Voices of the Lady: Collected Poems

This volume brings together for the first time one of the great lost masterworks of 20th Century American poetry. Stuart Z. Perkoff was the archetypal Beat poet, the central figure in the Venice West branch of this movement, where he lived within a maelstrom of jazz, sex, and drugs - all of it illuminated from time to time by flashes of visionary ecstasy.
In common with poets like Pound, Olson, Blackburn, and Creeley, Perkoff saw everything that he wrote as part of a continuous poem. From time to time he published bits and pieces of this endless poem, in magazines and in a few small collections. But he was too busy living - and then too busy dying - to bring his work together into a substantial collection. The legend has lingered, however; and now Gerald T. Perkoff has brought together a full collection of his brother's work, in a book revealing that Stuart Z. Perkoff was a great poet not only in his capacity to describe his own tragic life-history, but also in his affirmation of the bonds that draw human beings together, and in his deeply religious sense that human life is a dialogue with - in the words of his last poem, found written on the wall of the room in which he died - "he who must remain unnamed."

Perkoff (1930-1974) garnered reverent admirers in the Beat community of Venice, Calif., and beyond. This hefty volume compiles his eight books (three posthumous) and over 200 pages of unpublished verse. Drawing on Whitman, Williams, Lawrence, cummings and Olson, Perkoff's expansive poems show his mystic ambitions, jumping from jazz argot, to the casually demotic, to the aggressively elevated: "turned loose in the streets/ we eat the earth itself in/ search of vision." Some involve the poet's Jewish heritage, his heroin addiction or his five years in prison on drug charges. Many address a Lady-Muse; these can seem dated ("naked flesh woman flesh in the morning/ real flesh real ecstasy bodies/ flesh loved flesh") though they can show real love, especially for Perkoff's wife, whose psychotic break prompted The Venice Poems. Perkoff writes of "recklessly skipping our way in & out of poems/ our brains tied together like the three-legged race at the school picnic." For all their exuberance and pain, the results lack subtlety, seeming shrill, unrevised and formless even when measured against the Beat tradition: "man finds his screams & poems & dreams are smashed"; "despair threatens always to take over/ but life struggles toward its joy"; "indescribable nightmares overwhelm reality." The best few are comic portraits like "The Juggler" ("what a task he undertook with his sweaty armpits!"), or brief, Creeley-influenced scene descriptions. Scholars of Beat writing will welcome this gathering of Perkoff's work; readers not privileged to have known him personally may find the poems copiously predictable, historical documents in an effusively uncareful period style.

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