You can now watch my tribute to Harold Norse from an evening of Writers Remembered earlier this year in San Francisco. After checking it out, have a look at some of the other fantastic presentations from that evening.

Here’s a photo of me speaking about Harold taken by Gerald Nicosia, who organized the event.

Todd Swindell speaking about Harold Norse at Writers Remembered, March 1, 2013. Photo by Gerald Nicosia

America Destroys Though Who Create- The Italian Exile of a Brooklyn Bard

I want to dedicate my talk tonight to the visionary Judith Malina and The Living Theater, our country’s oldest experimental theater troupe. They were exiles that performed throughout Europe in the 1960s because of persecution from the IRS. This week the Living Theater closed the doors to its Manhattan performance space, as they could no longer afford the rent. That’s so terribly unjust. Harold Norse was not only a close friend of both Judith and her husband Julian Beck, but was involved in the creation of the Living Theater in 1947. His then lover, Dick Stryker, composed music for many of the Theater’s early productions.

From Gertrude Stein’s modernist prose which flourished in avant-garde Paris of the early 20^th Century to the evolution of blues and rock by Jimi Hendrix in the psychedelic scene of 1960’s London, many of America’s most prophetic artists were forced to leave this country in order to find the encouragement and community necessary to voice their visionary creations

Harold Norse was born in Brooklyn, during the summer of 1916, to an unwed Lithuanian Jewish immigrant. Like many others of his generation, he grew up poor during the depression with an abusive stepfather and a superstitious, overbearing mother. Harold was a language prodigy; his heroes were Walt Whitman and Hart Crane. As a student at Brooklyn College, he quickly rose above the fray.

By World War II, Harold was a full participant in the bohemian milieu of Greenwich Village. Among his friends were James Baldwin, W.H. Auden and Paul Goodman. Following a Master’s in English from NYU, Harold was on his way to a PhD and a life in academia.

But 1950’s America was gripped in the clutches of Cold War conformity and its conservative hysteria was particularly dangerous for Harold.  Not only was he a liberal and a poet but also queer, all red flags for being labeled a communist. This was the soulless era of validation through collective consumption where the only escapes were the numbness of alcohol & the ecstatic bliss of furtive sexual contact.

Fearing that he would either end up in jail for being gay or drink himself to death, Harold left for Italy in 1953. His plan was to go for 3 months but he quickly sold his return passage and, for the next 15 years, lived in Tangier, Paris then Athens. This geographical travel mirrored a development of his poetic voice as he took inspiration from the mores of Classical Rome and Greece.

By the time of his expatriation, Harold had published his first collection of poetry, The Undersea Mountain. The establishment of that time coveted poets such as Robert Lowell and Karl Shapiro and viewed Harold’s poems as too wild. William Carlos Williams was an early & strong supporter of his work, stating that Harold used the colloquial American language as never before.

Harold spent the next five years living in Rome, Florence and Naples primarily. In these classical surroundings he could finally breathe freely as a person and a poet. In a society with pre-Christian attitudes to same-sex desire, Harold no longer had to dissociate his soul’s voice from his poetic voice, but instead found fertile ground to blossom in an ancient culture (one which America could not offer). Europe’s shattered remnants from World War destruction had yet to be bulldozed for commercial development, the progress of underarm deodorant & computer automation.

Harold’s next collection of poems, The Dancing Beasts, connected his immersion in Italian life and the historical experience of Ancient Rome to the uncertain and changing realities of the mid- 20^th Century. In such poems at “Tiberius’ Villa at Capri” and “An Episode from Procopius”, the poet asks how much had we truly changed from those ancient days? When stone and marble structures from two millennia still stand yet homes, families, and lives were reduced to rubble. What had modern man learned but more efficient and lucrative means to destroy through violence?

Harold’s gift for language and his Whitmanic love of everyday American speech soon found him translating the Latin poet Catullus whose poems had been censored through translations choked by Christian prudishness. In “On Translations of Catullus,” he writes

Catullus, you’d bust your balls laughing!
For 2000 years they’ve fixed you like a horny cat-
The pedagogues can’t take you straight.
Old pederast, they’ll never make it
-not while they teach you how to write!

Harold also turned his ear to Giuseppe Gioachino Belli whose satirical sonnets attacked the corruption and egotism of the papacy with a sharp humor. Though D.H. Lawrence and Joyce both attempted translations, the vernacular of 19^th Century Rome proved too much of a challenge. Harold said that he accomplished the task with “a dictionary in one hand and an Italian youth in the other.”

During this time Harold continued to correspond with Williams and their surviving letters are preserved in the wonderful collection The American Idiom. In it Williams singled out the poem “Classic Frieze in a Garage” as “the best I have seen of yours” which saw Harold combine the old world and the new by following his native idiom. I will close with the second part of the poem:

I have passed my time dreaming thru ancient ruins
walking thru crowded alleys of laundry
    outside tenements with gourds in windows
& crumbling masonry of wars
 
when suddenly I saw among the greasy rags
  & wheels & axles of a garage
      the carved nude figures
      of a classic frieze
     above dismantled parts of cars!
 
garage swallows sarcophagus!
    mechanic calmly spraying
       paint on a fender
observed in turn by lapith & centaur!
 
the myth of the Mediterranean
            was in that garage
        where the brown wiry youths
               saw nothing unusual
                               at their work
among dead heroes & gods
 
but I saw Hermes in the rainbow
     of the dark oil on the floor
           reflected there
      & the wild hair of the sybil
          as her words bubbled
mad & drowned
              beneath the motor’s roar

On Friday, March 1st, I will participate in an evening of tributes to writers who have passed away in the last couple years by offering remembrances and reflections on Harold Norse. A number of Harold’s friends and contemporaries will be featured including Ira Cohen, Mel Clay and Peter Orlovsky. Please come and join what will be a lovely event.

Friday, March 1, 2013, 7-9 PM
California College of the Arts Writers Studio
195 DeHaro (@ 15th Street)
San Francisco

Harold Norse and Todd Swindell, San Francisco, 2008

In 1993, Harold Norse contributed to the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series with this 10 page entry of his life and work. Like a condensed version of his much acclaimed Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, this witty and concise overview is a wonderful read. The complete document can be viewed in the Writings section.

Announcing the complete visual documentation of Harold Norse’s major publications. From his first books in the early 1960?s to his later ones from City Lights and Gay Sunshine, the covers of Harold’s books were often as innovative and provocative as his poetry. This pages also includes hard to find foreign editions of Beat Hotel. They are all lovingly gathered under the Book Covers section.

They say Dylan Thomas’s recordings were the best recorded poetic voice of the twentieth century, but for my money, Harold Norse’s voice runs a close second. Hear this master of the American idiom, whose mind and knowledge were absolutely cosmic, on the must-have album for all poetry collection, Harold Norse Of Course…”

-Gerald Nicosia, author of Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac

Originally released on cassette tape in 1984 by Ins & Outs Press, Harold Norse Of Course captures the Master Poet in all his glory. Recorded in Amsterdam, this historic recording has been re-released on CD and a luxurious double-colored vinyl with gatefold cover featuring a collage of Norse photos.   Please visit the Merchandise page for more information.

They say Dylan Thomas’s recordings were the best recorded poetic voice of the twentieth century, but for my money, Harold Norse’s voice runs a close second. Hear this master of the American idiom, whose mind and knowledge were absolutely cosmic, on the must-have album for all poetry collection, Harold Norse Of Course…”

-Gerald Nicosia, author of Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac

Published in Beat Scene  No 64,  Spring 2011, page 57

OF COURSE HAROLD NORSE

“Anyone who has read Memoirs of a Bastard Angel is aware that Harold Norse was a very perceptive individual. Intuitive. Sensitive to atmospheres and moods. That remarkable (and incredibly fast-paced) autobiography is rife with instances displaying his keen sense of ‘just knowing’ what someone, or some place or scene, was really all about. Yet Harold’s finely-tuned instinct for seeing things as they were was far from limited to the present. As I discovered for myself in late 1984, six years after he and I had first met and spent time together, in Amsterdam and afterwards Barcelona. This second encounter was at the seventh annual One World Poetry festival, for which I had sponsored Harold and where we both performed. I then offered to put Harold up, so he could stay in Holland a while longer and additionally do a reading at Ins & Outs Press.”

-excerpt taken from Eddie Woods’ introduction to Harold Norse Of Course…

Harold Norse Of Course…was originally released on cassette tape in 1984 by Ins & Outs Press.

Eddie Woods and Tate Swindell are now releasing it on CD and Double Vinyl.

Please visit Unrequited Records website, located in the links page, to order a copy.

Featuring Paul Bowles, Ira Cohen, Mel Clay, Neeli Cherkovski, Douglas Field, Jack Hirschman, Tom Livingston, Gerard Malanga, Jim Nawrocki, F.A. Nettlebeck, Gerard Nicosia, Valery Oistneau, A.D. Winans and Eddie Woods.

Copies are $5, please add $2 domestic postage or $4 international.

Please visit Unrequited Records website, located in the links page, to order a copy.

Ira Cohen first met Harold in Tangier in the early 1960s when they were part of an expatriate group that included William Burroughs and Paul Bowles. It was Ira who gave the title “Sniffing Keyholes” to Harold’s first cut-up piece which was first published in Ira’s magazine GNAOUA, subsequently featured by Bob Dylan on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home.

Harold paid a visit to Ira’s Mylar Chamber while in New York City in the Summer of 1970. The photographs captured Harold dancing as a psychedelic Krishna, naked, flashing mudras. A photo from this series was featured, albeit in black  and white,  on the cover of Carnivorous Saint, Harold’s seminal collection of gay poetry .

Along with Judith Malina and the late Charles Henri Ford, Ira Cohen remained a loving friend until the end of Harold’s life. After Harold moved into an assisted-care facility, I remember Ira telling me on the phone that he wanted to cheer Harold up by sending him sweet potato pies and fudgesicles in the mail.

In 2007 when Ira made his last visit to San Francisco, he made sure to pay a visit to Harold. Sitting across from each other in Harold’s cramped room, they made quite a pair. Talk turned to reminiscence of Burroughs and the Beat Hotel. Harold, whose memory had begun to fail him, turned to Ira and asked, “Do you know Ira Cohen?” Without missing a beat, Ira replied brightly, “That’s me!” Harold was so pleased. He said, “How wonderful,” as he leaned over to shake Ira’s hand.

Being slips in and out of time’s stream of thought and memory.
Gone but not forgotten. Still here, more than most.
Image and word continue on, guiding us, chiding us, inspiring us.

Join us in celebration of beloved poet Harold Norse
as we remember his life and work.
Norse’s friends and admirers will pay homage to this master poet.
Led by Norse’s longtime friends and fellow poets

NEELI CHERKOVSKI    MEL CLAY    A.D. WINANS

July 12, 2009 2:00pm

The Beat Museum, 540 Broadway (at Columbus)

North Beach, San Francisco

Taken in August 1970 during the photo shoot which led to the cover image for Carnivorous Saint. The photographer was poet and filmmaker Ira Cohen using mylar screens to create images of liquid opium.

Striking Beat writer and artist later feted as one of America’s leading gay poets

By Douglas Field
The Guardian, Wednesday, June 17, 2009

William Carlos Williams once wrote to Harold Norse, who has died aged 92, that “you are the best poet of your generation”. Often associated with the Beat writers, Norse began publishing in the early 1940s, befriending and collaborating with leading 20th-century literary figures, among them WH Auden, James Baldwin and Allen Ginsberg. The author of 12 books of poetry, Norse was nominated for the US National Book award in 1974, but never achieved the success of his more celebrated peers.

Born Harold Rosen (a surname he later rearranged into “Norse”), he grew up in a poor Brooklyn neighbourhood in New York. His mother, an illiterate Lithuanian immigrant, had lost touch with his father by the time her only son was born. In 1938 he earned a bachelor’s degree at Brooklyn College where, the following year, he and Chester Kallman, his boyfriend, winked at Auden at a poetry reading. Kallman and Auden became lovers and Norse worked briefly as the poet’s secretary. Remaining in Auden’s circle for some years, by the early 1940s Norse was something of a literary Leonard Zelig, blending in and out of artistic circles.

A talented writer in his own right, he cultivated an extraordinary number of relationships, both personal and professional. In the early 1940s Norse met Ginsberg on the subway in Manhattan and became friends with Baldwin in Greenwich Village. He also spent a summer with Tennessee Williams as the playwright put the finishing touches to The Glass Menagerie, and survived drinking sessions with Dylan Thomas in 1950. He was awarded his master’s degree at New York University the following year.

Norse then met William Carlos Williams, who encouraged him to break free from academic poetry and write in his native Brooklyn tongue. Williams had a profound effect on Norse’s poetic voice and career, which is captured in American Idiom (1990), a record of their decade-long correspondence, beginning in 1951. After collaborating with Julian Beck and Judith Malina on what would become the experimental theatre group Living Theatre (notable for staging the works of American poets), Norse began publishing in literary magazines including Poetry and Saturday Review. His first collection, The Undersea Mountain, was published in 1953.

Despite his initial success, Norse remained frustrated with the New York poetry scene, which was dominated by the influence of Ezra Pound and TS Eliot. Heading abroad in search of literary and sexual freedom, Norse spent 15 years in Europe and North Africa. In Italy he translated the sonnets of GG Belli; these were published in 1960 as The Roman Sonnets of GG Belli, with the Roman’s dialect poetry transformed into bawdy Brooklynese.

Between 1960 and 1963 Norse lived in Paris with William Burroughs, Ginsberg and Gregory Corso in the hotel in the Latin Quarter known as the “Beat Hotel”. Although initially wary of the Beat writers’ literary credentials, Norse collaborated with Brion Gysin on the cut-up technique and was briefly an acclaimed painter of ink drawings soaked in the hotel bidet, known as Cosmographs. After travelling to Greece (where he met Leonard Cohen) and north Africa (where he struck up a friendship with Paul Bowles), Norse returned to the US, settling in California. There he became friends with the writer Charles Bukowski and began bodybuilding with Arnold Schwarzenegger, then an unknown.

Norse’s move to San Francisco in 1972 resulted in a productive spell. In 1974 City Lights, the publisher and bookshop founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, released Hotel Nirvana, Selected Poems, 1953-1973, to critical acclaim. After the publication of Carnivorous Saint: Gay Poems, 1941-1976, Norse was feted as one of America’s leading gay poets. This was followed by Harold Norse: The Love Poems, 1940-1985, and his final volume, In the Hub of the Fiery Force: Collected Poems, 1934-2003. His autobiography, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel: a Fifty Year Literary and Erotic Odyssey, was published in 1989.

Although Norse received support and acclaim from writers including Anaïs Nin, Burroughs and Bukowski, his work did not bring him the financial rewards or literary acclaim that he craved. Norse described himself as a “lone-wolf” and he refused to join the pack, at some cost. In many ways he was more “Beat” than the Beats: Jewish, illegitimate, homosexual, Norse was an outsider who quietly produced some startling and technically accomplished verse from the fringes of the US literary scene.

His return to America as the gay liberation movement gathered momentum gave Norse’s poetry a new sense of coherence and direction that critics had failed to spot. He wrote pioneering poems about masculinity (I Am Not a Man) and achingly painful snapshots of loneliness and unrequited love. In later years he reflected on what it meant to be an older gay poet in San Francisco, captured in the poem Old Age Does Not Happen Slowly, which ends, “If you’re gay you’re dead.”

Towards the end of his life Norse was surrounded by a group of friends who looked after him. When I interviewed him in 2007, it was clear his lack of recognition disappointed him. It was a theme that resurfaced as he pondered on his age: “I’m not a poet any more. I’m an old man.” But such moments rarely lasted, as Norse reminisced: “I have never felt I was any worth and I had to write and write and write.”

Flirtatious but gentlemanly, Norse could shock but did not want to offend. “You could be a real knockout,” he told me when we met, “if only you dressed better.” Full of Brooklyn wisecracks (“I can imitate anyone – even myself”), he was still reading his poetry at the age of 91 to enthralled audiences.

His 1958 poem Classic Frieze in a Garage captures the joy of unexpectedly spotting a frieze in Naples “amongst the greasy rags/ and wheels & axles of a garage”, a prophetic comment on the misplacing of his own best work.

• Harold Norse (Harold Rosen), poet, born 6 July 1916; died 8 June 2009

Todd Swindell, friend, with Harold Norse three days before his death. This is the last photo taken of Harold alive. The spinning object is a Tibetan prayer wheel containing the mantra Om Mani Padme Hum, the mantra of compassion. Photo by Tate Swindell.

Harold Norse, a Beat Poet, Dies at 92

By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: June 13, 2009

Harold Norse, a poet who broke new ground beginning in the 1950s by exploring gay identity and sexuality in a distinctly American idiom relying on plain language and direct imagery, died on Monday in San Francisco. He was 92.

The death was confirmed by Todd Swindell, a friend.

Although Mr. Norse is often classified with the Beats, he had already developed his themes and his style when, in the early 1960s, he fell in with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso, just a few of the many writers with whom he formed romantic or professional relationships. A disciple of William Carlos Williams, who once called him “the best poet of your generation,” Mr. Norse found common cause with the Beats in his rejection of academic poetry and traditional metric schemes and his outsider status as a gay man.

“Harold was one of the pre-eminent rebel poets of our time,” the San Francisco poet Neeli Cherkovski said. “He was someone who smashed conventions, like Ginsberg, and broke through to what he called a new rhythm, writing the way he talked, using the voices of the street. He also gave voice to homosexuality early on.”

Mr. Norse, born Harold Rosen, grew up poor in Brooklyn. His mother was a Lithuanian immigrant, and Harold, her only child, was the product of an affair with a German-American who disappeared from the scene by the time his son was born. When she later married another man, Harold took the last name of his stepfather, Albaum. In the early 1950s he came up with a new last name by rearranging the letters of Rosen.

At Brooklyn College, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1938, he edited the literary magazine and began writing poetry in an academic style. He also entered into a romantic relationship with Chester Kallman, and the two became part of W. H. Auden’s circle when Auden and Christopher Isherwood moved to New York in 1939. Kallman soon became Auden’s companion and remained so for the rest of Auden’s life.

While working toward a master’s degree in English and American poetry at New York University, Mr. Norse met Williams, who encouraged him to break with traditional verse forms and embrace a more direct, conversational language. Soon Mr. Norse was publishing in Poetry, The Saturday Review and The Paris Review. In 1953 he published his first collection, “The Undersea Mountain.”

Abandoning plans to earn a doctorate, he traveled through Europe and North Africa for the next 15 years. While in Italy, he began translating the sonnets of Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, written in Roman dialect. To decode the verse, he consulted street hustlers, and he later said that he did his translations “with a dictionary in one hand and a Roman in the other.”

His translations were published, with a preface by Williams, in “Roman Sonnets” (1960). His decade-long correspondence with Williams was published in “The American Idiom: A Correspondence: William Carlos Williams, Harold Norse, 1951-61” (1990).

In 1960 Mr. Norse moved in with Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso at their seedy hotel on the Left Bank in Paris, where he used Burroughs’s technique of cutting up and reassembling sections of text at random to create the novella “Beat Hotel.”

He later traveled to Tangier, where he fell in with Paul Bowles, and after returning to the United States in 1968 and settling in Venice, Calif., he befriended the poet and novelist Charles Bukowski.

“Harold stood outside the Beat tradition, on his own ground, but he found in the Beats and in Bukowski a certain community,” Mr. Cherkovski said. In “Memoirs of a Bastard Angel: A 50-year Literary and Erotic Odyssey” (1989), Mr. Norse provided a full roll call of friends, lovers and colleagues. It made for an impressive list, with names like Julian Beck and James Baldwin (both friends from his days in Greenwich Village in the 1940s), Tennessee Williams (his roommate in Provincetown when Williams was writing “The Glass Menagerie”), Ned Rorem, James Jones and Anaïs Nin.

“People expect, as I did, the famous writers and poets to be just open and wonderfully giving, and they were not,” he told Gay and Lesbian Review in 2003. “They all wanted to go to bed with me.”

After moving to San Francisco in 1972, Mr. Norse entered a productive period. In 1974 City Lights published “Hotel Nirvana: Selected Poems, 1953-1973,” putting him front and center in the city’s cultural life, and the collection “Carnivorous Saints: Gay Poems, 1941-1976” (1977) put the seal on his growing reputation as one of America’s most daring and innovative gay poets.

He later published “Harold Norse: The Love Poems, 1940-1985” (1986), and in 2003, Thunder’s Mouth Press brought out “In the Hub of the Fiery Force: Collected Poems, 1934-2003.”

“The fiery force is nothing more than the life force as we know it,” Mr. Norse wrote in his preface. “It is the flame of desire and love, of sex and beauty, of pleasure and joy as we consume and are consumed, as we burn with pleasure and burn out in time.”

A version of this article appeared in print on June 13, 2009, on page A20 of the New York edition.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Harold with Kevin Killian & James Broughton in San Francisco in 1987. Photo by Alex Gildzen.

Harold Norse and two of his books, December 25, 2003. Photo by Betty Best.

Harold Norse during his ballet dancer days in New York City, circa 1937. Photo by Marcus Bleckman, great-nephew of Sarah Bernhardt.

Harold Norse in Venice, CA circa 1969. This was the photo that made Charles Bukowski jealous.

At the Cafe Trieste, North Beach, San Francisco, 1975. Left to right: Allen Ginsberg, Harold Norse, Jack Hirschman, Michael McClure & Bob Kaufman. Photo by Diana Church.

At the Cafe Trieste, North Beach, San Francisco, 1975. Left to right: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Minelte Le Blanc, Peter Le Blanc, Allen Ginsberg, Harold Norse, Jack Hirschman & Bob Kaufman. Photo by Diana Church.

Gerard Malanga and Harold Horse, Union Square, San Francisco, 1973. Photo by Frances McCann.

Harold Norse and Neeli Cherkovski, date unknown

Harold Norse at the Cafe Trieste circa late 1970′s.

Harold Norse in front of City Lights Bookstore window promoting the release of his cut-up novella Beat Hotel, May 15, 1983

Harold Norse in the bedroom of his Albion Street cottage, November 11, 1999. Photo by Todd Swindell.

Harold Norse and Peter Orlovsky, Naropa Insitute, July 1980. Photo by Michael Kellner.

Harold Norse in Union Square, San Francisco, 1973. Photo by Frances McCann.

Harold Norse dies at 92; Beat poet was a literary beacon in gay community

A pioneer of poetry written in plain American English, Norse was a mentor or peer to great talents in 20th century American literature, including Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin and Allen Ginsberg.

By Elaine Woo
June 13, 2009

Harold Norse, a San Francisco poet often associated with the Beats, who was mentor or peer to many of the greatest talents in 20th century American literature, including Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski, has died. He was 92.

Norse died of natural causes Monday at an assisted-living facility in San Francisco, according to his conservator, attorney Mark Vermeulen.

Norse was born out of wedlock on July 6, 1916, in New York City and raised by his mother after his father disappeared. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Brooklyn College in 1938 and a master’s from New York University in 1951. The following year, his mentor, William Carlos Williams, arranged a reading for Norse at the Museum of Modern Art. His work appeared in prestigious publications, including Poetry magazine, the Paris Review and Saturday Review.

He was halfway to a doctorate in 1953 when he moved to Italy, where he discovered the 19th century Roman poet G.G. Belli and translated a volume of Belli’s bawdy sonnets.

By then, Norse, heeding Williams’ advice, had abandoned traditional verse for “my own free style” that drew on the rhythms of everyday speech.

“He was an absolute pioneer in the use of American language,” said Gerald Nicosia, a poet and biographer of Jack Kerouac, who knew Norse for more than 30 years. “He was writing good, strong poetry before the Beats were.”

At the Beat Hotel, where Norse lived from 1959 to 1963, he found himself experimenting with Gysin and Burroughs in what they called “cut-up writing,” in which they cut up pages of writing and randomly pasted the pieces together to form a new text. He wrote “Beat Hotel,” a novella, in the cut-up style. Burroughs wrote “Naked Lunch,” the nonlinear, obscenity-laced postwar classic.

Norse returned to the United States in 1968, settling for a few years in Venice, not far from Bukowski’s Hollywood bungalow. Bukowski, whom Time magazine would later dub the “laureate of American lowlife,” revered Norse, who returned the admiration when he included the younger poet in a volume of Penguin Modern Poets he edited that also featured his own work and that of Philip Lamantia, another Beat poet. The 1969 Penguin anthology was Bukowski’s first major introduction to the literary establishment.

After its publication, Bukowski wrote to Norse: “Whenever I read you my own writing gets better — you teach me how to run through glaciers and dump siffed-up whores. This is not saying it well, but you know what I mean. God damn you, Norse, I’ve just burnt a tray full of french fries while WRITING about you!”

Bukowski, like Ginsberg and other Norse associates, eclipsed him in fame. “I had a big ego,” Norse told the San Francisco Weekly in 2000, “but I always said — and it was a stupid thing that I lived by — ‘I won’t lift a finger to publicize my work. It has to come from the outside.’ So in a way I buried myself.”

He moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s and became a mentor to younger writers, including poet and Beat historian Neeli Cherkovski. In 1977, he helped put on a seminal reading at Glide Memorial Church featuring gay writers such as Ginsberg, Cherkovski and John Rechy that Cherkovski said “helped open up the idea of the identity of the gay poet in San Francisco.”

Norse was unabashed about being homosexual and poured his experiences — what Ferlinghetti once teasingly described as his “horizontal history” — into poems that reflected anger, sadness and pride.

I’m not a man. I write poetry.

I’m not a man. I meditate on peace and love.

I’m not a man. I don’t want to destroy you.

In 1990, he published his correspondence with William Carlos Williams. But he died before he could claim a larger place in the literary firmament, alongside Ginsberg and Burroughs, both of whom died in 1997. In his later years, he believed he could put himself back on the map if he could publish his 20-year correspondence with Bukowski, who died in 1994. Those letters remain unpublished.

“He used to talk about Norse’s luck,” recalled Cherkovski. “I said, ‘Look, you outlived everybody.’ ”

elaine.woo@latimes.com

Copyright 2009 Los Angeles Times

Harold Norse in San Francisco, 1981. Photo by Ira Cohen.

Harold Norse in San Francisco, 1981. Photo by Ira Cohen.

Harold Norse circa 1970′s. Photo by Frances McCann.

Harold Norse circa 1970′s. Photo by Frances McCann.

Harold Norse circa 1960′s

Harold Norse near the Bay Bridge, November 1972. Photo by Neil Hollier.

Harold Norse at his apartment on Guy Place, 1974. Photo by William Childress.

Harold Norse in 1984. Photo by Robert Pruzan.

Harold Norse and William S. Burroughs at Naropa Institue, July 1980. Photo by Michael Kellner.

Harold Norse executing a tour jete enl’air. He had begun to be a ballet dancer in New York after leaving home in Brooklyn and finishing college, circa 1938.

Let go with senses, pull out the stops, forget false teachings and lies
Let go of inherited belief, let go of shame and blame, in brief
Let go of forbidden energies, choked back in muscle and nerves
Let go of rigid rules and roles, let go of uptight poses
Let go of your puppet self, let go and renew yourself and be free
Let go the dead meat of convention, wake up the live meat of love

Let go this moment, the hour, this day, tomorrow will be too late
Let go of guilt and frustration, let liberation and tolerance flow
Let go of phantom worries and fears, let go of hours and days and years
Let go of hate and rage and grief, let walls against ecstasy fall for relief
Let go of pride and greed, let go of missiles and might and creed
Let go the dead meat of convention, wake up the live meat of love

Harold Norse circa 1960′s

Harold Norse circa early 1970′s. Photo by Frances McCann.

Harold Norse, circa early 1970′s. Photo by Frances McCann.

Harold Norse circa early 1970′s

Harold Norse in Venice, CA, July 1969

Harold Norse in San Francisco, Novemeber 1972. Photo by Neil Hollier.

Harold Norse in Paris in the early 1960′s. Photo by Martha Rocher.

Photo by Ira Cohen, “For Harold, It was great to see you. Here’s one photo of you w/ the great SHMOOZER. Mr. Gerard Malanga, who surprised you by not knowing that a BJ was “ALL THE WAY.” Best, Ira 1995″

William S. Burroughs & Harold Norse reading at Naropa Institute, July 1980. Photo by Michael Kellner.

Harold Norse in Crete, 1963. Photo by Thanassis.

Harold Norse circa 1950′s

Madame Rachou with Harold Norse. He asked me to take these pictures in January 1963, when,after 32 years, Mme Rachou “the bluehaired old mother of us all”, retired and moved to a flat nearby. The hotel had been sold, the handle of the cafe door had been removed, and a notice in the window read : “Closed fro alteration”. The Beat Hotel had ceased to exist.

Gay Sunshine, a benefit reading. Harold Norse, Allen Ginsberg, John Rechy, William Barber, Aaron Shurin, Dennis Cooper, Neeli Cherkovski, Robert Gluck. 7:30 Friday May 27, 1977, Glide Memorial Church

Todd Swindell, friend, with Harold three days before his death. The spinning object is a Tibetan prayer wheel contain the mantra Om Mani Padme Hum, the mantra of compassion. Photo by Tate Swindell.

Harold Norse at North Beach’s Beat Museum with proprietor Jerry Cimino, 2007. Photo by Tate Swindell.

Poet Harold Norse in his apartment kitchen, 157 Albion Street, San Francisco, May 28, 1988 – for HN with old Affection from Allen Ginsberg AH (c. Allen Ginsberg Estate)

Harold Norse, March 4, 1988. Harold Norse is a small man, but exudes a certain brawn. He also delights in being the bad boy, a quality that struck me as particularly Catholic. These aspects of Norse led me to photograph him thusly in the mud room of his Mission District apartment. By Rob Lee.

Monday, July 16, 2007. Legendary queer beat poet and writer Harold Norse, who’s very much alive and kicking, celebrated his 91st birthday on Sunday at the funky Beat Museum in North Beach. Surrounded by many dear friends and admirers, Norse read from his work, spoke about his Beat life, ate a slice of chocolate birthday cake and signed books for fans. I had never met him so I made sure to get to his party and reading, just to shake his hand and snap some pix of him. Loud and big thanks to Todd Swindell, Tate Swindell, Mark Vermeulen, Jerry Cimino and the entire staff at the Beat Museum for pulling the event together. Happy 91st birthday, Harold! From The Petrelis Files. Photo by Tate Swindell.

Harold signing books for a line of fans. From The Petrelis Files. Photo by Tate Swindell.

Monday, July 16, 2007. Two crotchety, opinionated, veteran queers giving each other the “Yeah, right. Who the hell do you think you are?” look. Harold on the right, Michael Petrelis on the left. From The Petrelis Files. Photo by Tate Swindell.

Harold Norse, a poet, writer and painter from the USA. He moved in to Bob and Ver’s room long after they had left. In the “City Lights Journal” he wrote, in February 1963; “Last September I got Room 9 at 9, Rue Git-le Coeur on the 9th day of the 9th month…. In the cabbala, 9 is the number referring to initiates and prophets”….

is the image of a young man

making music and love

to a girl whose interest

in love and music coincides

with an enormous despair in both

their inner selves like a plucked

guitar in the dry hot sun of

hope where savage and brutal men

are tearing life like a page

from a very ancient

and yellow

book

               & pine-lined palaces
                              fat palms beside balconies
                       the heat something
                                   you could really touch

                                     the kids with cunning
                                         delinquent faces
                                  after americano sailors

            -thinking of nerval    tends-moi le pausilippe
                  et la mer d’Italie & living
                          on the hill         posillipo          under
               a gangster’s dancefloor
                                                   among goldfinches

                                         on the bay of naples
                                                  in a stone cottage
                               over tufa caves in which the sea
                               crashed in winter     sweet gerard
                                                one hundred years
                       have made the desolation greater

     the tower is really down & the sun blackened
                     beyond despair      the loudspeaker drowns
                              finches     cliffs      caves
                                      all in the hands of racketeers
        yet i have passed my time dreaming thru this
                              fantastic wreck

walking thru incendiary alleys of crowded laundry
                              with yellow gourds in windows &
                              crumbling masonry of wars
                                    human corruption
                              so thick and hopeless that i laugh

when suddenly i saw among the oil & greasy rags
                               & wheels & axles of a garage
                                the carved nude figures of
                                        a classic frieze
                                there above the dismantled
                                parts of cars!

perfect! & how strange! garage
               swallows sarcophagus!
mechanic calmly spraying
                    paint on a
                                       fender
observed in turn by lapith and centaur!

                                                       flow
                           of unthinking flesh!
                                       frank thighs! eyes
                              of aphrodite!

the myth of the mediterranean
           was in that garage
      where the brown wiry
youths saw nothing unusual
                   at their work
    among dead heroes & gods

    but i saw hermes in the rainbow
            of the dark oil on the floor
                             reflected there
           & the wild hair of the sybil
                   as her words bubbled
mad and drowned
                               beneath  the motor’s roar  

yet cats continue basking
in the hazy sun
the chained goat sways in ecstasy
the Parthenon looks down from creamy heights
lichen and rust nibble the pediments
and tourist feet break the spell
of antiquity’s vibrations

the grass hits
as I look at rusty orangeade caps
thinking Who needs nuclear Apollo?
thermonuclear Minerva?
Nike crashing to grand finale?

we need the anti-Christ
who is probably playing football around the corner
the sweet boy who used to be called Eros
and wants us to be happy.

bring back the carnivorous saint
whose mother is no virgin
she’s Our Lady of Peace Movements
to ban the bomb and clean up the air
she’ll wave her umbrella and change the world.

ah yes, when the grass hits
old worlds burn down and new worlds form
in clouds of brown monoxide morning.

Athens, Jan. 1964

I’m not a man. I don’t like football, boxing and cars.
I like to express my feeling. I even like to put an arm
around my friend’s shoulder.

I’m not a man. I won’t play the role assigned to me- the role created
by Madison Avenue, Playboy, Hollywood and Oliver Cromwell,
Television does not dictate my behavior.

I’m not a man. Once when I shot a squirrel I swore that I would
never kill again. I gave up meat. The sight of blood makes me sick.
I like flowers.

I’m not a man. I went to prison resisting the draft. I do not fight
when real men beat me up and call me queer. I dislike violence.

I’m not a man. I have never raped a woman. I don’t hate blacks.
I do not get emotional when the flag is waved. I do not think I should
love America or leave it. I think I should laugh at it.

I’m not a man. I have never had the clap.

I’m not a man. Playboy is not my favorite magazine.

I’m not a man. I cry when I’m unhappy.

I’m not a man. I do not feel superior to women

I’m not a man. I don’t wear a jockstrap.

I’m not a man. I write poetry.

I’m not a man. I meditate on peace and love.

I’m not a man. I don’t want to destroy you

San Francisco, 1972