July 29, 1930 [St. Louis, Missouri] – June 25, 1973 [Los Angeles, California]
Perkoff was born in St. Louis, the sone of Ann and Nate Perkoff, and spent time in New York before settling in Venice Beach where he became a central figure in the Los Angeles Beat scene. He married Susan Blachard in 1949; they divorced a decade later. After another marriage, he married the poet Philomene Long with whom he stayed until his death. His first poetry collection, the chapbook The Suicide Room, appeared in 1956; he published over ten short books thereafter including Kowboy Pomes in 1973. He figures prominently in Lawrence Lipton’s The Holy Barbarians (1959), and in fact might be the only poet/artist of substance in that book. He was the only poet from Los Angeles (with the possible exception of Bruce Boyd) to appear in Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, 1945-1960. Perkoff also appeared in Jonas Mekas’s film Guns of the Trees in 1961. A heroin addict, he was arrested on a drug charge in 1968 and released in 1971. He returned to Venice in 1973 and died of cancer in 1974. Voices of the Lady: Collected Poems was published by the National Poetry Foundation in 1998.
