The packed room fell silent as the tiny woman in a flowery lavender print made her way to the podium. Her voice was shaky and the crowd strained forward to catch her words.
Eileen Kaufman, demure and gray-haired at 74, stood before the standing-room-only crowd to read "Powell Street Madness," an excerpt from her unpublished autobiography describing her life among the "beat" poets in San Francisco's North Beach in the mid-1950s.The vivid prose tells of one particularly crazy night when her husband, poet Bob Kaufman, and four friends barged into their flat and "began to spray paint the entire place: dishes, typewriters and walls, 27 different colors."
She tells how she and her husband were evicted every few weeks "because it was the '50s and Bob was black" and how the constant change and the mind-frazzling lifestyle periodically forced her to take their son, Parker, and live in France, where her husband was revered as "the black Rimbaud."
For Eileen Kaufman and others of her generation, this recent evening at Berkeley's Gaia Bookstore was a coming-out party of sorts. They came to celebrate their own role in a literary movement that is again catching fire with a new generation of academics, critics and spoken-word poets.
They also came to witness the unveiling of a new book: "Women of the Beat Generation," an anthology by Brenda Knight (Conari Press, $19.95).
The book chronicles the long-ignored lives and work of the women writers who influenced, fought, inspired and consorted with figures such as Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassidy, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It also contains samples of their work, including the excerpt from Kaufman's memoir.
Today the beats are cultural icons. Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" is rite-of-passage reading among the 20-somethings. College courses on the '50s poets, who rebelled against traditional meter and rhyme proscriptions to embrace free verse, confessional and political street poetry, are now standard offerings.
The beats have also been the subject of exhibits at New York's Whitney Museum in 1995 and a current one at the deYoung Museum in San Francisco.
Knight, a medieval scholar, became fascinated with the women beats' untold story.
Among those profiled in her book is former nun and redwood environmentalist Mary Norbert Korte, 62, in the northern California nature preserve where she has lived, written and worked since being radicalized by the civil rights movement.
A writer for years before she left the convent, Korte was befriended by mainstream poet Denise Levertov. Together they joined a group of activist poets that help propel the free speech and anti-war movements of the late 1960s.
Unfortunately, the "women beats" include many whose creative lives were misshapen by physical abuse or abandonment by their partners or by the massive quantities of alcohol and drugs they consumed together.
Elise Cowen, whose shoebox full of poems spent decades under a friend's bed after she threw herself out of a window at her parents' Manhattan apartment, was one of these lost souls. An early lover of Allen Ginsberg, Cowen wrote with passion about the conservative society that often sent nonconforming women like herself into mental hospitals for repeated jolts of electric shock therapy.
Other women beats were powerful forces, such as Diane di Prima, who is still active today.
While compiling 30 books of poetry, di Prima, now 62, also got caught up in the obscenity trials against playwrights, filmmakers and novelists like Jean Genet, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Ginsberg and Henry Miller. She coined the now-famous phrase, "The only war that matters is the war against the imagination," in a poem of the same name.
Ruth Weiss, 68, escaped the Holocaust in Berlin and wrote her first poem at 5 while living in Austria in 1933.
Over the next two decades she made her way from high school in Chicago to New York's Greenwich Village to the beat scene in San Francisco, where she became famous for her haiku and her jazz poetry jams with local musicians.
Weiss began the first-ever jazz readings at The Cellar, a North Beach hot spot, in 1956. Her style and flair for making word music can be felt in today's "spoken word" poets who often incorporate rap rhythms, rock, jazz and home videos in their public performance art.
Today, Weiss and her jazz collaborators still perform the last Monday of every month at the Gathering Cafe on North Beach's Grant Avenue.
- OTHER BOOKS on women of the Beat Generation include Joyce Johnson's memoir "Minor Characters" (Anchor Books, $12) and Hettie Jones' "How I Became Hettie Jones, a Memoir" (Penguin, $12). Also see the collection "The Beat Book: Poems and Fiction From the Beat Generation," edited by Anne Waldman with a foreword by Allen Ginsberg (Shambhala, $24).