Voices of the Lady

the long version

This volume brings together for the first time one of the great lost masterworks of 20th Century American poetry. Stuart Z. Perkoff was the archetypal Beat poet, the central figure in the Venice West branch of this movement, where he lived within a maelstrom of jazz, sex, and drugs - all of it illuminated from time to time by flashes of visionary ecstasy. In common with poets like Pound, Olson, Blackburn, and Creeley, Perkoff saw everything that he wrote as part of a continuous poem. From time to time he published bits and pieces of this endless poem, in magazines and in a few small collections. But he was too busy living - and then too busy dying - to bring his work together into a substantial collection. The legend has lingered, however; and now Gerald T.