Jack Micheline

Jack Micheline was of Russian-Romanian ancestry and worked as a union organizer before dedicating his life to poetry and painting. Taking his pen name from writer Jack London, 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 60s, where he spent the rest of his life and eventually published over 20 books. Though a poet of the Beat generation, Micheline characterized the Beat movement as a product of media hustle, and hated being described as a 'Beat poet.' He was also a painter, working primarily with gouache in a self-taught, primitive style he picked up in Mexi