Vega, Janine Pommy

(1942– )

   Janine Pommy Vega continues to be a major figure in contemporary American poetry, as is evident in her remarkable recent collection, The Green Piano (Black Sparrow 2005). While jack kerouac’s road took him all across America, Vega’s road has taken her all across the world. Janine Pommy was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, on February 5, 1942, to a working-class family. She was inspired to join the Beat movement after reading Kerouac’s on tHe road in 1958. “All the characters seemed to move with an intensity that was missing in my life,” she recalls. She met gregory corso in the Cedar Bar when an article on the Beat Generation prompted her to check out the scene in Greenwich Village, and she would eventually meet Kerouac himself. She has been associated with the Beats ever since. She was romantically involved with Peter Orlovsky (Allen Ginsberg’s partner) and became friends with ray bremser and his wife Bonnie (brenda frazer), and herbert huncke became her mentor. Of all the Beats, Vega admired Huncke the most for resisting the male chauvinism of the times. Though she graduated valedictorian of her high school class, Vega decided to live a life of a poet. For a time she lived with Ginsberg’s assistant Elise Cowen. She had an amphetamine-fueled relationship with Bill Heine, who would later be arrested with Huncke, and briefly lived in the same apartment as novelist Alexander Trocchi and his wife. In 1962 she met Fernando Vega, a talented Peruvian Jewish painter who took her to Israel. Fernando, the inspiration for Vega’s first book of poetry, poems to fernando (1968), died of a heroin overdose on the island of Ibiza off the coast of Spain in November 1965. She traveled (spending time with lenore kandel in Hawaii) and lived in New York City, San Francisco (with Huncke and, later, a member of the Hell’s Angels), and Woodstock, New York. In the 1970s she read poetry with Bob Kaufman, Jack Micheline, David Meltzer, and Ed Sanders, among others. She travelled with bob dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975. In 1982 she barely escaped death after a horrendous car crash. After recovering, she continued to travel, write, and work with prison programs to bring poetic inspiration to inmates. Her superb travelog, trackinG tHe serpent: journeys to four continents, was published by City Lights, the publisher of her first book of poetry, in 1997. Her signature poem, “mad dogs of trieste,” which was published in a volume under that name by Black Sparrow Press, appeared in 2000. One of the most, if not the most, peripatetic members of the Beat movement that she helped establish, Vega continues to be socially, politically, and artistically active today.

 Bibliography

■ As We Cover the Streets: Janine Pommy Vega. Film written by Kurt Hemmer, produced by Tom Knoff. Palatine, Ill.: Harper College, 2003.

■ Vega, Janine Pommy. Tracking the Serpent: Journeys to Four Continents. San Francisco: City Lights, 1997.

   Kurt Hemmer