Poetry is a tongue for tasting the world. It’s the un-translated or semi-translated material of experience. It’s not always a great graph of days or bushels of apples per acre or the relative velocity of one train verses another, but there are things that can only be learned by taking this substance neat and in gulps.

Benjamin Ferencz, one of the main prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials, died on April 7, 2023. His death at 103 years old jolted me. I thought of my poet friend ruth weiss’ flight at age ten, a refugee from Nazi Germany during WWII and a fellow Chicagoan.

Negative space, commonly associated with visual art, refers to the space between lines or the empty area surrounding a subject. While the concept of negative space is helpful in understanding ruth’s aesthetics, I prefer a more precise term: “Ma.”

ruth weiss refused to look away from hard truths. Instead, she synthesized her own experiences as a child of war and used them to fuel her activism. Her voice would not have rung out so affectingly, so assuredly, had she looked away. ruth stared down the marred complexion of the world she lived in and found beauty. She found hope.

Why does some art move us to act? Is it a perfect shot, brush stroke, or line? Is it a desire to be jolted to action by something outside ourselves? While the question of why is definitively unanswerable, ruth weiss’s experience with the film The Boy With Green Hair provides a case study for how some art moves us to act.

Before the Summer of Love, there was the Beat generation. Disillusioned by World War Two's ravages and the Cold War's apocalyptic undercurrent, a new bohemia emerged in the San Francisco zeitgeist, primarily in North Beach, where 24-year-old ruth weiss lived and performed. ruth weiss, along with other prominent members of the beat generation like Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac, was a voice for a generation of young people.

What would you bring if you had only a few minutes to pack your belongings before running for your life? The things we keep from our childhoods tell stories. ruth weiss, even in her old age, kept two relics of her childhood: an ancient book and a very special doll.

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It was Caen who named ruth weiss "the goddess of the beat generation", and the title stuck to her. After all, she was the first and most prominent female poet in the scene- and her seniority meant that she had a certain amount of influence on those who came after her. Her innovations- including reciting poetry to live jazz music- became hallmarks of the beat style.

If you ever spelled ruth weiss’s name with capitals Ruth Weiss or RUTH WEISS, she would tell you that you spelled her name wrong. ruth weiss wasn’t only reacting specifically to the nazi party, which was defeated decades before, but to the authoritarian tendencies in her contemporary world.

In a search for spiritual meaning, ruth weiss’s poetry blends religious references from the west and east, pulling from her cultural background as a European jew and her education in Buddhism.

Poet ruth weiss’s childhood included a series of journeys and transitions. From Germany to Austria to The Netherlands, then to Chicago, where she settled with her parents until the end of World War II. Later, she returned to Europe for a stint in Switzerland. She attended college, hitchhiked, and wrote during her young adult years. After returning to America, she lived in New York, then traveled to New Orleans before settling in San Francisco for the rest of her life, where her work became an influential part of the Bohemian scene.

In the 1950s, ruth weiss left New Orleans to live in a San Francisco apartment, working alongside other artists and poets. It was here, that she struck up a "fantastic connection on multiple levels" with the writer Jack Kerouac. According to interviews with Nancy Grace and Ronna C. Johnson, the two writers would spend hours drinking wine and writing haikus back and forth to each other- and sometimes take thrill-seeking car rides along the hills of California's coast.

It was at the San Francisco Art Institute, where ruth weiss sometimes posed for figure drawings, that is where she met the filmmaker Steven Arnold, and went on to perform in almost all of his avant-garde art films.

ruth weiss, the poet who didn't believe in endings, observed a peculiar circle. She left one community homeland only to find herself in another. The same desert lands, occupied by distant cousins, claimed by different countries, hundreds of years.

In her early twenties, ruth hitchhiked across the country to the Old French Quarter in New Orleans, where she worked for two years alongside a community of artists and poets. It was here that she first dyed her hair a vivid shade of green, in 1950. It was an impulsive decision, a half-dare, made after watching a film called "The Boy with Green Hair."

I am the shadowless figure who walks between the shafts of light

Amidst your redwoods, I walk with you, breaking bramble beneath our bare feet.

Into the cave we lay our bodies upon moss furniture,

with mushrooms mounted in crevices of split bark

hypnotizing sketches reaching out from the cold rock walls

to touch our warm skins.

When I hear ruth’s story, I think about how many histories are just like hers. ruth grew into a woman dedicated to herself and to the beat of life, able to forge her own path in the United States that blazed from the East Coast to the West Coast, carved into American history with a switchblade. Without her talent, her drive, her good fortune, ruth may have been swallowed alongside millions of other immigrants, absorbed into the mural-like so many brushstrokes. Even then, her colors would have mixed and mingled with the rest to create an image like never before, an America defined and redefined by the stories of its people.