone cairn I built for her in our woodlot in Vermont. It would be ten times the size of the stone cairn we laid up for another poet friend Cid Corman — that was made at the summit to our Vermont land, a few steps into the twenty-first century when Cid died, and we made that cairn by hiking the trail up to the summit most every day and any good stone we found along the way on the trail, we picked up and added to the slowly formed cairn that would be for Cid. Think of each stone picked up as a haiku poem, which Cid was a master at writing and translating from the Japanese, and you’ll quickly get an image in your head how some stone structures can go up: line by line/stone by stone. The only odd stone away from the path we hiked on that came to the cairn was one a friend brought, round granite solid, and we set that down into the center of the cairn. The cairn’s been up there now a decade catching leaves, taking snow, slowly but ever surely disappearing like the best of stumps. That’s Cid.

Susan and Janine in Vermont

Janine was different. Janine was an activist, teacher, performer, raconteur, and maybe not as easily understood for her learned discipline and hidden charms. I found a location for her cairn that took the morning sun in the woodlot at the ease of a eastern slope, around the tallest maple trees and where plenty of old stone wall had fallen away, but the stone was there, you just had to dig and find it. Over a few August days I did just that and built a cairn in, what I had hoped would be, the shape of something familiar in Nepal or Ireland, two places on earth Janine was drawn to. For a few years now we’ve watched the stone cairn season with its surroundings, take on the light, the snow, rain, leaves falling, and chipmunks and squirrels passing over and through. It may be finally her birthday coming in February when we’ll put some of her ashes there.

49

If you want to know about stone, when Hurricane Irene came to Vermont in late summer 2011, it left us in stone.

We were returning from northern New Hampshire the night before the hurricane and already we could see military and National Guard convoys moving south on the interstate. What is this all about? we thought. In an eerie lighting and swirling fog. The sky was already messed up, but it wasn’t raining, just spooky. 

"Split-Rock" in our front yard

The next morning we rose early as usual, it was our wedding anniversary, and it was raining heavily and it only became heavier. We could hear the river rising, then roaring. The roaring part concerned us enough to go have a look, and that’s when we saw a river we’ve never seen in our lives. It was no longer a river, it was a water mass grown up and out of its form, speeding into the woods, rising up and over the road, gobbling the road, and rising many feet by the minute, so it could be — there was nothing that was going to stop it. It was only raining heavier. We were in rain gear following the river along the higher edges of the road, and the river was now a tidal wave. Maybe fourteen feet higher than we ever knew it. We met a neighbor we also never knew we had wandering like the young father he is asking us if the river would reach his house. It turned out I built this house decades ago and tried to assure him, not knowing anything myself, that the river wouldn’t get to where he was, huddled upstairs with a family. Rain pelting off our faces. River louder and louder, overpowering the woodland, going anywhere it damn well pleased. As humans, visitors to planet earth of land and water, we simply got to watch and wait.

The next day we all crawled out of our caves. Much of our dirt road was gone. It was obliterated the further south you went and where the river always widened and was wilder. The road wouldn’t open for months, and it took all those months to first realize what had happened and what is it that had to be done, and then all the stone started to get moved back into place; the stone that made roads. Neighbors teamed up and helped one another. Town laborers scratched their heads and tied together town-to-town to assist. We hiked down four miles from our house south into Massachusetts only to find all the road gone away, not a speck left, not even a hint. All we had was bare ledge from the mountainside the road curled around and hugged, and this is where stone would be brought back in and river banks were painstakingly rebuilt from scratch, large flat stone and cube rock after rock, days on end, and dumptrucks were the norm for weeks into months. Bringing stone. A life moved on stone.

Susan and Eleanor the day after Hurricane Irene

When we eventually got north up into our Vermont village, I met up with the two oldest residents who grew up as children here, and I knew both to be practical and hardworking folks. The woman said she had never seen anything like this ever in her life, and certainly not in our village, and the old man listening, a worker, quietly agreed nodding his large head. “The river was this close to the covered bridge,” he said to me, squinting his serious eyes, as he held his two large hands up and apart eight inches. Whoever designed and whoever built the covered bridge should now be complimented for laying in maybe one more height of stone beneath the bridge. It stood standing when many other bridges in the state went away.

Bob & Greg Joly putting down another steel roof.

50

Oscar Weatherhead, and in fact, Hap Weatherhead — there’s two names for you. Old timers I once knew or worked with. Last names from the earth and sky. They’re disappearing on us. At the age of fifty I was also seriously called “an old timer” by another old timer, much longer in the tooth than I was. I was always drawn to the old timer, the worker, ever since the age of ten and I was working in the family lumber business. There was “Slim,” Jim Duffy, Freddy Zarek, “Big John,” Frank Lazarczyk, Max Lebech — all builders. They didn’t read much, but for my sake they would pick up this book you’re reading. They were curious, keen listeners, devoted to their life and work. They’d take off their own shirt for you to wear. Out in the gardens and farmland were both “Weatherheads,” plus Harvey Cutting, Lee Stone, Alden Bell, Don Squires, Carl Eckhart, Lester Clark, Anna Carey, Ted Enslin, Richard Levasseur, Dudley Laufman, Gerry Hausman, Jonathan Greene, Greg Joly, and Peter Wilde. Pete turned a tractor over on himself causing a terrible mishap that took his life. One winter we built the swinging footbridge over the Green River together. In the sawmills were Bing Denison, Fred Miller, and Chuck Lynde who would consider himself too young to be an old timer. With repairing old vehicles were Ronny Barton, Denny King, J.D. Whitney, and Larry Croiser. I also met the Chinese scholar and translator Bill Porter (Red Pine) who came looking for me in Vermont as what I consider a prime old ways traveler, definitely with all that grace, bark and tumble place where all old timers settle…like Eleanor vanWaveren,  Alan Belville, Pete Higley, and Bill Barker, who, like me, aren’t even close to hanging up their tool belts yet. 

all photographs by Susan & Bob Arnold

Stone Hut
a builder's notebook
Bob Arnold
1988, 2013

BEAT ATTITUDE ~

A strong collection of Beat Women Poets

with some surprises: Denise Levertov

is at the front of the parade; finally

someone recognizes Mary Norbert Korte,

and all the other poets are dear

essentials: ruth weiss, Anne Waldman,

Janine Pommy Vega, Joanne Kyger,

Lenore Kandel, Hettie Jones, 

Diane di Prima, Elise Cowen

all for you in French

and English.

Pretty cover.

[ BA ]

R E A D     M O R E

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JANINE ~

Janine Pommy Vega
5 February 1942

ACROSS THE TABLE ~

JANINE POMMY VEGA 3 ~

Happy Birthday, Janine!

JANINE POMMY VEGA 2 ~

Happy Birthday, Janine!

JANINE POMMY VEGA 1 ~

Happy Birthday, Janine!

HABEAS CORPUS BLUES ~

JANINE POMMY VEGA ~

ACROSS THE TABLE ~

NEW! JANINE POMMY VEGA ~

New and available now from Longhouse ~

 

Janine Pommy Vega
Janina
Visions, Tales & Lovesongs

288 pages

perfect bound 

packed with poems and photographs

Janine's full course album of photographs, travel journals, poems, facsimile notebooks of poems, childhood photographs, and family, Beat family, plus her unfinished
memoir of Jerusalem.


____________________________________

$50
 
Shipping $5 ~ U.S. orders with Paypal

Buy now through easy-to-use Paypal, US Orders (total $55)

Please use our email address of

longhousepoetry@gmail.com

or we can invoice you, with thanks

_________________________

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LONGHOUSE
 PO Box 2454
 West Brattleboro
Vermont
 05303


 _________________________________

"Generally speaking, of the so-called ‘Beat Generation’, it is the names and creativity of its male protagonists that are most familiar to us, and whose lives and works have been extensively documented, lionised, and mythologised.  But there were also, among this company of free-thinkers-and-livers, women too.  Lovers, wives and partners, surrogate mothers, and sisters, some of whom tried to keep hearth and home in some kind of order midst the turbulence of the wake created by the trajectories of the lives of those they loved. 

   Among the women who were part of, or associated with this group of poets, writers, painters, musicians, street-vagabond-drug addicts, outsiders and hobos, was an angel of the edge.  One who put herself out there where many an angel would have feared to have trod.  Her name was Janine Pommy Vega, who, as a very young woman became close friends with most of the prominent members of this older generation of ‘Beats’, who bedded her, initiated her into drugs, and more importantly tutored her in literature and thought, and a way of life that was a riposte to the stifling and meaningless materialism of the conventional bourgeois lives they were born into.

   Janine, or Janina in Polish, blossomed within this creative coterie, into a fine poet, writer, traveller, lover, sometimes-recluse, and quester for the truth of herself, in the form of love, both in the human realm among her many male muses, and in her search of the embrace of the Absolute or Divine.  The insistence of her ‘chosen’ path, that had actually chosen her, was the need for her to constantly travel to the edge; to put herself at risk; to test every sinew and thought in her enquiry into her own nature through the art of living and the craft of poetry.  In her pursuit of this knowledge, she travelled widely, both terrestrially around North and South America, Europe and Scandinavia, giving readings, writing, teaching, meditating and generally hanging-out; and into those deep hinterlands within her own consciousness.  All the while an enquirer, an observer, experiencing both realms with her intellectual, emotional and spiritual antennae ever-sensitive to the world around her – both the visible and the invisible.  Making home wherever her path took her, “…for home is a far place, and the place at hand.  I carry them with me, my home and my wanderings.”

   Here in this beautiful book – a tribute to Janine – designed and produced with the care and attention of ones who were intimate friends of hers, Bob and Susan Arnold at Longhouse Publishers, we find writings, papers, notebooks and photographs left after her death.  To read the contents and look at the photos, is like peering onto the desk and into the drawers of Janine’s own workspace.  Here is the poet’s temenos, with the evidence of the processes of her thinking, recalling, creating, adjusting and rewriting.   Occasionally with offcuts of her craft left lying about the place, marking her path – her heroic journeying towards catching a glimpse; a reflection; an echo of her true nature.

   Love was her vocation, both in her finite relationships with others, and finally in the infinite embrace of the Other.  Each dwelling within the learned recognition and acceptance of herself.  A beautiful woman poet who experienced that divine affliction – that ‘fine madness’ – the temptation to BE.  As she herself wrote; “…the woman Ferocious in her heart for love/And Poet, blessed with the necessity to go on seeking…”
  

Malcolm Ritchie

Arran Island, Scotland

author of ~ 

The Crows of Gravity 
( Longhouse 2016 )