CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

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of a 45-year-old poet 55 years after he took leave of his life, leaving behind him a wealth of work both published and unpublished?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........

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