Her own Muse

Why poet Janine Pommy Vega can't be beat

by Catherine A. Salmons

TRACKING THE SERPENT: JOURNEYS TO FOUR CONTINENTS, By Janine Pommy Vega. City Lights Books, 192 pages, $12.95.

WOODSTOCK, NEW YORK -- Janine Pommy Vega is rummaging in her kitchen garden, sleeves rolled up, tanned forearms etched with abrasions from brambles and wild-rose thorns. As the last strands of sunlight sink behind the Catskills, she emerges with a basket of baby lettuce leaves and meaty tomatoes for dinner.

Basket in hand, the celebrated poet, author of 12 volumes of verse and prose -- one of the few women writers of the Beat Generation to feel even a glimmer of the limelight -- gives me a quick tour of the rock-choked hillside outside her cottage near Woodstock. We wind our way down a terraced path toward a stream camouflaged within a cradle of pines. "There's the lilac I planted for Huncke," she says, pointing to a scraggly bush enclosed in wire to keep out the deer. ("Huncke" is the late novelist, heroin addict, ex-convict, and Beat philosopher Herbert Huncke, her friend and literary mentor.)

A second chicken-wire shrine surrounds a nascent magnolia consecrated to another departed soulmate, Allen Ginsberg. A boxwood commemorates her brother, right beside a rare strain of yellow rose for her husband, the painter Fernando Vega, whose sudden death in 1966 left her a widow at age 23. Any loved one she has lost is reborn in the labyrinth of her private memorial garden.

Vega points out the distant mountain trails where she spends hours hiking, and the flat stone embankment where she practices yoga, meditating on the abundant, mostly female images of God that she has collected on her treks to some of the remotest corners of the earth -- the subject of her new travel memoir, Tracking the Serpent: Journeys to Four Continents.

Vega's book is a quasi-anthropological outpouring on the order of Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi, or anything by Lawrence Durrell. Her writing exudes the grit of trekking alone in the Annapurna mountains of Nepal, spending months in the Amazon jungle, braving rocky steeps and altitude sickness to climb the cordilleras of the Andes. Yet this is no mere chest-thumping record of "adventure" travel. Woven into Vega's travelogue is her compelling personal narrative: growing up in a working-class New Jersey suburb, leaving home at 16 to join New York's East Village Beat scene, following her artist husband to Paris, where she scrounges to keep food on their table and nurses him through repeated episodes of narcotics-induced dementia. When he dies, she is thousands of miles away, desperately trying to sell his paintings.

Following on this touchingly understated tragedy is the book's spiritual turning point: a near-fatal car crash. During her months of convalescence, she happens on a book about the female images of the ancient Celts: the owl-eyed goddess, the mother/protector, the huntress in her antler mask. She responds to their Jungian echo of millennia of creative female voices; they symbolize her fight to put her broken mind and body back together. They are also the seed of her travels. "As I read into the early-morning hours," she recounts, "an owl began calling at my window. Slowly the idea coalesced of making a pilgrimage to the ancient sites . . . I needed to reaffirm something in me that felt ripped apart and empty."

Thus begin years of introspective journeying. Vega visits the ancient sites where the goddess was worshipped: Glastonbury, Silbury, and Avebury in England, the high hills of Ireland, the shrine of the Virgin in Chartres Cathedral. She studies Vedic myth in desolate Himalayan temples, explores the earth cults of the Andes, participates in a yage ceremony in Peru, where believers coax visions from the potent, peyote-like hallucinogen ayahuasca. Fascinated by the survival of these ancient, poetic faiths in remote agricultural regions across the globe, she becomes both scholar and mystic -- a Boddhisatva seeking an image of herself among the ruins.

What Tracking the Serpent doesn't talk much about is the young Janine -- the teenage girl who met Gregory Corso one night at the Cedar Bar in New York and was soon swept headlong into the Beats' literary world. And I would like to have seen more of the material Vega contributed to Brenda Knight's recent anthology, Women of the Beat Generation (Conari Press), which also features Diane di Prima, Hettie Jones, Elise Cowen, and Lenore Kandel -- names that never achieved the household-word status of "Kerouac" or "Ginsberg."

So what about the details of life on the Lower East Side: her long flirtation with drugs; her first sexual encounter (with Peter Orlovsky); her intense friendship with Orlovsky and Ginsberg, when they all lived in the same Bohemian tenement on Avenue B, with Huncke one flight above? Vega laughs. "All my life I've avoided doing that `Beat Generation' memoir. I don't know why. It takes as much ego to avoid it as it does to do it!

"Then as I started to write [the piece in Women of the Beat Generation], I really got into it. I remembered how sweet Peter was, how beautiful Huncke was, how genuinely open Allen was. But it doesn't belong in this book. This is not their story."

It should be noted, however, that she did negotiate the Beat "scene" with her self-esteem intact. The swaggering inner circle (Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, et al.) was overwhelmingly male and homoerotic. Unlike many female writers, Vega refused to become invisible. "They were breaking loose in that era, the end of the '50s," she recalls, "from a fixed and conservative and straitlaced, largely nonsexual context. But as a woman, your real job was to be sort of like the Muse -- or the mop, and clean up after them!

"Huncke was not a misogynist. And you have to understand that Fernando was supportive. When I finally brought my poems to Allen [Ginsberg], in '64, he sort of tore them to shreds. The first poem in the first book I ever published is called `Last Watch.' It's about listening to the bells, the last watch of the night, in Jerusalem. That's the first poem I ever labored over for days and weeks and months. And when it finally was created, it was my voice, or it was the first stuttering possibility of having a voice. And he tore it down. I had wanted Allen to love those poems. But Fernando said, `You know who he is. What difference does it make? Your work is your work.' "

This kind of deep-rooted critical brutality among Vega's male peers served as an object lesson in not hobbling oneself with doubts. It also showed her what not to do, as a guest teacher/writer-in-residence for the "Poets in the Schools" program in upstate New York, in prison writing programs since 1976, and as a member of PEN's Prison Writing Committee. "I'm very supportive of people's work," she explains, "because I think that unless you have a voice, you're dead in this culture."

Prison work is important to Vega in part because she sees so little separation between herself and the inmates. "Having been a young person, taking drugs for many years, what's the difference? Except that now the society we're part of is more punitive. If you go to Danbury [the federal prison] and talk to the women in there, the majority -- probably 80 percent -- are there for drugs that they did not carry, sell, or anything. It's because of their husband or their boyfriend or their brother or their father."

This compassionate indignation resonates on every page of Vega's memoir. It's part of what has driven her travels, the cornerstone of her present understanding of the life of the spirit. "I had to give up everything to find my way back to who I was. I hiked the cordilleras, I lived with somebody, I got pregnant, I had a miscarriage. And still, I didn't go far enough. By which I mean, I wanted to have no one. What I was asking for I was not yet big enough to contain. The divinity in yourself requires a certain discipline on your part. We practice until we get it perfect."

Loss and grief have taught her this, as much as her travels to the four corners of nowhere. Maybe she was right, after all, to leave nearly everything out of the book except the record of her seeking, the friends and lovers she met along the way, food, sex, and endless walking as part of the earthy, sweaty process of becoming whole by breaking oneself down to the rawest components.

That's the fundamental relevance, for any woman artist, of Vega's exploration of the world's oldest female images of creativity. Outside, the terraced hillside sprawls like a rough, pregnant belly. Vega's voice slips into the cadence of a hymn, explaining the Amazon snake goddess, the "serpent" of the book's title: "In the jungle, all green matter is a snake. All air is a snake. All water is a snake. All within concentric circles, snake, snake, snake. Each element is a snake of a different color . . . "

Janine Pommy Vega will read along with Boston poets Elizabeth McKim and Diana Der Hovanessian in a program entitled "Three Wise Women," at Old West Church, 131 Cambridge Street in Boston, next Wednesday, September 17, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $5; call 227-0845.