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

[Sarah Pearlstein]

Cool!   I sent this to my favorite local anti-war coalition's list-serv
(they are in Boston, based in Chinatown.  OT/ FYI their web address is:
www.stopthewars.org .)  we are having a week-end of events on the Boston
commons.    I thought it was an interesting note on the anti-academic,
intellectual left.... And all the poets involved in it at one point or
another.    I wonder about people, such as Sam Hamill (who I was lucky
enough to meet briefly this summer, at the William Joiner Center for the
Study of War and its' Consequences; a 2 week long writer's workshop...)
getting together this sort of thing, in proper manifesto form, perhaps?
Agit-prop, anyone?   Feelings about manifesto as an art form, etc?

Pax vobiscum,
          Sarah Pearlstein

-----Original Message-----
From: new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu
[mailto:new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu] On Behalf Of TheOldMole
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2007 6:31 PM
To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &Views
Subject: [New-Poetry] Hot Whiskey, Poets, and Revolution

 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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