ruth weiss in One More Step West Is the Sea
Guest contributor Joan Hawkins reveals the story of Beat movement pioneer ruth weiss and how her work has been rediscovered over the years.
When we think of the women associated with the Beat movement, the people who most readily come to mind are the girlfriends, lovers, and partners of the movement’s male romantic leads.
Carolyn Cassady (Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac), Hettie Jones (LeRoi Jones, later called Amiri Baraka), Joyce Johnson (Kerouac), Elise Cowen (Allen Ginsberg), Joan Vollmer (William S. Burroughs)… Even Diane DiPrima, an amazing poet in her own right, is often remembered in the histories primarily as LeRoi Jones’s love interest. Brenda Knight’s The Women of the Beat Generation (Conari Press, 1996) goes a long way to writing women back into the movement, featuring poems by women, like Lenore Kandel, who have been largely ignored. But even Knight feels compelled to toe the party line about the relative importance of Beat women, subtitling her book “Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution” (italics mine). As David Wills once noted, “history has not been kind” to the women who largely made the Beat movement possible (who do you think was temping to get pasta on the table while the guys were pursuing creative nonconformity)?
Thomas Antonic’s 2021 documentary One More Step West Is the Sea appears then as an important corrective to a history that all too often leaves the women out. The film focuses on ruth weiss (always lowercase), a Beat poet and innovator of Jazz and Poetry, and a woman so talented that once a jealous Allen Ginsberg tried to trip her as she came offstage, having — he thought — upstaged him.
Long before Kerouac began doing his Beat-jazz performances, weiss was reading alongside jamming musicians in Chicago’s “Art Circle” and in New Orleans’s French Quarter. She was friends with everyone, but she was nobody’s “muse.” And the documentary is a fascinating portrait of a woman who continued to work, write, and perform until her death in 2020, at the age of 92.
weiss was born into an Austrian-Jewish family in 1928. With her family, she fled the Nazis and narrowly escaped the Holocaust by emigrating to the United States in 1939. In the late 1940s and early ’50s, she began writing and performing. She spent three years hitchhiking across the United States with her female partner, Jeri, and then after their separation she continued on, carrying nothing but a typewriter. She ended up in San Francisco’s North Beach, the “one more step west is the sea” art scene at the edge of the world, home to the West Coast Beat movement.
ruth weiss
She was already a remarkable figure, attracting attention for her signature blue-green dyed hair, which she considered a statement of pacifism and environmental awareness. By 1953/54, she was collaborating with the still unknown Jack Kerouac, writing haikus for nights on end in her room at the Wentley Hotel. Neal Cassady would sometimes pick them up early in the morning and drive them to Mount Tamalpais to watch the sun rise. She waited tables at the Cellar Jazz club, where she also began doing jazz/poetry performances once a week.
She published her poetry in Bob Kaufman’s BEATITUDE, Wallace Berman’s Semina, and other legendary literary magazines (many of which we have at the Lilly Library). She published her first four volumes of poetry between 1958 and 1960, and in 1961 directed and produced The Brink, now considered a major cult underground film. She lived in relative poverty for most of her life, embracing what the Italians called arte povera exploring a range of unconventional processes. She continued to publish and perform but it took Brenda Knight’s book, Women of the Beat Generation, which included seven of weiss’s poems (at the very end, a hazard of alphabetization), to bring her the attention she deserved. From a poem she wrote shortly after arriving in San Francisco, “Ten, Ten,” you can get some of the flavor of her rhythm and her remarkable attitude toward life:
across the hall
professor FOON
kept music in a room
tongue click against tooth
a nervous habit
from near-miss of bomb
on his home in hong kong
butterfly harp
I danced he played
kept us both
from being afraid
we spoke no english
i wrote in it though
and ate with chopsticks
but not pizza
ten fingers for that
After the publication of Knight’s book, weiss gave performances across the US and Europe, taught at the Vienna Poetry School, and had successful exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and others. She also received the Medal of Honor of the City of Vienna.
In 2012, Thomas Antonic met ruth weiss in Vienna and in 2016 began preparing to make a documentary about her. Encouraged by film historian and producer Robert Dassanowsky and strongly supported by weiss, Antonic and his camera accompanied her over a period of two and a half years. He conducted lengthy interviews with weiss who shared her life story. Antonic filmed several of her Jazz & Poetry performances in the San Francisco Bay Area and on the coast of Northern California, including one of her last shows on her 90th birthday at the Beat Museum in San Francisco. Antonic subsequently followed her 1950s hitchhiking route from New Orleans to San Francisco, armed with a camera, interviewing, among others, weiss’ saxophone player Karl Schoen and her first husband, Sojun Roshi Mel Weitsman, abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center.
ruth weiss provided an enormous number of documents from her private archives for this film, including unreleased audio and video recordings, never-before-seen artworks, and even her school dictation book from 1938, in which she records the Nazi annexation of Austria to Germany from a child’s perspective. Moreover, weiss invited Antonic to stay with her and her last long-time partner and percussionist Hal Davis in their secluded house under huge, old redwood trees at the Mendocino coast of Northern California. As a result, One More Step West Is the Sea is not only a biographical retrospective of one of the original West Coast Beat poets, but also an intimate portrait of the relationship between weiss and Davis, two bohemians and extraordinary free spirits continuing to create and perform in their advanced age.
The film has won numerous awards including a New York Independent Cinema Award and it was the official selection of the International 2023 Poetry Film Festival in Los Angeles.
One More Step West Is the Sea will be shown at IU Cinema on April 9 at 7pm. Director Thomas Antonic will be present for a Q&A. There will also be a Jorgensen program with Antonic at the Cinema at 4pm on the same day.
This program is co-sponsored by the Writers Guild at Bloomington, Borns Jewish Studies Program, the departments of Germanic Studies, English, Cinema and Media Studies, The Media School, and the Center for Documentary Research and Practice.
Part of this blog post is taken from Thomas Antonic’s website.
Joan Hawkins is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at IU Bloomington. She has written extensively on the avant-garde and regularly teaches classes on Beat cinema. Her most recent book is William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century, co-edited with Alex Wermer-Colan, and is currently editing two anthologies of 1968, which include discussion of Kerouac’s influence on the counterculture.