The Venice Beat Poets –The Great River Outside the Mainstream
– JOHN THOMAS
By Jim
Smith
Charles Bukowski – who should
know – called John Thomas, “The best unread poet in America. He is
the invisible genius of American poetry.”
Referring to John Thomas when he died, the London
Independent quoted Lawrence Lipton, author of The Holy Barbarians about the
Venice Beat “scene,” as follows: How does one review the work of a
poet who mocks the societal role of the poet, who has no desire to publish his
poetry and says that he has no interest in the familiar moral values of poetry
and poets?
Thomas, in true Beat
fashion, seemed to care not about fame. For him, the creative process of writing
the poem or the essay was sufficient in itself. The work didn’t have to be
reviewed in the New York Times to gain
validation.
He quit writing poetry
for 15 years, until 1983, when the love of his life, Philomene Long, inspired
him to begin again. Much of his writing for the rest of his life had either a
direct, or indirect, connection with his wife. Books in which Thomas appears are
collaborations with Long, including Bukowski in the Bathtub, The Ghosts of
Venice West, and The Book of Sleep. An exception is Feeding the
Animal, published by Lummox Press in 2001, which is all John Thomas
poetry.
Thomas was a descendent of
Meriwether Lewis, of Lewis and Clark fame. And like his ancestor, Thomas was an
explorer in his own right, but of intellectual pursuits. As an explorer, he
traveled far from his beginnings in Baltimore and his stint as a cryptographer
in the Air Force (he lost his security clearance by developing a friendship with
the poet, Ezra Pound, who was in jail for treason). He then became a programmer
for UNIVAC, one of the world’s first computers. Fired in 1959 for growing
a beard, Thomas ended his association with the corporate world, and hitchhiked
to Venice.
In Venice, Thomas declared
himself a poet and found work as the cook and manager at Venice’s first
coffee house, The Gas House, on the Ocean Front at Market Street. He collected
donations and provided up to two meals a day, free of charge, to poets and
artists who made up the growing Beat community (They also got a free room at the
misnamed Grand Hotel on Market Street, later destroyed by the city of
L.A.).
After the Gas House closed,
Thomas, who had fallen in with other now-famous poets including Stuart Perkoff,
Tony Scibella, Frankie Rios, and Jimmy Ryan Morris, hung out at the Venice West
Expresso Cafe and the Potpourri coffee house, both on Dudley Ave. Later, Thomas
developed a close friendship with Charles Bukowski, who went on to become not
just a well-known poet, but a cultural idol to
many.
Without a doubt, the most
significant person in Thomas’ life was Philomene Long, the Poet Laureate
of Venice. They met after a reading by Long at the old Venice Jail in 1983, and
were together for the next 19 years. Most of that time was spent at the Ellison
Apartments at 15 Paloma Ave. #31, whose cramped quarters and view of the ocean,
became a topic of many of their poems. John Thomas died on March 29, 2002 at age
71, and Philomene Long died on August 21, 2007. They are interred side by side
at Holy Cross Cemetery. On their marker are some lines from one of his poems:
Our Life: The One Secret that Surprises
Death.
------------
Even
the barrel of my pen
is full of the
ghosts of uncouth poets.
In case
you wondered,
they are the wild kidney.
They are
the bitter crackling sound I
hear
when Philomene brushes her
hair.
In case you
wondered,
they are the small transparent
parasols
all of us stroll
beneath.
–John
Thomas
Excerpt from The Ghosts of the
Poets
reproduced on the Venice Poetry Wall,
west of Ocean Front Walk at Horizon Avenue.
Posted: Fri - February 1, 2008 at 03:00 PM
