[New-Poetry] Hot Whiskey, Poets, and Revolution

[TheOldMole]

 From the Hot Whiskey Blog (http://hotwhiskeyblog.blogspot.com/:

I was just searching around in The New York Review of Books' archives 
and found this collaborative letter from 1968:

To the Editors:

We assembled poets respectable enough to travel across the planet to 
Stony Brook hereby announce to the public that we are all victims of 
closed vision, crippled mechanical consciousness, and bad poetry mouthed 
by all governments and propagandized thru controlled mass media.

That police state military tyranny, sexual repression and laws against 
expansion of consciousness by joyful music naked dance and high natural 
herbs threaten further evolution of the race. Joy to all poets' wives 
and lovers in every country (Herbert).

That no government except the invisible commune of poetry has become 
conscious that man's usurpation over all nature is an egotism that will 
destroy human as well as whale kingdoms thru ecological disruption of 
the planet surface.

That revolutions of consciousness manifested in human society by younger 
generations present should be protected from armed dinosaur repression 
and black magic violence perpetrated by the state; that everywhere Stony 
Brook to Vietnam the state is the cause and source of violence, state 
violence is preventing peaceful change. Student violence exacerbates 
some people (Cooperman). Poets fighting on suburban lawns drunk is also 
real. (Ginsberg).

That Black Power is the active American conscience, the African soul 
rising within our nation to force the European soul to love and the 
marriage of races in a new humanity. We must all work for the wedding of 
Asia and our continent. For Asia sulks in rejection and pride and only 
begins to roar in pain (Duncan)—that Black Power is an ideal vision of 
African Divinity resurrected to save the white rational races from 
suffocating the entire planet in dung colored gas—We ask return to true 
tribal structure in which men use society rather than be used. 
(Oppenheimer)—

That the U.S. utopian* war against attempted state* utopias in China and 
Cuba as well as Vietnam is a bring down for the entire human race—that 
good old Dr. Spock and friends have made pure poetic statement aiding 
and abetting younger bodies to avoid War Theater, that the assembled 
poets commit the same holy deed.—

That the new consciousness articulated by longhair revolutionary student 
generations Prague New York Paris Madrid Santiago everywhere on earth 
begins the fulfillment of human anarchy (withering away of state 
[Guellivic]) and communal utopia prophesized by poets for 
millenia—Academies should return to wisdom study in tree groves rather 
than robot study in plastic cells—Bless the Universe!

Robert Duncan

G. E. Kimball III

Stanley Cooperman

Holly Stevens

Donald Hall

Jerome Rothenberg

Ed Sanders

Joel Oppenheimer

Eduardo de Olivera

John Logan

Mackson MacLow

T. Weiss

Anthony Hecht

Denise Levertov

J.D. Reed

Donald Justice

Allen Ginsberg

Louis Simpson

Nicanor Parra

George Hitchcock

Robert Vas Dias

Tim Reynolds

*Zbigniew Herbert

*Czeslaw Milosz

Anselm Hollo

Clayton Eshleman

George Quasha

George A. Williams

Tom Gatten

Milton Kessler

Jim Harrison

Dan Rowe

Allen Planz

Ann London

A. J. M. Smith

Ron Loweinsohn


Is this possible? Would Don Justice have signed a letter like this? 
Would Ted Weiss? Anthony Hecht? It seems out of character. Anyway, it's 
quite a list (even if you include Mackson MacLow).

-- 
Tad Richards
http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/
http://opusforty.blogspot.com/