Skip to main content
Walt Curtis, Portland’s poet of the hardscrabble and dispossessed, who wrote the memoir that became Gus Van Sant’s first movie and spent decades manifesting at arts events as an apparition from the city’s bohemian past, died Friday, Aug. 25. He was 82.
Curtis is most commonly remembered for his autobiographical pamphlet Mala Noche, published in 1977 that recounted his love affairs with Pepper and Johnny, two undocumented young men from Mexico. Van Sant adapted it into a feature film in 1986, giving Curtis brief fame and a central place in a close-knit society of writers and filmmakers who produced independent work on the then-gritty westside.
For another 40 years, Curtis continued writing—poetry, mostly, much of it Beat-inflected, some of it published in a 1995 book titled Salmon Songs. One poem begins: “Because you don’t have / eyes to see / you miss / all the beauty out there. / The beauty of ordinary things!”
He founded an arts preservation group, the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission, and mentored a new generation of poets and filmmakers, many of whom in turn felt a protective urge toward the fragile, rail-thin man whose living quarters ranged from spare rooms to an apartment in the basement of a dive bar, which he protected with a shotgun.
“I can’t think of anyone with a more vibrant and visceral relationship to Portland than Walt,” says documentary filmmaker Brian Lindstrom. “He has been an important part of my life since 1981 when I would attend his poetry readings. He was provocative and pugnacious, but (almost) always in the service of something bigger than himself. He made a huge impression on 20-year-old me—'Wow, one could make art about real people living in Portland.’”
He was also the city’s most accomplished heckler. “Banned from more readings by more open mic hosts than anyone else,” wrote fellow poet Gary D Aker on social media over the weekend. “That’s doing it right.”
If Curtis was often agitated, the fury erupted from a sense of injustice, particularly that the city that had nourished his artistic and sexual discovery was being replaced with glass towers, without a thought to who was being displaced. In a 2014 interview with WW, he offered to build a curriculum of Oregon’s literary history.
“I personally feel all this knowledge I have is underutilized,” he said. “We all have to die at a certain point—blah blah blah, who cares. It’s fucking offensive to me [that Oregon’s literary history is ignored], and I’m a serious fucker. I’m not a joker. This pisses me off. You don’t have to wear people out on it. Just give them somewhere to go.”
Curtis’s death was first reported Friday evening by the Portland Tribune. In a social media post, poet Leanne Grabel said Curtis’ sister recounted his spending his last hours on earth planning a party along the Willamette River with his friends. “She said he was very sick and could have never made it to the river,” Grabel wrote.
Lindstrom, too, found Curtis holding court on his front stoop last summer as his health faded. “We visited for a while, I gave him some money for groceries, and as I was leaving he was enticing his neighbors to have dinner together in the backyard,” Lindstrom tells WW. “My mind flashed back 40-odd years to Walt playing a similar role at The Lawn, his former wonderfully ramshackle apartment building in Northwest Portland. Walt brought people together and made any place feel like home.”