Jack Micheline

Jack Micheline (November 6, 1929 – February 27, 1998), born Harold Martin Silver, was an American painter and poet from the San Francisco Bay Area. His name is synonymous with street artists, underground writers, and "outlaw" poets. One of San Francisco's original Beat poets, he was an innovative artist who was active in the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s.

Born in The Bronx, New York, of Russian and Romanian Jewish ancestry. Micheline took his pen name from writer Jack London and his mother's maiden name. He moved to Greenwich Village in the 1950s, where he became a street poet, drawing on Harlem blues and jazz rhythms and the cadence of word music. He lived on the fringe of poverty, writing about hookers, drug addicts, blue collar workers, and the dispossessed.

In 1957, Troubadour Press published his first book River of Red Wine. Jack Kerouac wrote the introduction, and it was reviewed by Dorothy Parker in Esquire magazine. Micheline relocated to San Francisco in the early 1960s, where he spent the rest of his life. He published over twenty books, some of them mimeographs and chapbooks.

Though a poet of the Beat generation, Micheline characterized the Beat movement as a product of media hustle, and hated being categorized as a Beat poet. He was also a painter, working primarily with gouache in a self-taught, primitive style he picked up in Mexico City.

In September 1968, a short story he wrote, "Skinny Dynamite", was published in Renaissance 2, the literary supplement of John Bryan Bryan's Los Angeles alternative newspaper Open City. Solicited from Micheline by guest editor Charles Bukowski, its subject was a promiscuous young woman. The story used the word "fuck" and Bryan was arrested for obscenity, but was not convicted.

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