Our very recent item in the ‘Beat Meetings’ series saw an encounter between British Beat academic Bob Lee and the poet Ted Joans described. We are pleased to report that another US poet Eliot Katz has dropped us a line about his own meeting with Joans in Paris over 30 years ago and Rock and the Beat Generation publishes his message below.
Called ‘another classic New Jersey bard’ by Allen Ginsberg, Eliot Katz is the author or editor of ten books of poetry, including Love, War, Fire, Wind and Unlocking the Exits, as well as a prose book, The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg (Beatdom Books, 2016).
His most recent poetry book was a free pdf volume posted on his website before the 2020 presidential election, entitled: President Predator: Poems to Help Make America Trump-Free Again. Katz, whose late mother was a Holocaust survivor, has worked for many years as an activist for a wide range of peace and social-justice causes.
His website can be found at www.eliotkatzpoetry.com
Email, June 1st, 2023
Hi Simon,
Thanks again for another interesting Substack. Ted Joans was an interesting person and writer, very friendly and generous. On my first trip to Paris, around 1990, I met him, can’t remember exactly how, and we had a dinner together and I was honored to have him ask me if he could introduce me at a reading that I was doing a few nights later at Shakespeare & Company Books, a reading that I had booked with the help of a postcard intro from Allen Ginsberg to George Whitman, whose daughter is now running the bookstore. Ted read a poem or two and then introduced me to about as many people as could fit in the open spaces of the bookstore.
My main contacts in France were (and still are) a few French poets and activists (one of whom won a Nobel Peace Prize just a few years ago for helping to chair an anti-nuke group and had years earlier translated a poetry book of mine into French) and the Shakespeare & Co gig was actually a kind of nice side event to some of the events that I did with my French friends, who translated for me to French audiences, including at a large politics festival. But meeting and becoming friends with Ted Joans was a nice surprise on that trip.
With continued appreciation,
Eliot
See also: ‘Beat Meetings #7: A. Robert Lee & Ted Joans’, May 31st, 2023