[Deathwatch] Harold Norse, beat poet, 92

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

Beat poet Harold Norse dies at 92

Peter Fimrite

Sunday, June 14, 2009

When he wasn't regaling friends with wild tales of past cavortings,
Harold Norse would sometimes complain about his lack of fame compared
with other Beat poets.

Neither his work nor his name was as well known as Beat contemporaries
Allen Ginsberg or Jack Kerouac. Still, his friends said, the mild
irritation would soon be forgotten amid joyous gossip about one more of
his famous literary friends.

Mr. Norse, a onetime American expatriate who lived the last 35 years of
his life in San Francisco's Mission District, knew in his heart that
what mattered was not fame but art, and it is the extraordinarily
talented artist and stylist that his friends said they will remember.

Mr. Norse, author of "Hotel Nirvana," "Memoirs of a Bastard Angel," and
a long list of poems that both celebrated his gay life and exposed his
inner pain, died Monday of complications of old age. He was 92.

"Harold had the real stuff, the rhythm was there. He knew how to make a
poem move and sound good," said Gerry Nicosia, a poet and longtime
friend. "He really was a great poet, a breakthrough poet."

Mr. Norse was born Harold Rosen in Brooklyn in 1916. His mother was an
unmarried Jewish immigrant from Russia. He was short, about 5 feet 2,
and his stepfather reportedly beat him.

He later rearranged the letters of his last name to create "Norse," and
he stuck with the name the rest of his life.

In 1934, he was the first freshman at Brooklyn College to win the
school's annual poetry contest. He received a bachelor's degree in
English literature from the college in 1938.

Openly gay, he became part of poet W.H. Auden's inner circle soon
afterward. In 1951, he received a master's degree in English and
American poetry from New York University.

His talent began to blossom the following year when William Carlos
Williams invited him to read at the Museum of Modern Art and then took
him under his wing. Williams, who had mentored numerous poets,
including Ginsberg, would later call Mr. Norse "the best poet of his
generation."

Mr. Norse moved to Italy shortly after his first book of poetry, "The
Undersea Mountain," was published in 1953. He lived there until 1959,
translating the sonnets of 19th-century poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli
with what he quipped was "a dictionary in one hand and a Roman in the
other."

Nicosia said American poetry at this time was straight-laced and
academic. Mr. Norse revolutionized the art, Nicosia said, by using
accessible American language and drawing upon his own painful
experiences as a gay outcast.

Many of his famous gay poems were in the book "Carnivorous Saint," the
same name as the poem he wrote in Athens in 1964 that talked of the
saint "whose mother is no virgin," and who will "wave her umbrella and
change the world."

Mr. Norse moved to Paris in 1960 and lived in the famous Beat Hotel on
the Rue Gît-le-Cif { return "" } else { return "" }ur, with, among
others, Beat Generation writers Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William S.
Burroughs.

It was there that he helped devise the "cut-up" technique, in which
different phrases and sentences are snipped from a variety of works and
pasted together. He wrote the experimental cut-up novel "Beat Hotel" in
1960.

Mr. Norse returned to the United States in 1969 and is said to have
lifted weights at Venice Beach with Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the
1970s, he moved to San Francisco, where he became a leading gay
liberation poet.

Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was editor and publisher of his book
"Hotel Nirvana," which was nominated for a National Book Award.

"His poetry was very much expatriate poetry," Ferlinghetti said. "It
was the voice of alienation from modern consumer culture."

One of Mr. Norse's most famous poems was "In the Hub of the Fiery
Force," which was published in 1999 when he was 82.

"I consider him one of the best poets there was," said A.D. Winans, a
poet and friend. "He was very congenial, very educated. He was also
funny. He could hypnotize you with all these stories about the great
writers he knew."

Mr. Norse's last words, spoken to a nurse, according to friends, were
"the end is the beginning."

A "poets' tribute" will be held for Mr. Norse at 7 p.m. Monday at Bird
and Beckett Bookstore, 653 Chenery St., San Francisco. A memorial will
be held July 12 at the Beat Museum in North Beach. 

Many thanks to Deathwatch Central for posting this obituary