Memoirs of a Bastard Angel: A Fifty-Year Literary and Erotic Odyssey

Harold Norse is the author of 12 volumes of poetry and a novel, Beat Hotel. His selected poems, Hotel Nirvana, was a National Book Award nominee in 1974. His numerous grants include one from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in San Francisco. Of his writing, Christopher Street said: "Norse's work is one of the foundations of a post-World War II tradition that includes the prose art of John Rechy and Jean Genet." Anis Nin wrote "I enjoyed the Memoirs tremendously... So well written so honest.. The Memoirs are a live and powerful". Of his latest volume, Love Poems, Booklist wrote: "A major work of gay literature". Library Journal concurred "An elder statesman of homoerotic verse, making this volume an important addition to poetry collections". And James Baldwin wrote: "If light ever enters the hearts of men, Harold Norse will be one of those who have helped to set it there.

Over the past decade or so, The Beats have become white hot...so much so imitators have come crawling out of the woodwork with their own bad poetry or semi-autobiographical tales of the East Village. Make no mistake about it: Harold Norse is the real thing...and more. From Barry Miles's book, The Beat Hotel: "...for a brief period -- from just after the publication of Howl in 1957 until the building was sold in 1963 -- it was home to Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin, Peter Orlovsky, Harold Norse, and a host of other luminaries of the Beat Generation." Norse was there -- no only as witness -- but, much more importantly, particpant. And he wrote. Here's one of my favorite parts of the book: "In February 1960, before moving into the Beat Hotel, I began doing ink drawings and cut-up poetry at the Hotel Univers on rue St. Grégoire de Tours next door to Edouard Roditi. He had often put me up at number 8 where, he said, Théodore de Banville had rented a room for Rimbaud. Shortly after I moved into the Beat Hotel in April, I wrote Sniffing Keyholes, a sex/dope scene between a muscular black youth called Melo and a blond Russian princess called Z.Z. It was my first narrative cut-up. I felt I had broken through semantic and psychological barriers; hashish and opium helped with the aleatory process. My experience of breaking new ground alarmed and exhilarated me. For awhile I believed I had lost my reason but didn’t consider it a great loss—the mind works in mysterious ways. Actually, word, image, and perception come together in a simultaneous jumble, not, as grammar and logic would have us believe, in a linear structure. I telescoped language in word clusters in a way James Joyce had pioneered, but with this difference: I allowed the element of chance to determine novel and surprising configurations of language. John Cage had done it in music, Pollock in painting. When I showed it to Brion Gysin he raved, "You’ve done something new! It’s a gas! Bill must see this right away." Bill Burroughs came down to my room. "Well, Harold, Brion says you’ve written a very funny cut-up. I’d love to see it." In his fedora and topcoat he sat at the edge of my bed reading the piece, exploding in little sniffs and snorts, his equivalent of lusty guffaws. "This is marvelous," he said, looking up. "You must show it to Girodias." Maurice Girodias, owner of Olympia Press, had published Naked Lunch; his father had published Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. But I wasn’t so sure he’d go mad about a few typewritten pages of cut-up. Burroughs disagreed. "I’m calling him right away to get you an appointment." A day or two later I trekked over to the office a few blocks away on the rue St. Séverin. I was right. Girodias read it and thought it similar to Burroughs. He wanted to see more but didn’t sound enthusiastic. "He missed the point," snorted Burroughs. "He rejected Naked Lunch the first time it was offered to him." Poetry (Norse is one of Ferlinghetti's "Pocket Poets"),