Beat poet Harold Norse dies at 92
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/13/BABV183SHI.DTL
Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, June 14, 2009
When he wasn't regaling friends with wild tales of past cavortings,
Harold Norse would sometimes complain about his lack of fame compared
with other Beat poets.
Neither his work nor his name was as well known as Beat
contemporaries Allen Ginsberg or Jack Kerouac. Still, his friends
said, the mild irritation would soon be forgotten amid joyous gossip
about one more of his famous literary friends.
Mr. Norse, a onetime American expatriate who lived the last 35 years
of his life in San Francisco's Mission District, knew in his heart
that what mattered was not fame but art, and it is the
extraordinarily talented artist and stylist that his friends said
they will remember.
Mr. Norse, author of "Hotel Nirvana," "Memoirs of a Bastard Angel,"
and a long list of poems that both celebrated his gay life and
exposed his inner pain, died Monday of complications of old age. He was 92.
"Harold had the real stuff, the rhythm was there. He knew how to make
a poem move and sound good," said Gerry Nicosia, a poet and longtime
friend. "He really was a great poet, a breakthrough poet."
Mr. Norse was born Harold Rosen in Brooklyn in 1916. His mother was
an unmarried Jewish immigrant from Russia. He was short, about 5 feet
2, and his stepfather reportedly beat him.
He later rearranged the letters of his last name to create "Norse,"
and he stuck with the name the rest of his life.
In 1934, he was the first freshman at Brooklyn College to win the
school's annual poetry contest. He received a bachelor's degree in
English literature from the college in 1938.
Openly gay, he became part of poet W.H. Auden's inner circle soon
afterward. In 1951, he received a master's degree in English and
American poetry from New York University.
His talent began to blossom the following year when William Carlos
Williams invited him to read at the Museum of Modern Art and then
took him under his wing. Williams, who had mentored numerous poets,
including Ginsberg, would later call Mr. Norse "the best poet of his
generation."
Mr. Norse moved to Italy shortly after his first book of poetry, "The
Undersea Mountain," was published in 1953. He lived there until 1959,
translating the sonnets of 19th-century poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli
with what he quipped was "a dictionary in one hand and a Roman in the other."
Nicosia said American poetry at this time was straight-laced and
academic. Mr. Norse revolutionized the art, Nicosia said, by using
accessible American language and drawing upon his own painful
experiences as a gay outcast.
Many of his famous gay poems were in the book "Carnivorous Saint,"
the same name as the poem he wrote in Athens in 1964 that talked of
the saint "whose mother is no virgin," and who will "wave her
umbrella and change the world."
Mr. Norse moved to Paris in 1960 and lived in the famous Beat Hotel
on the Rue Gît-le-Cif { return "" } else { return "" }ur, with, among
others, Beat Generation writers Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William
S. Burroughs.
It was there that he helped devise the "cut-up" technique, in which
different phrases and sentences are snipped from a variety of works
and pasted together. He wrote the experimental cut-up novel "Beat
Hotel" in 1960.
Mr. Norse returned to the United States in 1969 and is said to have
lifted weights at Venice Beach with Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the
1970s, he moved to San Francisco, where he became a leading gay
liberation poet.
Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was editor and publisher of his book
"Hotel Nirvana," which was nominated for a National Book Award.
"His poetry was very much expatriate poetry," Ferlinghetti said. "It
was the voice of alienation from modern consumer culture."
One of Mr. Norse's most famous poems was "In the Hub of the Fiery
Force," which was published in 1999 when he was 82.
"I consider him one of the best poets there was," said A.D. Winans, a
poet and friend. "He was very congenial, very educated. He was also
funny. He could hypnotize you with all these stories about the great
writers he knew."
Mr. Norse's last words, spoken to a nurse, according to friends, were
"the end is the beginning."
A "poets' tribute" will be held for Mr. Norse at 7 p.m. Monday at
Bird and Beckett Bookstore, 653 Chenery St., San Francisco. A
memorial will be held July 12 at the Beat Museum in North Beach.
--
E-mail Peter Fimrite at pfimrite@sfchronicle.com.
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Harold Norse dies at 92; Beat poet was a literary beacon in the gay community
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-harold-norse13-2009jun13,0,7672432.story
A pioneer of poetry written in plain American English, Norse was
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.
A pioneer of poetry written in plain American English who was called
"the best poet of your generation" by William Carlos Williams, Norse
never attained the recognition that he and others felt was his due. A
literary beacon in the gay community who risked ostracism by writing
openly of his sexual adventures in the 1940s and '50s, Norse exiled
himself to Europe for 15 years before returning to the United States
and publishing such volumes as "Hotel Nirvana" (1974), which was
nominated for a National Book Award, "Carnivorous Saint" (1977) and
"In the Hub of the Fiery Force: Collected Poems" (2003).
"He was essentially an expatriate voice in American poetry," said
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet and bookseller who published a volume
of Norse's poems in the mid-1970s. "He had an original voice because
he ventriloquized what a lot of other poets were saying. . . . He
could sound in one poem like T.S. Eliot . . . or in another poem like
William Burroughs."
Norse's life reads like a history of modern American literature. At a
reading in 1939, he flirted with W.H. Auden and became his personal
secretary, a job he held until Auden took up with Norse's lover. He
met Ginsberg riding a New York subway in 1944, more than a decade
before Ginsberg attained international notoriety with the Beat
classic "Howl." Later, Norse caroused with Burroughs, Gregory Corso
and Brion Gysin at the Parisian flophouse that became famous as the Beat Hotel.
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.' "
--
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