Welch, Lew (1926–1971)

A writer who successfully bridged the Beat era of
the 1950s and the San Francisco youth counterculture of the late 1960s, Lew Welch left behind a
body of work that is among the most precise and
beautifully crafted of any poet of his generation.
Born in 1926 in Phoenix, Arizona, to an intelligent, often overbearing mother and a freespirited, often absent father, Welch’s childhood was
marked by a sense of alienation and detachment.
He moved frequently, spending much of his youth
in several small towns along the California coastline where he was raised by his mother following
his parents’ divorce. After a brief term in the army
air corps at the end of World War II, he took advantage of the G.I. Bill and enrolled in college, first
at Stockton Junior College in California and in
1948 as an English major at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
At Reed, he met and roomed with fellow
students
gary snyder and philip whalen. The
three shared common interests in poetry and Eastern spirituality and formed a lasting friendship that
played a significant role in the development of
the West Coast Beat movement. While at Reed,
Welch published his first poems in the school literary magazine,
Janus, and along with Snyder and
Whalen, he hosted a campus visit by poet William
Carlos Williams. The elder poet encouraged Welch
to publish his B.A. thesis on the work of Gertrude
Stein and to continue to follow his ambitions as a
poet.
The years after Welch’s graduation from college provided the grist for much of the discontent with urban America that would figure so
prominently in the poet’s mature work. In the
mid-1950s, as the West Coast was in the midst of
a literary renaissance, he moved to Chicago, married, and worked as an advertising writer. (Welch is
credited with writing the famous slogan “Raid Kills
Bugs Dead.”) He found the job, the marriage, and
the city (which he called a “pitiless, unparalleled
monstrocity [sic]”) unbearable, a situation that he
later captured in one of his finest works, “
chicago
poem
” (1958).
By 1957 Welch returned to San Francisco
where he worked at numerous part time jobs—cab
driver, longshoreman, commercial fisherman—to
support his career as a writer. He began a serious
but short-lived course of Buddhist study with Snyder, and many of his poems from the late 1950s,
including his powerful Pacific coast meditation
“Wobbly Rock” (1960), draw heavily from Buddhist imagery. He published several small collections of poems in the 1960s, writing with clarity,
precision, and an ear for American speech that
sometimes escaped his colleagues in the Beat
movement. The finest of these small collections,
Hermit Poems (1965) chronicles his solitary withdrawal into the California foothills in the early
1960s. During the heyday of the San Francisco
counterculture in the late 1960s, Welch was affiliated with members of the Digger commune, an
experience that is reflected in many of his later
poems and essays.
Despite growing success and recognition as a
poet in the late 1960s, Welch was plagued by a battle with alcohol, and on May 23, 1971, he left behind a cryptic suicide note and wandered into the
California foothills, carrying a gun. His body has
never been found. His volume of collected poems,
Ring of Bone, was published in 1973.
Bibliography
Meltzer, David. “Interview with Lew Welch.” San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets. San Francisco: City
Lights Books, 2001, 294–324.
Phillips, Rod.
“Forest Beatniks” and “Urban Thoreaus”:
Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch, and Michael
McClure.
New York: Peter Lang, 2000.
Saroyan, Aram.
Genesis Angels: The Saga of Lew Welch
and the Beat Generation.
New York: Morrow, 1979.
Rod Phillips

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