For a long time, ruth weiss did not want to be known as a poet from the Beat Generation. She still thinks of herself as a "jazz poet." Jazz and bebop were essential to weiss's work. She was one of the first to read as jazz musicians played. North Beach poet Jack Hirschman says, "No American poet has remained so faithful to jazz in the construction of poetry ... others read to jazz or write from jazz. Ruth weiss writes jazz." While she once rejected the term "beat," she has come to embrace it. Her name is in lower case to show her defiance toward the sort of authority she encountered from the Nazis in her native Germany. (German nouns are capitalized.) She and her family escaped to Austria in 1933. As the Nazis moved in, her family got the last train out. In 1949, weiss hitchhiked to San Francisco, befriending Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. She lived "on the road" for real, the three of them speeding over the hills in a car, going as fast as they could, flirting with mortality. Kerouac and weiss would write haikus to each other. She remained devoted to haiku.