Janine Pommy Vega continues to be a major figure
in contemporary American poetry, as is evident in
her remarkable recent collection, The Green Piano
(Black Sparrow 2005). While jack kerouac’s
road took him all across America, Vega’s road has
taken her all across the world.
Janine Pommy was born in Jersey City, New
Jersey, on February 5, 1942, to a working-class family. She was inspired to join the Beat movement
after reading Kerouac’s on tHe road in 1958. “All
the characters seemed to move with an intensity
that was missing in my life,” she recalls. She met
gregory corso in the Cedar Bar when an article
on the Beat Generation prompted her to check
out the scene in Greenwich Village, and she would
eventually meet Kerouac himself. She has been
associated with the Beats ever since. She was romantically involved with Peter Orlovsky (allen
ginsberg’s partner) and became friends with ray
bremser and his wife Bonnie (brenda frazer),
and herbert huncke became her mentor. Of all
the Beats, Vega admired Huncke the most for resisting the male chauvinism of the times. Though
she graduated valedictorian of her high school
class, Vega decided to live a life of a poet. For
a time she lived with Ginsberg’s assistant Elise
Cowen. She had an amphetamine-fueled relationship with Bill Heine, who would later be arrested
with Huncke, and briefly lived in the same apartment as novelist Alexander Trocchi and his wife.
In 1962 she met Fernando Vega, a talented
Peruvian Jewish painter who took her to Israel.
Fernando, the inspiration for Vega’s first book of
poetry, poems to fernando (1968), died of a
heroin overdose on the island of Ibiza off the coast
of Spain in November 1965. She traveled (spending time with lenore kandel in Hawaii) and lived
in New York City, San Francisco (with Huncke and,
later, a member of the Hell’s Angels), and Woodstock, New York. In the 1970s she read poetry with
bob kaufman, jack micheline, david meltzer,
and ed sanders, among others. She travelled with
bob dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975.
In 1982 she barely escaped death after a horrendous car crash. After recovering, she continued
to travel, write, and work with prison programs
to bring poetic inspiration to inmates. Her superb
travelog, trackinG tHe serpent: journeys to
four continents, was published by City Lights,
the publisher of her first book of poetry, in 1997.
Her signature poem, “mad dogs of trieste,”
which was published in a volume under that name
by Black Sparrow Press, appeared in 2000. One of
the most, if not the most, peripatetic members of
the Beat movement that she helped establish, Vega
continues to be socially, politically, and artistically
active today.
Bibliography
As We Cover the Streets: Janine Pommy Vega. Film written
by Kurt Hemmer, produced by Tom Knoff. Palatine,
Ill.: Harper College, 2003.
Vega, Janine Pommy. Tracking the Serpent: Journeys to
Four Continents. San Francisco: City Lights, 1997.
Kurt Hemmer