A Smoking Life
Daniel T. 'Danny' Propper dies at 66
by Mikhail Horowitz
Danny Propper, a second-generation Beat poet who swung with the best
of them, died on Saturday, November 22, at his cabin on John Joy Road
in Saugerties. He was 66 years old.
A self-described "quasi recluse," Propper had been an elder statesman
of Woodstock's lively poetry scene since the early 1990s. Prior to
that, as a sales rep for Decca Records, a sometime teamster, and an
"amazing tramp," he made the late '50s-early '60s Beat scenes in New
York City, San Francisco, New Orleans and Denver. Back then, in the
heyday of the hipster coffeehouse, Propper, who described his poetry
in a 1991 Woodstock Times interview as being in the "bebop Hebraic
long-line romantic surrealist" mode, recited his poems, on several
memorable occasions, to the accompaniment of Dizzy Gillespie's
trumpet, or Thelonious Monk's piano and Roy Haynes's drums. His Fable
of the Final Hour, a wildly cinematic long poem featuring apocalyptic
cartoon imagery, was published in Seymour Krim's landmark 1960
anthology The Beats and subsequently enjoyed great popularity among
declamatory performers at poetry readings from New York's East Village
to San Francisco's North Beach.
"He was one of the smartest men I've ever met," said Dean Schambach,
the dean of Woodstock's open-reading emcees. "His knowledge was
encyclopedic; he knew jazz backwards and forwards, knew it cold. He'd
come to the readings and make so many rich observations. He sometimes
had a cruel sense of humor, because he was so bright, but he could be
sweet and tender and innocent, too."
And, like so many of his peers, he could be self-destructive. In
Propper's early years his vice of choice was Benzedrine; it was the
decades of heavy smoking, however, that cut his set short. Several
friends related how, a couple of years ago, following lung surgery, he
prevailed upon his buddy, the late Bob Dacey, to stop for a carton of
cigarettes on his way home from the hospital. Yet Propper accepted
himself as he was, much as he always accepted others as they were, and
never pissed or moaned about the repercussions of his bad habits.
Indeed, because he never complained, many of those close to him had no
idea how sick he was over the last few years.
Propper was born in Coney Island Hospital on April 13, 1937. He
studied with Stanley Kunitz at the New School for Social Research;
Kunitz advised him to drop out, and Propper never looked back. He did
maintain a friendly correspondence with Kunitz for many years after,
sending him poems and signing them, "Your grateful student, Danny."
His published work includes three volumes of poetry: The Fable of the
Final Hour (Energy Press, 1958); The Tale of the Amazing Tramp (Cherry
Valley Editions, 1977); and For Kerouac in Heaven (Energy Press, 1980)
- along with some translations of Pablo Neruda. He also published
scads of poems in many lit mags: Evergreen Review, Invisible City,
Coldspring Journal, Longhouse and Hunger, to name just a few. But for
Propper, publication was incidental to being a poet; he was most
emphatically not a self-promoter, which made him closer to the pure
spirit of being "Beat" than many a beatnik of greater renown. He once
intimated to this writer that he had a "gang of stuff" squirreled away
in notebooks and loose papers; among his effects at the time of his
death was a briefcase full of unpublished poems, which is now in the
possession of his son.
"I learned so much from him," said Myrna Hilton, his "New York Times
puzzle buddy" and a fast friend over the last ten years. "His words,
his passion at live readings, often brought the audience to a frenzy,
begging for more."
In the fable of his own final hour, Propper chose to pooh-pooh a bed
at the hospital and opted to die peacefully at home. Shortly after his
death, a dozen or so of his friends and his son, Willie, gathered at
his cabin in the woods. They spread his ashes over the property,
saving some for a favored fishing hole in Jersey, and took turns
standing on the stump of a newly hewn tree, offering praise to the
poet and the man. Last Saturday, recalling the ceremony, Willie said,
"I look forward to catching five-pound flounders with him in heaven."
It would certainly speak well of the Creator if, in addition to those
flounders, Danny Propper could spend eternity catching jazz in
celestial bistros, sitting at a table near the stage and digging his
beloved Monk, Diz, Bud, and Charlie Parker, and every once in an
endless while stepping up to the mic himself, to blow.
In addition to his son, survivors include his parents, Stanley and
Ruth Dreisin Propper, and his aunt Rita.
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