Anika Czander
5/29/17
60s NYC
Professor Krase
Music of New York: The Life of a Female Beat Poet
Early Life & Education
Susan Levitt was born in the suburb Cedarhurst on Long Island, to an upper-middle class Jewish family. She attended a private girl’s school for her primary education, and though her grades suffered due to her early rebelling and spending time near Washington Square Park, she later went on to attend Barnard College. It was here that she met Elise Cowen and Joan Vollmer who would introduce her to the Beat movement.
Introduction to the Beats
After graduating Barnard she moved in with Elise Cowen and was briefly her lover. Elise was very close to Allen Ginsberg; they often worked to inspire each other’s poetry. They had an apartment on the Upper West Side near that of Joyce Glassman who would later write a memoir Minor Characters about her relationship with Jack Kerouac. Their apartment, on 542 W 112th St, so they were also near the Smoke Jazz Club, where they would frequent for drinks, and the apartment of Joan Vollmer, where William S Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac would all live at various points in time.
She began at this time to experiment with drug use, and though seeing Burroughs’ addiction to heroine prevented her from having any desire to try it, she and Ginsberg took active roles in the demystification of LSD with Timothy Leary. It was with these people and experiences in her life that Susan Levitt began to take up writing.
Career
In the mid 60s, Levitt began writing fiction inspired by her life events, in the vein of Burroughs and Kerouac, but later moved to poetry. Being close to Ginsberg, she began writing in a style similar to that of his mentor, William Carlos Williams, but later moved on to a style more closely aligned with Cowen, though they were no longer romantically involved at that point. Her most famous poem, “The Music of New York City” captured the iconic beat style and urban atmosphere of New York in the 1960s.
The Music of New York City
i felt the music of new york melt on my tongue
i felt it’s black menthol melting my gums
i felt it freezing my throat
clenched within the rapic howls
of after hours evenings
the echoes of bleecker street
reverberated in the caves of a drum.
the music of new york and i got high
we smoked a joint filled with jazz
our blue smoke curled and wisped
improvised it’s notes
had a solo and reluctantly
accepted her applause
the creak of a gilted saxophone
comes from the stairs
the knots in the wood
the knots in my stomach
the knots in the noose in the noise in the street
wrapped ‘round the wrists
of the music of new york
the cats that are hip
to the happenings the
vibrations the vibes
they wiggle their thighs
to the tunes and the moans
to the music of new york
there’s a man at the bar
with wild eyes and bleeding heart
he looks to me with stained lips
calls me sugar, calls me doll
his clouded whispers air into my ears
as he sings to me the sweet
the sweet
music of new york
“The Music of New York” was truly emblematic of the beat movement. It included some of the key qualities of beat poetry, although this particular work of hers was not obscene or free verse; qualities adored by Levitt’s friend Allen Ginsberg. However, it did reflect transgressive poetic values, in that it spoke of sex in the “wiggling of thighs”, drugs in the smoking of the joint, and referencing suicide in the mention of the noose. The rhythm of the poem is very characteristic of jazz, as the poem was meant to be read aloud over jazz music. The bouncing beat initially sounds uneven and sloppy to the reader; It’s almost as if it’s improvised jazz. However, like an improvised jazz solo, there is a lot of delicate work that goes into making it sound as such.
William Carlos Williams, an influence of the Beat movement, did not write in free verse confessional style like Walt Whitman, another Beat influencer. Instead his terse form was more an inspiration to Levitt, as she incorporated the rhythm and ambiance of jazz music into her structured poems. In addition, the content is very much scandalous for a female poet to write about. This goes along with the transgression of the poem, but also with the rebellious writings of the Beat Poets. As a participator in free love, a bisexual woman, a drug user, and an educated woman, Susan Levitt was not the average woman in the 1960s. She was radical, a feminist, and an iconic artist who’s work will last for ages to come.
Personal Life
However, in 1951 tragedy struck the friend group. They often gathered for parties, and these affairs usually involved copious amounts of alcohol and drugs. At one occasion, William S Burroughs suggested that they play a game of William Tell. This is most famously known as shooting as apple off of ones head with a bow and arrow, but all that the friends had were empty liquor bottles and a gun. None trusted Burroughs enough to do so with their head, as he was not only drunk, but high off heroin, his drug of choice. After some time, he eventually convinced a drunken Joan Vollmer to agree. At this point, though Burroughs was an openly gay man, he and Vollmer had a common-law marriage for the sake of solidifying their friendship. When the point came to shoot the bottle off her head, Burroughs missed and struck her directly in the skull. She died in the hospital hours later. Susan Levitt, witness to her close friends murder, was profoundly affected by the horror. Levitt fell into a deep depression and, at Kerouac’s persuasion, succumbed to a Benzedrine addiction. Levitt’s addiction would become the source of much of the inspiration for her poetry, but unfortunately would also have extremely detrimental affects on her health, mentally and physically.
Later Life
Though she was struggling with addiction and poverty, she continued to write and was eventually published in Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry 1945-1960. However she was the one of the few women to be published in it. It would later be written by Professor and Poet Bob Perelman that
“It was a multiplicious and highly unlikely breakthrough. I say this even though its tremendous deficits of representation have long been glaringly obvious: only four women and one African American out of forty-four poets. If you want to sense the passage of fifty years, those absences are a first place to look. However, while The New American Poetry is nothing but backward in terms of gender and race, it still demonstrates a powerful dimension of poetic capaciousness that retains an enlivening force.”
The anthology was the really a catalyst for her professional career, and she would go on to read much of her poetry live, in jazz bars like Smoke Jazz Club, and publish an anthology of poetry in 1967, In the Scene. Her anothology was highly regarded as the best anothology of Beat poetry written by a female at the time. It was highly revered at the time of it’s publishing but as time went on, the Beat poetry canon left Levitt behind; it is suspected by many that this was due to the fact that she was a woman.
However, it was around 1969 that her addiction became too much for her to handle, and she was admitted to Bellevue Hospital for a number of years to manage her psychosis. Upon her release in the early 1980s, Levitt began teaching at Columbia University, shortly after they began allowing female attendance. After teaching, she retired and wrote a memoir titled, About My Time: Musings from the Beat Generation. Susan Levitt died in her apartment in Morningside Heights on August 15th, 2014.
