Beat Culture because it so beats the Death Culture!

I'm lately from Santa Cruz, California. Grew up in Maryland, where my mom took her life (when I was ten yrs) after being faced three times with the mental health "care" system of that time. Her mother was a nurse. She was born to be an artist, but there wasn't room socially then for a woman to be BOTH an artist and a mother.

I guess I've been unforgiving of society? I've notice since (and to this day) the victims and survivors of mental health "care" systems and other forms of incarceration are often artists being shutted up.

I've been devoted to "other ways" (rather than mainstream conformance) a long time. Was a closet poet myself since before Vietnam war and finally bumped into a Shaman who was a poet's Poet. He actually thought some of my work was "good", which I hadn't quite seen. I've reared three children, two of whom are artists, too.

He read aloud to me from Kerouac and other contem-poets. I got to spend time with great poets a little older than I was: Michael Nicholas, Bob Kaufman, Jack Michelin, Janis Blue, others. Helped put on a huge Poetry show at our City's Civic Center, and the big party afterwards at Studio Menagerio. Met Corso, Burroughs, Ginsberg, DiPrimo, others and have been very lucky.

Those poets continue to inform me of the live-sucking landscape of their time. I guess besides Margaret Mead and a few scholars, honest chronicles outside of the beats' contributions are nil. I will keep looking through my dreams for my mommy; finding such other delights along the way. I keep on reading poetry, tho' with little bread, so you can find me in the bookstores on a rainy day.

While I haven't published much, I often read poetry at public events locally. And I've no pride about it: often read beat odes even if my "own" work is requested or expected, if that's what the occasion deserves! So far haven't been thrown offstage. Also I enjoy "costumes" and dressing up as ritual iconography.

> rexroth was the king. read "thou shalt not kill". it is the precursor to howl.

You could say much the same of Walt Whitman and "Leaves of Grass" as well.