Micheline, Jack, 1929-
Biography
Jack Micheline, né Harvey Martin Silver, was born in the Bronx in 1929. He quit high school and ran away from home at the age of 16, and at 17 joined the army. In 1949 he went to Israel and worked on a kibbutz in the Negev, and from 1950 to 1957 traveled throughout the United States, working odd jobs to support himself. His first poem was published in the American Friends Service Committee Newsletter in 1954. Moving to Greenwich Village, he became identified with the Beat Poets, although he himself disputes the tag, as well as that of "street poet." In 1957 he won the Revolt in Literature Award at the Half Note Club in the East Village. His first collection, River of Red Wine, was published in 1958.
In 1963 Micheline married Mimi Redding and they spent a year travelling in France, Spain, England, and the Netherlands. Shortly after their return to the United States, the marriage broke up and Micheline returned to the Village. In February 1964 his only child, Vincent Silver Micheline, was born to a woman he had known before his marriage to Redding.
Micheline's play, East Bleeker: A Drama with Music, was produced at Café LaMama in 1967. North of Manhattan: Collected Poems, Ballads, and Songs was published in 1976. Skinny Dynamite, a collection of short stories which appeared in 1968 and led to an obscenity trial, was published by Second Coming Press in 1980. Several of his works have been translated into German and Spanish. Recently he has written fewer poems and has become known as a primitive painter.
Micheline's poetry chronicles the different worlds in which he has lived and travelled, as well as the pain and triumph of being a poet. Much of Micheline's work is meant to be read aloud, and he continues to give poetry readings
Information taken from Gerald Nicosia 's article in the Dictionary of Literary Biography and from notes by the poet.
From the guide to the Jack Micheline Papers, 1948-1986, (The Bancroft Library)
Jack Micheline was born Harvey Martin Silver on November 6, 1929, in New York, N.Y., to Herman (a mechanic and postman) and Helen (Michelin) Silver. He changed his name legally in 1963, choosing "Jack" after Jack London and "Micheline" by adding an e to his mother's maiden name.
Micheline's first poem was published in 1954 as he worked a series of odd jobs; a year later, he moved to Greenwich Village and in 1958 his collection River of Red Wine, which boasted an introduction by Jack Kerouac and garnered favorable reviews from critic Dorothy Parker, established him as a writer. Today he is also a painter and painting instructor and has also gained recognition for his primitive-style paintings.
Although relatively unknown to many in the literary world, Micheline is nevertheless regarded as one of the few Beat generation poets who continues to produce important work. Both the style of his writing (his poetry is intended to be read aloud and reflects the rhythms of the spoken word, particularly ethnic dialects, as well as jazz music) and its substance (populated by society's rejects such as destitutes, dreamers and drunks) place him squarely within the Beat milieu, although he himself considered the "Beat Movement" to be an invention of publishers' propaganda. He was also closely associated with many prominent Beat artists, writers and poets, particularly Jack Kerouac with whom he maintained a long-standing friendship (in 1982 Micheline gave a public poetry reading at the Jack Kerouac Conference of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado).
Writers such as Langston Hughes, William Saroyan, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, and Miriam Patchen have praised his work, and he is considered an inspiration by many young San Francisco writers. In his essay on Micheline, Gerald Nicosia writes, "[Micheline found] a new conception of the poet as a peripatetic witness, whose job it was to discover beauty beneath the various lies with which men had masked it and to record everything he saw."
(Adapted from "Jack Micheline," Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2005 and from "Jack Micheline" by Gerald Nicosia, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 16: The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America., The Gale Group, 1983. pp. 410-415. Gale Database)
From the guide to the Jack Micheline Collection, 1958-1965, (Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries)
Role | Title | Holding Repository | |
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referencedIn | Allen Ginsberg papers, 1937-1994 | Stanford University. Department of Special Collections and University Archives | |
referencedIn | Eddie Woods papers, circa 1957- 2009 | Cecil H. Green Library. Department of Special Collections and University Archives | |
creatorOf | Jack Micheline Collection, 1958-1965 | Syracuse University. Library. Special Collections Research Center | |
creatorOf | Jack Micheline Papers, 1948-1986 | Bancroft Library | |
referencedIn | New Directions Publishing records | Houghton Library | |
referencedIn | Notes from Underground. Manuscripts-Letters-Pasteups, 1959-1974. | Temple University Libraries, Paley Library |
Filters:
Relation | Name |
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associatedWith | Ginsberg, Allen, 1926-1997 |
correspondedWith | New Directions Publishing Corp. |
associatedWith | Notes from Underground. |
associatedWith | Woods, Eddie |
Person
Birth 1929
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Micheline, Jack, 1929-
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