An Ode to the Street Poet - Jack Micheline

By: Erik Rittenberry

“Imagine Jack Micheline, half pint riding the left hip pocket of his holy corduroys, walking sunset, one arm around the sky, the other around the Earth, as he rages against The Clowns who’ve denied The Poet’s Blood…”

-- Wanda Coleman

He was born in the Bronx on the brink of the Great Depression. 
Barbed wire and asphalt, soup lines and madness in the 
cold wretched winter of discontent. A nation on 
the verge. He grew up there. America, 1930’s. 

Early in life, Jack took to the road, a wandering young man 
with no resources, roaming and roaring across the land
like a wild nomad. He never did drink himself to 
death like Kerouac or die mysteriously like Cassady
on some lonesome railroad track in Mexico 
but goddamnit he did fall into a ditch 
in Cicero, Illinois 
and rise like a frayed phoenix 
a born-again poet. 

Harvey Martin Silver was his birth name 
but he changed it to Jack, taken of course 
from the famous American tramp-writer,
Jack London, a man unrivaled in the
art of living dangerously. 

Micheline’s first poem was penned 
after watching two bums brawl 
over a bottle of wine in the cold
streets of the city. From then on, 
he wrote about the poverty-stricken 
workers and artists, petty criminals, 
whores and addicts. Unadulterated 
life in the streets.  

This was 1954, the time of Beats, 
the time of post-war conformity 
and middle-class sensibilities
and that fierce, rebellious hunger 
for LIFE seething in the hearts 
of the youth. 

For a little money 
Micheline took up odd jobs—
clerk, actor, beggar, dishwasher, 
union organizer. Deliberately 
detached from the social ladder, free 
from the chains of societal norms and the 
nine-to-five stability, Jack was a solitary figure 
making his way through the new America 
writing his poems and painting, surrendering 
comfort and security for art and escapades.

He somehow got in with the down-and-out Beat poets
before the Beats became commercialized and he read 
his poems on city corners and in cafés and pool halls. 
He won a poetry contest and finally got published 
in a magazine along with the works of Philip Whalen, 
Diane di Prima, and Allen Ginsberg. 

Against all odds, Micheline had something. 

He got his first book of poems published and
was fortunate enough to have the great Jack Kerouac 
write the forward. Micheline spent the better part 
of the 1960’s writing poems and traveling around Europe 
finally settling down at the end of that rip-roaring decade 
on the West Coast where he became friends with the 
beer-swigging Los Angeles poet Charles Bukowski. 

Bukowski, rarely bent on showing admiration 
for other writers and poets, had this to say 
about ole’ Jack:

“Micheline is all right—he’s one-third bull shit, 
but he’s got a special divinity and a special strength. 
He’s got perhaps a little too much of a POET sign pasted 
to his forehead, but more often than not he says the 
good things–in speech and poem–power- flame,
 laughing things. I like the way his poems roll and flow. 
His poems are total feelings beating their 
heads on barroom floors. I can’t think of anyone 
who has more and who has been neglected more. 
Jack is the last of the holy preachers sailing down 
Broadway singing the song. Going over all the people 
I’ve ever known, he comes closer to the utmost divinity, 
the soothsayer, the gambler, the burning of stinking 
buckskin than any man I’ve ever known.”

Jack once told a story about how Janis Joplin asked him 
to write her a song. He wrote it, “great song too,” 
he proclaimed with a shit-eatin' grin. But he said 
that her mind was far too gone by then.
So it never got sung. No one really 
believed him. 

Micheline, a dying breed indeed, 
was an outlaw in life and with the written word 
who was shunned by the literary world. He 
was ignored by all the major publishing houses 
along with the tweed jackets of academia. 

Hell, he mostly held company with the vagabonds 
and bohemians and the street people anyway. 
He never did conform or try to appease. 
His poems were like a crumpled page 
ripped from his ragged soul that reflected 
the life in the cold streets of America.
He wanted to give voice to the disenfranchised – 
"The literary revolution was a put up job. 
A middle-class revolution, a paper tiger, 
a media hype at best. It's time 
for poor voices not heard from, hidden in 
the dark corners of America. Voices crushed 
on skid row, walking the streets & 
highway out of their minds."

He was “a true minstrel, living in our own sad, 
desperate times,” wrote Diane diPrima. 

I can still hear Micheline howling
into the demented wind: 

"I am fifty-two, live alone, considered 
some mad freak genius
In reality I am a fucked up poet
who will never come to terms with the world
No matter how beautiful the flowers grow
No matter how children smile
No matter how blue is the bluest sky…
Tomorrow is never better..."

February 27th, 1998, 
I was an 18-year-old senior in high-school
somewhere in Florida, green to life, 
about to join the Navy.
Jack was on a commuter train 
somewhere outside 
of San Fran where he died suddenly 
of a heart attack, probably scribbling 
a poem in his tattered notepad 
like he always did on buses and trains. 
He was discovered by the transit police 
on that late Friday morning. He was 
68 years old. 

Sing it Jack, sing us one last one:

Everywhere I go is beauty,
trees illuminated
street lights glowing in the darkness
I want to run up to strangers and kiss them
but there is too much noise
men kill each other
I’m sick and tired of seeing sad faces
stop that bastard machine
everyone is God and Holy
a spike is ripping at my throat
I smell a fragrance of a rose
everywhere I go is beauty.

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