We Remembered Lew Welch: 1926-1971

Welch at his Marin City home in 1968 – Public Domain

The two volumes of his letters are both titled I Remain. Indeed, he does. But how do you deal with the suicide of a 45-year-old poet 55 years after he took leave of his life, leaving behind him a wealth of work both published and unpublished? If it’s the suicide of Lewis Barrett Welch, known to friends as Lew, you rally the faithful for a celebration of the man and his poetry at the Counterculture Museum (CCM) on Haight Street in San Francisco on August 16, 2026. You do what friends and fans of Welch have been doing ever since that day in 1971 when he left a suicide note, grabbed a pistol (a Smith & Wesson . 22) and wandered into the wilderness near Gary Snyder’s mountain home and was never seen or heard from again.

What do you do? There are choices. You can go into denial and insist that he’s still alive somewhere, as many have done. Or else you accept his death as final, recite poems about him and for him and move on. Or, alternatively you believe that there’s a continuing mystery about Welch’s death, that he’s another missing poet and like Weldon Keyes (1914-1955), who vanished into thin air so to speak, his body like Welch’s never to be recovered and never to receive a proper burial. Keyes drove to the Marin side of the Golden Gate Bridge, parked his car and disappeared. His book of poems, The Last Man (1943) might serve as an apt title for his biography. Welch’s might be called I Remain.

Lew’s step son Huey Lewis of Huey Lewis and the News called Lew an “orator and a rock star with a musical voice.” Huey Lewis would know better than anyone else.

For the record, here’s Lew Welch’s pithy suicide note which strikes me as a kind of Zen document: “I never could make anything work out right and now I’m betraying my friends. I can’t make anything out of it – never could. I had great visions but never could bring them together with reality. I used it all up. It’s all gone. Don Allen is to be my literary executor- use MSS at Gary’s and at Grove Press. I have $2,000 in Nevada City Bank of America – use it to cover my affairs and debts. I don’t owe Allen G. anything yet nor my Mother. I went Southwest. Goodbye. Lew Welch.”

He was kind enough to write a farewell for his friends.

It was a heavy occasion that night at the CCM, not only because it was the anniversary of Welsh’s birth, and a commemoration of his death, but also because the present weighed heavily on the presenters and the audience members. Peter Coyote of the Diggers, a movie star and the voice-over for many of Ken Burns’ documentaries, talked about “the mistakes we made,” but didn’t go into detail.

Not necessary. We knew what he had in mind. Coyote suggested that the death of the old American culture was “taking longer than we thought it would,” and that Ronald Reagan was “punishment for the excesses of the Sixties.” He also talked about “the great underground” to which Lew belonged, along with Snyder, Ginsberg, Kerouac and many others.

Coyote added that “historians can decide what we got right and what we got wrong.” CCM co-founder Jerry Cimino observed that “history was a pendulum” and that it had swung to an extreme opposite the extremes of the Sixties. No one quoted William Blake who wrote that “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” and that “You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.” Welch tasted the extremes; he discovered what was too much, perhaps achieved a kind of wisdom and then gave up.

I don’t want to hold him up as a tragic hero or as a victim of the times in which he lived and his own illusions. I’m not sure I even want to remember him for more than a few brief minutes, but I did want to share my observations with readers of Counterculture and let them know that at the western edge of the continent of North America, a tribe of “Welch men and women,” as I’ll call them, convened to make sure that he won’t be forgotten. You have to remember members of the tribe. It’s part of the deal.

A crossover figure who aimed to bridge the Beats and the Hippies, Zen and modernist verse, and an alcoholic and an ecologist, Lew tried his hardest to be somebody. Perhaps he didn’t fail at all, as he suspected, but came as close to the sun as any human could come. I remember. We all did at the CC Museum on the 100th anniversary of Lew’s birth.

Jonah Raskin is the author of Keeping the Beat Alive.