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     On February 27, 1988 Jack Micheline died from a heart attack while riding a Bart commuter train on his way to visit a friend residing in the East Bay. 

      Micheline and Kerouac became friends and often drank together at Greenwich Village bars.  When I asked him about his relationship with Kerouac, he said:    “Kerouac was a high being.  He had a great spirit.  A man with heart.  He also had a great sense of humor.  It was a great time when I met him; jazz musicians, poets, writers, dancers, actors and painters, all doing their own thing.”

    He was born of Russian-Romanian, Jewish ancestry, under the name of Harvey Martin Silvaer, taking to the road at a young age, working at a variety of odd jobs.  It was during this time that he changed his name, adopting the first name of his hero Jack London and the surname of his mother.  He worked for a short time as a union organizer before devoting his life to poetry and painting.  He was sixty-eight years old at the time of his death and for the last several years of his life suffered from diabetes.

     "I don't want to be published because I wear the same clothes that others wear, or because I have the same ideas. I want respect for my own individuality, but it doesn't workt what way."

     Micheline didn't attend college.  His University was the streets, where he majored in street smarts.  He wasn't concerned with semantics, or the carefully arranged use of metaphors.  We see this in the following lines from a poem of his titled Real Poem:  

     I met Micheline in the late 60's, but didn’t get to know him well until l973, when I was editing and publishing Second Coming (a literary journal). Both Micheline and the late Charles Bukowski became regular contributors.  In 1975 I published a small collection of his poems, Last House in America, and five years later published a collection of his short stories (Skinny Dynamite), which had earlier been published in a German edition

     His poems ring true, because beyond the lines and stanzas flow the energy of life.  His voice was an original one. No one tried to imitate it, as is the case with Bukowski, because it can't be imitated.  Both young and old alike loved him.  Although he exasperated many people with his outspokenness, his real friends saw through this crusty side of him, and focused on his genuine love for the common man and woman. In my interview with him, he said:

     "I never wanted to be a poet.  I still don't want to be a poet.  I just  want to live my life.  The thing is that the working class, given a chance, would relate to poetry, but they have all this football, baseball, and television.  They've never had a chance to see a real poet that relates to them.  What they need are poems that relate to their own way of life.  In America everything is profit motivation. 

     It's the spirit that I relate to.  The church doesn't do the job. Television doesn't do the job. Everything in America is based on greed, the almighty buck and mediocrity."

     He openly spoke out against what he called the “business of poetry.”  Poetry Flash, the icon of the Bay Area poetry scene, ignored him up until the time of his death, when they chose to honor him with the all too familiar obligatory respect shown the dead It came to late and with to little sincerity.

     Ignored by the poetry establishment and to some extent the larger alternative presses, he went about the business of writing, fighting off the bitterness that has overcome so many poets his age.  He survived with the skills of a street fighter.  His words resounding like a hammer on a nail.

     His poems were personal poems; poems from the heart and heartbreak; poems that were questioning, probing, and often accusing, but always truthful.  When you read his poems, you can feel the pain, but also feel the joy and laughter of life.  His poems came from street life experience, not from reading the likes of Charles Olson, Robert Creely, or William Stafford.

He knew that the only thing a poet can truly call his own is integrity and he knew even more that if you sell this intangible asset that you will have sold your soul to the devil.  Walking the streets of the Village and Harlem he inherited the richness of the culture, especially the culture of black jazz musicians.  He was drawn to the warmth and humor of the black poets and musicians whom he encountered, and was truly at home in the passionate web of Harlem's after-hours jazz clubs  Here was a poet who had been friends with the likes of James T Farrel and William Saroyan, and developed a dynamic reading style that left the audience calling for an encore.

     In my interview with him he described Greenwich Village as a poor, working class Italian neighborhood where the rent was cheap, and the people poor, but the center of artistic expression, a place where people were at ease relating to each other.

     He eventually grew tired of the New York Village scene and left for San Francisco, where he was quickly accepted in North Beach circles. He described the post-Beat North beach community as a place where there was a great openness to create, in contrast to the closer knit brotherhood that existed in Greenwich Village, at the height of the Beat era.  He said of North Beach:

     We don't know much about his years growing up as a child.  We do know he was born premature; a six month, two pound-six ounce baby, who had to fight for survival, even as he did in later life.   By his own admission he described himself as a "shy and dreamy" boy, who grew up in the poor section of the Bronx, born to parents who fought like "cats and dogs." 

     In his writings he describes his mother as a religious woman, who cried a lot, but who possessed a heart of gold.  He paints a portrait of his father as a bitter postal worker, who seldom smiled, after losing everything he owned in the 1929 stock market crash.He said

He would relate in a short story that the girl later told her boyfriend that he had tried to rape her. The boyfriend and four of his friends ambushed him on his way home from school and administered a terrible beating.  In the short story he talks about coming home after the beating and how his mother tended his wounds and tried to console him.  

     "I went to my room and cried. Tears and torment poured out of my head.  It was a hell of a world.  There had to be a place somewhere where it wasn't hell, where fear didn't choke you like a knife, where you wouldn't have to hide in your own skin and swear at the Bastard earth."

     The one fond memory of his childhood was that of his grandfather, Louie Lipinsky, whose wife one day kicked him out of the house and told him never to come back.  In poems and in conversations he recalled how his grandfather would search in garbage cans for newspapers and bring him home the “funnies.”

     “He would always find clean funnies to bring to me.  He would tell me, “Son, learn to laugh.  Life is cruel. The most spiritual people in America were the Indians and we wiped them out.”

     To learn how to laugh was a message he never forgot. A message that helped see him though many a hard time.   He began a long trek across America; recording in his notebook everything he saw and heard, even at the age of seventeen serving a stint in the Army Medical Corps. By the time he was nineteen, he found himself in Israel.  Then it was back to the United States, where he worked at a variety of odd jobs while traveling Jack Kerouac's, On The Road.

     “I guess everyone wanted a piece of him in those days, he said.  I liked him.  We went to the track together, a few times. He was very vulnerable, but he changed, like everyone does after they become famous.  He had to protect himself, that's understandable.  He had a magic there and it carried over to his writing.”

     It doesn’t get much better than this, but Micheline could try the patience of the best of men.  Like the time he visited Bukowski in Los Angeles, arriving at his doorstep unannounced, and carrying with him a stack of paintings and poems.  After a day at the races and a night of heavy drinking, Bukowski said he allowed him to sleep overnight on his sofa.  According to Bukowski, he sensed Micheline might vomit, and placed a wastebasket near his head, telling him that if he had to vomit, to vomit in the wastebasket. According to Bukowski he drove Micheline to the airport, and upon returning home, he discovered that Micheline had thrown-up, completely missing the wastebasket, and had wiped the mess up with a magazine that Bukowski had been published in.

     It was incidents like this that tried the patience of many a friend, but it was hard for his real friends to stay angry with him.  It’s true he could be loud and abrasive, but there is no denying that he was always honest, even if it meant hurting your feelings. 

     He never denied that in his younger days he had been a wild spirit. One of his favorite sayings was, "To be a poet is to be mad."

     One evening in New York, after leaving a literary party, he found himself dancing up West Eighth Street, on his way to the Cedar Tavern, when two cops attempted to arrest him for being drunk and disorderly.  He wrestled the two officers to the ground, suffering cuts and bruises, and in the scuffle bit one of the officer's on the nose.  He was taken to the emergency room where a doctor who by chance had heard him read at a local pub attended him. The doctor told the officers that while Micheline was drunk there were nothing else wrong with him.  But the two police officers believed he was a mental case and had him committed to Bellevue Hospital for 72 hours observation. 

     After moving from New York to San Francisco he was again arrested, this time by the San Francisco Police, outside the Co- Existence Bagel Shop.  He was charged with indecent exposure, for pissing in public, and taken downtown to the Hall of Justice, where he was forced to spend the night in the drunk tank.  The next morning he appeared before a judge and listened to the charges being read:  "Urinating on the corner of Grant and Green." 

     When he showed no shame the judge became outraged and ordered him sent to County Hospital for mental observation.  When he next appeared before the judge, he tells us that he swallowed his pride, and apologized to the judge, who gave him a ten-day suspended sentence.  When later confronted by a North Beach regular who asked him where he had been, he said, “I just took a long piss in this glory called civilization.”

      He remained a wild man well into the 80s, when he became ill with diabetes and was forced to give up drinking. It had to have hurt him not to receive the recognition afforded other Beat poets, and he didn't make it any easier on himself by offending those in a position to help him. He would have one believe the slights he received from the literary establishment didn't hurt him, but I know better.

     In his last years his fight with diabetes had taken a toll on him.  He looked all his age and then some, but he was still indomitable, giving readings and presenting art shows throughout the city.

     Sharing a cup of coffee with him, a few short months before his death, I looked out the window of the café, and saw two punk rocker types strolling by.  It reminded me of the time a group of punk rockers had come to one of his readings, intent on hooting him down, but who in the end found themselves wildly clapping their appreciation.   No one, but no one, could turn around an audience like he could.

     One of his proudest accomplishments was winning a literary prize presented to him in 1982 by the author Ken Keasey, given to him for the “best” live performance at the Naropa Institute. It was a night where he made the elite (Ginsberg, Burroughs, Waldman) pale in comparison.  The prize, a bottle of scotch!

It’s sad that his enemies could not concentrate on his poems and ignore their personal dislike of him.  For the strength of his work far outweighed any human weakness.  His poems are total feelings charging at you from the bullring, where life and death become one, and where the winner too often is the one with a corrupt soul. He was