Poet, pilgrim, spiritual warrior and prisoners’ rights activist, Janine Pommy Vega has passed on.

Janine Pommy Vega, a poet and intimate of the Beat generation luminaries Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky whose lifelong quest for transcendence took her to San Francisco in the 1960s and on a pilgrimage to neolithic goddess-worship sites in the 1980s, died on Dec. 23 at her home in Willow, N.Y. She was 68.”

In the early 1970s, I was involved in a literary scene in Boulder, Colorado revolving around the Jack Kerouac School Of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. At the time, I was managing the Hotel Boulderado, a funky century old building in the middle of downtown Boulder. Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs were staying at the Boulderado and it was through Ginsberg that I came to know the poetry of Janine Pommy Vega. While visiting Allen, I noticed a copy of “Poems to Fernando” by Vega sitting on the desk in Allen’s room. It was a City Lights publication and I was reading everything that Lawrence Ferlinghetti published. Plus, the fact that Ginsberg had it in his possession was more than enough to make me immediately seek the book out. Reading it was the beginning of my being enthralled by Vega’s poetry and prose and an awakening to the beauty of the goddess unleashed.

In addition to being a stellar writer, Vega was one of the few women of the Beat Generation who held her own in a male dominated scene. Along with Diane di Prima, she would break down walls that existed even in the so-called counter culture. Vega opened up pathways that Patti Smith, Lydia Lunch and Exene Cervenka would later walk.

Poet Anne Waldman writing about Vega:

Peter Orlovsky was her first lover at a tender age. They lived together and she confronted the complicated sexuality and male chauvinist ethos early on when Allen took Peter off to India, with nary a thought to her feelings. “Is this the way it is with the poets? This is my first lover and this is the way it goes? Fuck those people, man, I don’t want to know about the writers. I rather meet the painters, the musician, the magicians, let’s get to the street.” And meet them and the street she did. Janine was a populist, a street fighter, a survivor, a world traveler and hugely prolific writer many decades. Tracking The Serpent: Journeys to Four Continents is an amazing account of an adventuresome life. She spent the last 11 years with poet Andy Clausen, tending her garden when she wasn’t traveling the world performing her magnetic and politically engaged poetry, and doing the scholarly work as well, burning the midnight oil. Even after being hampered with debilitating arthritis she was out on the road, her uplifted voice and spirit cutting through anyone’s gloom.”

Sister, shaman and a Jersey girl.

Read her obituary in the NY Times here.