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

[James Cervantes]

Collaborative maybe, but it sure has a generous helping of Ginsberg.
Sure, Donald Justice would have signed it in his old days.  Don't know
about Weiss and Hecht.

- Jim

On 10/24/07, TheOldMole <Opus40-01 at opus40.org> wrote:
>  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/
>
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> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>


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