Background
Janine Pommy was born on February 5, 1942, in Jersey City, New Jersey, and grew up in Union City, New Jersey. Her father worked as a milkman in the mornings and a carpenter in the afternoons.
(Janine Pommy Vega is the archetypal New York Beat. Her po...)
Janine Pommy Vega is the archetypal New York Beat. Her poetry is intelligent and politically aware, and her performances in English and in Spanish, with and without music are intense, incantatory. Her writings are also intensely autobiographical, following closely in the footsteps of her life-journey: they are the poetic record of her experience-hungry travels through the world and her spiritual retreats into herself; her work with public school children and delinquent youth, and with the inmates and staff of the New York State prison system; her friendships and her love affairs, her farewells and her lingering memories. For this major retrospective volume, she has selected the best lyrics, protests, portraits, and elegies from her first twenty-five years of writing. The result is "an honest and passionate road map to her soul," said the American Book Review, "a book describing one poet's life as a pilgrimage toward herself. It is an exhilarating trip."
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( These are the true-life adventures of a woman who range...)
These are the true-life adventures of a woman who ranges over four continents, endeavoring to go beyond the limits of ordinary life. Recovering from an accident, she goes to Glastonbury, where she finds energy portrayed in ancient earthworks as a snake coiled in concentric circles around a hill. To walk this spiral is called threading the maze, which means both to ascend and to go deep within. This becomes a guiding emblem of her pilgrimages to sites of female spiritual and temporal power, from the Irish countryside to the Amazon jungle to the high mountain cultures of Nepal. Janine Pommy Vega, Beat Generation writer, performer, and musician, is the author of twelve books. For many years she has worked with Poets in the Schools, and she is a member of PEN’s Prison Writing Committee.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0872863271/?tag=2022091-20
Janine Pommy was born on February 5, 1942, in Jersey City, New Jersey, and grew up in Union City, New Jersey. Her father worked as a milkman in the mornings and a carpenter in the afternoons.
At the age of sixteen, inspired by Jack Kerouac"s On the Road, she traveled to Manhattan to become involved in the Beat scene there. After his sudden death in Spain in 1965, she returned to New York, and then moved to California. Her first book, Poems to Fernando, was published by City Lights in 1968 as part of their City Lights Pocket Poets Series.
During the early-1970s, Vega lived as a hermit on the Isla del Sol in Lake Titicaca on the Bolivian-Peruvian border.
Out of this self-imposed exile came Journal of a Hermit (1974) and Morning Passage (1976). Following her return to America, she has published more than a dozen books, including Tracking the Serpent: Journeys to Four Continents (1997) which is a collection of travel writings.
Her last book of poetry was The Green Piano. In the 1970s, Vega began working as an educator in schools through various arts in education programs and in prisons through the Incisions/Arts organisation.
She has served on the Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association Prison Writing Committee.
Pommy Vega was a pioneer of the women"s movement in the United States. She had worked to improve the lives, conditions, and opportunities for women in prison. Vega had traveled throughout the North American and South American continents, all throughout Europe, including Eastern Europe, countries in the Middle East, often alone.
She made friends everywhere, approaching all on the same, basic, human level, with love and compassion.
By 2006, Vega was living near Woodstock. She spent the last 11 years of her life with poet Andy Clausen.
Janine Pommy Vega died peacefully of a heart attack at her home in Willow, New York on December 23, 2010.
( These are the true-life adventures of a woman who range...)
(Spiritual descriptions of a recluse, as well as a variety...)
(Collection of poems by Vega (1942-2010), a writer associa...)
(Janine Pommy Vega is the archetypal New York Beat. Her po...)
(First Edition)
(First Edition)
Member Save Overlook, Woodstock, New York, 1989. Member Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association (prison writing committee 1992-1997), Poets & Writers, Catskill 3500 Club.