Shown clockwise from left: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Lafcadio Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso in 1956. The Beat movement was characterized by a rejection of the materialism, consumerism, and conformity of the 1950s, in favor of individual freedom and spontaneity. Photofest.
Beat poetry evolved during the 1940s in both New York City and San Francisco. The Beat Generation is a term identified with a group of American writers (led by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Howard Hart, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gregory Corso) who, finally on the West Coast, in San Francisco, created the core of the movement in the early 1950s.
Allen Ginsberg’s first book, Howl and Other Poems (1956), published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s press City Lights, is often considered representative of the Beat poets. Two other major works of Beat writing are Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959).
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1965.
Besides publishing the Pocket Poets Series, Ferlinghetti had founded the legendary San Francisco bookstore City Lights, which is still in operation today. City Lights is recognized as an important landmark of Beat generation history, and assisted San Francisco becoming the focal point of the Beat movement.
Michael McClure, Bob Dylan, and, you guess, Lawrence Ferlinghetti or Allen Ginsberg? Larry Keenan Photo.
In the 2003 book, The Beat Generation in San Francisco, author Bill Morgan wrote of the Caffé Trieste at the corner of Vallejo and Grant Street: “This was and still is a major writers’ hangout in North Beach. Poets like Gregory Corso, Kaye McDonough, Kirby Doyle, Tisa Walden, Howard Hart, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Hirschman, and Jack Kerouac often hung out, yakking late into the night and sometimes writing. Ferlinghetti wrote…Unfair Arguments With Existence, at a back table in the 1960s. And Francis Ford Coppola brought a portable tape recorder to work on the script of The Godfather.”
Neeli Cherkovski, the author of the biography Hank about Charles Bukowski, told of how one day the two were walking by the Caffé Trieste. Bukowski looked inside at the regulars hanging out, paused, and famously said: “All these guys waiting for something to happen. Only it never will.”
But, of course, they were not all guys. Her own works are more often than not recalled as being by “T. Walden” or “t. Walden.”
One of the central women in this mix of creative people, who has lived into this century, is the Beat poet-painter-publisher Tisa Walden.
Walden lived with “the wonderful poet” Howard Hart (pictured above) for 20 years until his death at 75, after a long battle with cancer in 2002. Hart’s poetry readings and jazz performances with Jack Kerouac, Philip Lamantia, and David Amram in New York City, 1957 & 1958, were important early Beat influences, before he moved to San Francisco.
T. Walden was raised in Washington D.C. and attended the University of Maryland, where she received a BA in Art History. She moved to San Francisco at 23 where she encountered the lively poetry scene of North Beach — reading for the first time publicly with Corso, Ferlinghetti, Kaufman, Kyger, Hart and others in 1980. Then she went on to found Deep Forest Press — at first a chapbook series, which is still publishing today with over sixty titles to its credit. She received an MA at San Francisco State University in English Literature.
Her book of poems, Fire Road was published by City Light Books in 1988, “in loving memory of my grandfather Horace Regions,” subtitled The Accordion Series No. 3. Other titles include Blue Junk, Perfumes, and Twilight.
PUCK
Go out in the cover of darkness
Sliver of moon through the open window
To the wild roses blooming in the schoolyard
Sweet scent of the Lemon Orchard
Sting of a spider? Thorn prick?
Suck and swallow blood
Mid-Summer night
Flower
T. Walden, 08.20.2006, Otoliths A Magazine of Many E-Things, ISSN 1833-623X
Tisa Walden, a poet and painter, had become a publisher in the early Beat movement, and historians are today seeking her out for her rememberances and photographs of those early San Francisco times. She formerly taught with other Beat writers and artists at the New College of California.
T. Walden has lived in the absorbing San Francisco world of Beat poets, musicians, and painters. However, recently, she became aware of the world of cryptozoology, in the persona of Bill and Bob Clark. The Clark brothers are the San Francisco twins who saw a Sea Serpent in San Francisco Bay in 1985. Their story is retold on page 69 of the Coleman-Huyghe field guide on watery cryptids. Later, at another time, in search of more observations of their quest, the Clarks took some video that has been discussed here.
This illustration (above) from the early 1800s’ sighting of a Sea Serpent off the coast of New England is compared with a video capture (below) from the Clarks’ 2004 Sea Serpent videotape taken off of California.
When Tisa Walden learned of the Clarks, she finally decided to talk to someone about a sighting of a Sea Serpent she had years ago.
After Walden told the Clarks of what she saw, she followed up in a series of emails to the Clarks, she told them of her remembrances of her encounter.
Walden wrote them (in three emails here combined into one narrative):
My guess is I saw it in 1985 — yesterday for the first time I called my father in Virginia and told him, plus another friend in D.C. and then I called the mother of the 5 year old boy I mentioned who also saw it. . .asked her when it was and she wasn’t sure. . .couldn’t say what time of year. . .asked her to ask her son who now lives in Las Vegas if he remembered. . .
I’m a painter and a poet from old farmer stock in Mississippi and Dad and I both agree we are particularly observant when it comes to nature. . .
Like I say — I saw it — I believe myself — I still remember it and it is exactly as you describe. . .was huge. . .
***
I was looking at the map today trying to remember exactly where I had my sighting — and pin-pointed the area of Bayside Drive 101 that runs along the water prior to Candlestick Park. Right there….
Many times I’ve had occasion to ride that stretch of highway in a cab coming back from the airport and many times over the years have thought of what I saw.
***
One, if there are babies etc. this was a granddaddy — just huge. Two, it was extremely stationary either like it was coiled to strike, or resting. I believe that it’s length was resting on the bottom of the cove to stabilize it. Three, the head was more “dragonlike” and large rather than rounded. Again, it was night, and the thing stood out vividly, and unmistakably organic against the water in the moonlight. Two enormous coils rising up out of the surface of the water.
Later, Walden shared: “I was saying to my 83 year old father in Va. who was a Pultizer Prize nominee for editorship of a newspaper in the South that I had never told anyone because what I saw was so fantastic it would be like trying to convince people you’d been abducted by aliens. It’s important to me that you guys know that I have no need for publicity, or attention but am sincerely interested in helping to substantiate your claim for reasons of science.”
When I talked to the Clarks about publishing her sighting, I let them know I had discovered what I thought was the historical celebrity status of Tisa Walden. I asked them to double-check with her, to see if she was whom I thought she was, and about using her name. She confirmed that she was the poet-painter I had found biographical info about, and that she was giving permission to use her name, so it won’t just be another anonymous “monster eyewitness.”
Tisa Walden also did a quick sketch of what recalls she saw, at my request. It follows. Walden said she saw this Sea Serpent when she was a passenger in the rear seat of a car which was going north on highway 101 in 1985.
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