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Stuart Z. Perkoff
Stuart Z. Perkoff (July 29, 1930 – June 24, 1974) was an American poet, painter, collage artist and a central figure of the Venice West early beat era.

Stuart Perkoff was born in St. Louis, Missouri to a relatively liberal Jewish household. He spent time in New York and then on the west coast before establishing himself in Venice Beach. As one of the poets of the Beat era, Perkoff's books included: Suicide Room (1956), Eat the Earth (1971), Kowboy Pomes (1973), and Alphabet (1973); was arrested on a drug charge in 1968 and released from prison in 1971; after trying to establish a bookstore in Northern California, he returned to Venice in 1973; died of cancer in 1974.

Perkoff was published in The New American Poetry 1945-1960 edited by Donald Allen.



VOICES OF THE LADY COLLECTED POEMS by Stuart Z. Perkoff p/b 474 pps b/w photo cover ISBN: 0-943373-48-4 (paper)

Published by: The National Poetry Foundation

From the NPF page "This volume brings together for the first time one of the great lost masterworks of twentieth-century American poetry. Stuart Z. Perkoff was the archetypal Beat poet, the central figure in the Venice West branch of this movement, where he lived within a maelstrom of jazz, sex, and drugs, and where he died in 1974, at age 43. In common with poets like Pound, Olson, Blackburn, and Creeley, Perkoff saw everything that he wrote as part of a continuous poem. From time to time he published bits and pieces of this endless poem, in magazines and in a few small collections. But he was too busy living—and then too busy dying—to bring his work together into a substantial collection. Now Gerald T. Perkoff has brought together a full collection of his brother’s work, in a book revealing that Stuart Z. Perkoff was a great poet not only in his capacity to describe his own tragic life-history, but also in his affirmation of the bonds that draw human beings together, and in his deeply religious sense that human life is a dialogue with—in the words of his last poem, found written on the wall of the room in which he died—“he who must remain unnamed.”" University of Maine, Orono, Maine 04469

see letter to Stuart from Charles Olson:

Books: Love is the Silence Poems 1948-1974 edited by Paul Vangelisti Red Hill Press Los Angeles and Fairfax 1975