Sixty-Seven Poems For Downtrodden Saints is the last book project completed by poet, Jack Micheline, prior to his death. It is an important publication and one of Micheline's finest, representing a great variety of Micheline's body of work, and contains over 60 images with many rare and unique photos and ephemera. 

Edited and published by Matt Gonzalez (San Francisco political figure and renown public defender). Easy to tell that this book was a labor of love and is a treasure.

The books offered in this listing are from the estate of Jack Micheline and come directly from the estate. No middle-man, no big mark-up. A portion of the proceeds will benefit The Jack Micheline Foundation For The Arts whose mission is to assist the downtrodden, artists in need and support and The Beat Museum in San Francisco.

ADDED EXTRA: Each order ships with pieces of actual Micheline ephemera from the estate.

Biographical History

JACK MICHELINE was one of America’s least renowned prolific personas that rose from the heyday of the Greenwich Village “beat generation” scene in the 1950’s. Micheline was a Troubadour artist who painted and wrote poems in a particular moment. His rhythmic and colorful style and cadence is entrenched in all fibers of his work. Much of his work has a primitive and childlike quality…colorful abstracts which reach into the depth of your soul, engaging ones innocence and comfortably familiar and inviting sentiment from our youth, supplying us with profound delight.

Micheline’s bohemian lifestyle enriched how he worked. His paintings were often created with gouache on paper, paper on floor, artist on knees, rags in hand, and fingers moving on the paper to the beat of his soul and imagination raging in his mind. Micheline was driven like a wild animal to the act of creation. Painting and writing provided a more appealing outlet. He, like many of his time, rebelled against the business world, corporations, wars and politics. One of his famous lines from a song he wrote and performed is “it’s the dead, the dead, the god dammed dead, it’s the dead that rule this world.” Micheline was never an artist to make a living, he was an individual living as an artist.

Humanity was very prevalent in Micheline’s work– often painting and writing about city life, struggles that pulled people down, the fallen, children, and animals. He had an immediate connection and rapport with the downtrodden.

Jack Micheline was born Harvey Martin Silver on November 6, 1929 in the East Bronx (New York City) of Russian-Romanian ancestry. He changed his name legally in 1963, choosing "Jack" after Jack London and "Micheline" as some purported adaptation of a family name.

He began his travelling at the age of seventeen and at twenty-six Micheline's first began his artistic endeavors as a poet. He began creating and publishing work in 1954, moved to Greenwich Village and in 1958 his collection River of Red Wine, which boasted an introduction by Jack Kerouac and garnered favorable reviews from critic Dorothy Parker (Esquire Magazine), established him as a writer.

He found a home in the streets of Greenwich Village, where he lived the next five years. Rapidly Micheline identified himself with the tradition of American street poets, such as Vachel Lindsay and Maxvell Bodenheim. He walked the streets of the Village and Harlem listening to jazz, digging the vitality and humanity amongst poor people. He found a friend in the black poet Langston Hughes, who encouraged him in his writing.

Micheline’s enigmatic personality endeared him with some of the era’s most prolific artists. His friendships transcended the various art factions; Musicians, Painters, Photographers, Filmmakers, Playwrights, Poets and Writers. Micheline like many of his contemporaries held court at the Cedar Tavern in the Greenwich Village in the 1950s and 60s. Micheline counted an extraordinary lot of artists among his friends.

In 1982 Micheline gave a public poetry reading at the Jack Kerouac Conference held at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO, celebrating 25 years of “On The Road” where he read to the delight of the attendees garnering the award for most outstanding poet for the conference. He also enjoyed a close kinship with Jack’s daughter, Jan Kerouac.

He was most influenced as a painter by the renowned abstract expressionist, Franz Kline. Through Kline’s friendship and generosity, Micheline received moral and financial support to begin painting in earnest. In 1961, Kline gave Micheline $3,200 to travel to Mexico to further explore his artistic aspirations. In Mexico, Micheline became an active painter adopting his trademark colorful, childlike primitive-style.

The influence in Micheline’s paintings can be easily seen in his connection to his cadre of abstract expressionist friends. He distinguished himself as a Colorist; skilled in the way he used colors in achieving special effects within his work. While self-taught, his work is also sometimes considered part of the Outsider and Folk art genre.

Jack Micheline lived on the fringe of poverty, painting and writing about hookers, drug addicts, blue collar workers, and the dispossessed. Franz Kline’s statement seemed to sum up Micheline’s living conditions very well; “A ‘Bohemian’ is a person that can live where animals would die”

In the early 1960’s Micheline traveled to Europe, across the United States, Mexico and Israel. He lived in rooming houses, stayed with friends and got in touch with other underground artists. In 1962 he married Patricia Cherkin of Monessen, PA. With this marriage he had his only child, Vince Silver. The marriage lasted 1 year.

In 1964 he married Marian Elizabeth Redding, a politician's daughter, and went to Europe with her. Just a year later the marriage broke up.

By the late 1960s Micheline had relocated to the West Coast, settling in San Francisco permanently in the early 70s. He was a local figure in the in the North Beach art scene. He became acquainted with west coast artists including Charles Bukowski, Ken Kesey, A.D. Winans, Jack Hirschman, Bob Kaufman, Neeli Cherkovski, ruth weiss, and many others with whom he had very close friendships.

Throughout his adult life, he joined liberal causes and criticized the oppressive elements of government that enforced censorship or tacitly accepted racism. He identified with the disenfranchised and downtrodden he encountered in his travels and learned to love the sound of jazz, and the liberation of painting and poetry. His work possessed a natural rhythm and rhyme that was able to connect to an audience that normally had little interest and contact with the arts.

For Micheline being an outlaw meant that the “academy” would ignore him; his work would not be readily available, no coronations of his work, no gallery exhibits, and wouldn’t be anthologized, and he wouldn’t be taught in schools. Any success he had would be through the pure strength of his work and would be disseminated by small galleries and publishing houses or through self-publication and promotional efforts.

He corresponded with women in prison, women of considerable size and weight, he wore large colorful bowler hats and painted his old friends in beautiful gouache colors. He reveled in a traveling vagabond style that meant leaving his art and poems strewn across America. For Micheline, this meant trading his paintings and poems for food and a place to sleep.

At the end of his life Micheline lived in San Francisco, writing poetry and painting while still being ignored by the bigger presses and galleries. "Good work doesn't sell well they claim. I am a rare human spirit; the work is open, free and alive. I'm sorry if I frighten them. Maybe they want stories with condoms on them, clean and safe. My work is ALIVE! This animal is alive. Sad for this unbrave world. Sad state indeed. It makes one scream..."

Micheline’s enigmatic personality endeared him with some of the era’s most prolific artists. His friendships transcended the various art factions; Musicians, Painters, Photographers, Filmmakers, Playwrights, Poets and Writers. Micheline like many of his contemporaries held court at the Cedar Tavern in the Greenwich Village in the 1950s and 60s. Micheline counted an extraordinary lot of artists among his friends.

Born in The Bronx, New York, of Russian and Romanian Jewish ancestry.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 on a trip funded by friend, Franz Kline.

Micheline was regarded as one of few Beat Generation era artists who continued to produce important work into the 1990’s. He remained an active painter and writer up till the time of his death in 1998. He died on a San Francisco BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train on February 27, 1998 of a heart attack.

#Burroughs #Kaufman #di Prima #Weiss #Solomon #Sanders #Waldman #Bukowski #Ginsberg #Naropa #Ferlinghetti #Hirschman #McClure #Tsongas #Winans #Orlovsky #Krim #Hettie #Weisner #Baraka #Cassady #Knight #Kline #Cohen #Selby #Menebroker #Robertson #Cherkovski #Salas #Vinograd #McDonough #Librizzi #Silverman #Ruggles #McDarrah #RobertFrank #AlfredLeslie