janine pommy vega’s work has received scant critical attention, despite the fact that she has published
roughly a dozen books since her first work, poems
to fernando, appeared in 1968. What makes this
omission even more surprising is that Vega was not
a latter-day Beat follower but was intimately connected with the Beat circle in New York City during the late 1950s. In 1958, after graduating as the
valedictorian of her class, Vega moved to New York,
where she met gregory corso, allen ginsberg,
herbert huncke, Elise Cowen, and Cowen’s lover
Peter Orlovsky. Vega would later meet the Peruvian
painter Fernando Vega, traveling with him until his
sudden death from a heroin overdose in November
1965. While Vega’s attempt to develop her own
brand of spirituality in the face of social and cultural constraints mirrors the work of fellow Beats,
the ways in which she develops such Beat themes as
individuality, spontaneity, sexuality, and particularly
mobility deserve more critical investigation.
As its subtitle suggests, Tracking the Serpent is a
book about travel. Vega journeys to British castles,
the cathedral at Chartres, the Irish countryside,
the Amazon jungle, and the mountains of Peru
and Nepal to discover what she terms the “Goddess.” The goal, according to Vega, is to “let my
personal history be overtaken by a present that was
conscious of itself and infinitely alive. That consciousness I call the Mother or serpent power or
Goddess.” Vega’s novel chronicles this search and,
in the process, reveals not only what this interaction with the Goddess looks like but, perhaps more
importantly, how it is achieved. The key for Vega is
to remain open to the possibilities of the moment
in both body and soul. Ultimately, Vega experiences
this spiritual connection, though not always where
and when she plans for it to happen. The Goddess
reveals herself when you least expect it during those
moments that you cede control over the world and
offer yourself up for change and revelation.
By invoking the term Mother or Goddess, Vega
also raises the important question of gender that
is beginning to receive the attention it deserves in
Beat scholarship. In Tracking the Serpent, Vega is
repeatedly disappointed to discover that many of
the sites in which she hopes to find the Goddess
are actually governed by a patriarchal mindset that
closes off the possibility for communion with the
divine. Male space is often enclosed, hierarchical,
and exclusionary, as many poems in her collection Mad Dogs of Trieste likewise demonstrate. The
space of the Goddess, by contrast, is characterized
by an openness and egalitarianism that is the hallmark of Vega’s work. The lesson for Vega is to always remain open, whether trekking up the side of
a mountain, making love, or simply meeting someone for the first time.
Tracking the Serpent is an important Beat work.
Although it was written after the Beat heyday of
the 1950s and 1960s by a woman who has yet to
receive the sort of accolades accorded to male
writers like Ginsberg, jack kerouac, and william
s. burroughs, Vega’s book seriously engages the
desire for personal transformation through interaction with the divine that animates much Beat
writing. Vega gives us a means of understanding
not only how such a connection is forged, but the
pitfalls of relying on a purely masculine model of
transcendence, and in the process sheds light on
what it means to be “Beat.”
Erik Mortenson