weiss, ruth (1928–  )

The outcast and the alien are concepts that are
long associated with the Beat Generation, but
perhaps no one exemplifies these tropes as dramatically as Berlin-born poet ruth weiss. She was
an only child of Jewish parents: her father, Oscar
Weiss, was a night editor for the Wolfburo news
agency and of Hungarian decent; her mother Fani
Zlata Weiss was a homemaker whose family was
Yugoslavian. By the time weiss was 10, the family
had moved to Vienna where she attended a Jewish
elementary school. The family’s efforts to escape
the repression of Adolf Hitler’s regime failed at
that point, however, when weiss and other Jewish
children were brutally expelled from their school.
Her father was imprisoned for two weeks. After his
release and fearing for their lives, the Weiss family fled Austria in December 1938, taking a train
to Holland where they boarded the ship
Westerland
which ferried them to safety in the United States
in 1939. Many of weiss’s poems return to memories of these traumatic childhood experiences. As
a survivor of the Holocaust, she later registered her
antipathy for Nazi totalitarianism by rejecting the
conventions of her native language, electing in the
1960s to spell her name in all lower case. This was
not her only form of rebellion, however, as she soon
mapped out a life devoted to art, self-definition,
and cosmic liberation.
During the war, New York City, Iowa City, and
Chicago became sites of refuge for the Weisses, her
father supporting the family as a bookkeeper and
her mother as a seamstress in various sweatshops.
After they moved to Chicago, Oscar and Fani enrolled ruth in a private Catholic high school in Chicago, from which she graduated in 1942. To this
day, weiss credits Sister Eulogia, one of the teachers at the school, for encouraging her to write. By
1946 her parents had returned to Europe to work
as Americans with the occupation forces. weiss attended school in Switzerland, but she has said that
she spent much of this time hitchhiking across Europe, where she had no difficulty finding safe rides
from American soldiers: “I wore my saddle shoes
and jeans, and they knew I was American.” In 1948
she returned to Chicago with her parents.
By that time, weiss had set out to find an environment in which she could evolve as a writer.
Whether riding the “L” in Chicago, where she lived
in the Art Circle, or sitting in a jazz club, weiss
made time to write poetry, a vocation that she had
practiced since penning her first poem at age five.
She supported herself by working as a dice girl, a
waitress, and a nude model. She tried living in New
York City and New Orleans as well, but it was not
until 1952, when she hitched from Chicago to San
Francisco, that she began to establish more permanent roots. After learning that weiss was a poet,
her ride decided that bohemian North Beach was
where she belonged, dropping her off at the heart
of Broadway and Columbus.
weiss quickly settled into the area’s avantgarde poetry and arts scene, introducing jazz–
poetry readings at The Cellar in 1956, a blending
of the two art forms that she had pursued since her
Art Circle days in Chicago. Never aligning herself with any single art coterie, weiss says that she
was more like a hummingbird, skipping and hopping from one group to another. She attended a
few of
kenneth rexroth’s evening salons; met
Scottish poet Helen Adam; was a close friend of
painter Wallace Berman and poet Madeline Glea
son; associated with lawrence ferlinghetti,
jack micheline, and philip lamantia; worked
for musicians Jack Minger, Wil Carlson, and Sonny
Wayne (now Sonny Nelson) at The Cellar; and
married Mel Weitsman, a Zen priest. She also knew
jack kerouac, with whom she has said she wrote
haiku in the 1950s.
Despite the connection to Kerouac in those
early years, weiss never associated herself specifically with the Beat Generation or with pseudoartists known as beatniks—“that was a very bad
word,” she later recalled. “Really, an insult.” But
in true Beat fashion, she made her own way as an
artist, unencumbered by conventional boundaries.
She would read on the streets and in bars, doing
whatever she could to write poetry and plays, make
films, and paint.
weiss published her first collection of poems,
Steps, in 1958 and her second collection, Gallery of
Women,
in 1959. The latter, a small but elegant assemblage of short poems, showcases weiss’s gratitude
to female friends and feminist pioneers. In 1961
weiss became screenplay writer and director for
a film version of her long poem “The Brink.” The
black-and-white film, featuring a “he” and “she”
who wonder whimsically around San Francicso,
draws upon spontaneity, improvisation, and found
objects—an unintentional yet effective West Coast
partner for the Robert Frank/Albert Leslie Beat film
Pull My Daisy which was set in New York City.
weiss has remained a prolific writer and performer, not only in California but also in Europe.
She has produced seven plays and numerous
poem–prints, performed in at least a half-dozen
films by Steven Arnold, been published in more
than 150 magazines and anthologies, and written 10 books. Since 1998 she has returned to Vienna several times to perform. The North Beach
Chamber of Commerce also presented her with
its Community Enrichment Award in 1999 for her
“lifetime of dedication and commitment to the
muses of poetry and jazz.”
Selections from her collected works were published as
A NEW VIEW OF MATTER, a CzechEnglish edition by Mata Press in 1999. Her most
recent work,
full circle, is a German-English edition that includes a touching memoir of weiss’s
early years in Austria and the United States; it
was brought out in 2002 by the Austrian publisher
Edition Exil. The most comprehensive collection
of her work is housed in the Bancroft Library, the
University of California, Berkeley.
Bibliography
Grace, Nancy M. “Single Out: ruth weiss.” In Breaking
the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women
Beat Writers,
edited by Nancy M. Grace and Ronna
C. Johnson, 55–80. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2004.
Knight, Brenda. “ruth weiss: The Survivor.” In
Women of
the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses
at the Heart of a Revolution.
Berkeley: Conari Press,
1996, 241–256.
weiss, ruth.
The Brink. 1961 16mm film. 1986 videocassette. San Francisco, Calif.
Nancy M. Grace

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