*****I Hear The Voice Of My Arky Angel-Once Again-With Angel Iris Dement In Mind

*****I Hear The Voice Of My Arky Angel-Once Again-With Angel Iris Dement In Mind

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman  

SWEET FORGIVENESS (Iris DeMent)

(c) 1992 Songs of Iris/Forerunner Music, Inc. ASCAP

Sweet forgiveness, that's what you give to me

when you hold me close and you say "That's all over"

You don't go looking back,

you don't hold the cards to stack,

you mean what you say.

Sweet forgiveness, you help me see

I'm not near as bad as I sometimes appear to be

When you hold me close and say

"That's all over, and I still love you"

There's no way that I could make up for those angry words I said

Sometimes it gets to hurting and the pain goes to my head

Sweet forgiveness, dear God above

I say we all deserve a taste of this kind of love

Someone who'll hold our hand,

and whisper "I understand, and I still love you"

AFTER YOU'RE GONE (Iris DeMent)

(c) 1992 Songs of Iris/Forerunner Music, Inc. ASCAP

There'll be laughter even after you're gone

I'll find reasons to face that empty dawn

'cause I've memorized each line in your face

and not even death can ever erase the story they tell to me

I'll miss you, oh how I'll miss you

I'll dream of you and I'll cry a million tears

but the sorrow will pass and the one thing that will last

is the love that you've given to me

There'll be laughter even after you're gone

I'll find reason and I'll face that empty dawn

'cause I've memorized each line in your face

and not even death could ever erase the story they tell to me

Every once in a while I have to tussle, go one on one with the angels, or a single angel is maybe a better way to put it. No, not the heavenly ones or the ones who burden your shoulders when you have a troubled heart but every once in a while I need a shot of my Arky angel, Iris Dement. Now while I don’t want to get into a dissertation about the thing, you know, that old medieval Thomist argument about how many angels can fit on the end of a needle. Or, Jesus,  or get into playing sides in the struggle between pliant wimpy god-like angels and defiant hellion devil-like angels in the battles in the heavens over who would rule the universe that the great revolutionary English poet from the time of the 17^th century  English revolution of blessed memory, you know old Jehovah fearing Oliver Cromwell time, John Milton, when he got seriously exercised over that notion in Paradise Lost.  However  I do believe we our faced, vocally faced with someone who could go mano y mano with whoever wants to enter into the lists against her.

Yes, and I know too that that “angel,” earthly material five feet plus of flesh and bone angel thing has been played out much too much in the world music scene, the popular music scene, you know rock and roll in the old days and now mainly hip-hop. You could hardly live a 1950s childhood extending into a 1960 coming of age teenage-hood  without being bombarded by every kind of angel every time you put your quarter in the jukebox especially if the other hand attached to that quarter, as it usually was had been your everlovin’ dreamy date who just had to hear you compare her to the Earth Angel of the then currently popular song.

On a more sober note when some poor by the midnight telephone (now cellphone, okay, Smartphone) girl was beside herself when her Johnny did not call at nine like he said he would and she wanted to deny reality, a reality pointed out to her by her best friend one Monday morning before school talkfest that her Johnny Angel just couldn’t keep one girl happy but had to play the field (including an almost successful run at that best girlfriend). Going to the distaff side (nice old-fashioned word, right) some Honky-Tonk Angel who was lured into the night life, who went back to the wild side of life where the wine and liquor flowed and she was just waiting there to be anybody’s darling who would eventually be done in by her own her own hubris, Hank’s morbid angel of death that seemed to hover over his every move until the big crash out, until the lights flickered out.

There’s my favorite, no question, though showing just how recklessly secular the angel angle could spin on a platter, no question, Teen Angel. And this will put paid to the notion that the teens in those days were any smarter in going about the business of being a teenager than today’s crop. Let me give few details and if you don’t believe me then just go God Google the lyrics and be done with it. Some, I don’t know how else to say it although I will give advanced apologies to the rest of women-kind, some maybe sixteen year old bimbo of unknown intelligence but you decide for yourselves once you hear the story line  and of unknown looks whose boyfriend’s car got stuck on a railroad track one Friday date night after a full course of heavy breathing, you can figure the doing what part, down at the local beach, the boyfriend got her out safely and yet she went running back, running back to get his two-bit class ring, a ring that he had probably given to half the girls in school before her, and did not come out alive. Of course the guy was broken up about it, probably personally wrote the words to the song for the guy who sang the song for all I know but let’s leave it at this since I don’t like to speak unkindly of the dead, even the reckless dead, RIP, sister, RIP.

So that's off my chest.  No, that fleet of angle-tipped songs are strictly from nowhere, I will take my sensible Arky angel, take her with a little sinning on the side if you can believe there is any autobiographical edge to some of the songs she sings, take her with a little forlorn lilt in her voice, take her since she has seen the seedy side of life. Seen “from hunger” days and heart hurts. Yeah, that is how I like my angels. Alive as hell and well.                 

Every once in a while when I am blue, not a Billie Holiday blue, the blues down in the depths when you have to just hear her, flower in hair, maybe junked up, maybe clean, hell, it did not matter, when she hit her stride, and she “spoke” you out of your miseries, but maybe just a passing blue I needed to hear a voice that if there was an angel heaven voice Iris would be the one I would want to hear.    

I first heard Iris DeMent doing a cover of a folksinger-songwriter Greg Brown’s tribute to Jimmy Rodgers, the old time Texas yodeler discovered around same time as the original Carter Family in the late 1920s out in some Podunk town in Tennessee when the new-fangled radio and the upstart small independent record companies were desperate for roots music to feed their various clienteles whatever soap, flour, detergent, deodorant their hungry advertisers had to sell, on his tribute album, Driftless. I then looked for her solo albums and for the most part was blown away by the power of Iris’ voice, her piano accompaniment and her lyrics (which are contained in the liner notes of her various albums, read them, please). It is hard to type her style. Is it folk? Is it Country Pop? Is it semi-torch songstress? Well, whatever it maybe that Arky angel is a listening treat, especially if you are in a sentimental mood.

Naturally when I find some talent that “speaks” to me I grab everything they sing, write, paint, or act I can find. In Iris’ case there is not a lot of recorded work, with the recent addition of Sing The Delta just four albums although she had done many back-ups or harmonies with other artists most notably John Prine. Still what has been recorded blew me away (and will blow you away), especially as an old Vietnam War era veteran her There is a Wall in Washington about the guys who found themselves on the Vietnam Memorial without asking for the privilege or knowing what the hell they were fighting for in that hellish war, probably one of the best anti-war songs you will ever hear. That memorial containing names very close to me, to my heart and I shed a tear each time I even go near the memorial when I am in D.C. It is fairly easy to write a Give Peace a Chance or Where Have All the Flowers Gone? sings-song type of anti-war song. It is another to capture the pathos of what happened to too many families when we were unable to stop that war.

The streets of my old-time growing up neighborhood are filled with memories of guys I knew, guys who didn’t make it back, guys who couldn’t adjust coming back to the “real world” and wound up in flop houses, half-way houses, and along railroad “jungle” camps and also strangely enough these days given my own experiences guys who could not get over their not going into the service, in retrospect, to experience the decisive event of our generation, the generation of ‘68.

Other songs that have drawn my attention like When My Morning Comes hit home with all the baggage working class kids have about their inferiority when they screw up in this world. Walking Home Alone evokes all the humor, bathos, pathos and sheer exhilaration of saying one was able to survive, and not badly, after growing up poor, Arky poor amid the riches of America. (That may be the “connection” as I grew up through my father coal country Hazard, Kentucky poor.)  

Frankly, and I admit this publicly in this space, I love Ms. Iris Dement. Not personally, of course, but through her voice, her lyrics and her musical presence. This “confession” may seem rather startling coming from a guy who in this space is as likely to go on and on about Bolsheviks, ‘Che’, Leon Trotsky, high communist theory and the like. Especially, as well given Iris’ seemingly simple quasi- religious themes and commitment to paying homage to her rural background in song. All such discrepancies though go out the window here. Why?

Well, for one, this old radical got a lump in his throat the first time he heard her voice. Okay, that happens sometimes-once- but why did he have the same reaction on the fifth and twelfth hearings? Explain that. I can easily enough. If, on the very, very remotest chance, there is a heaven then I know one of the choir members. Enough said. By the way give a listen to Out Of The Fire and Mornin’ Glory. Then you too will be in love with Ms. Iris Dement.

Iris, here is my proposal, once again. (I have made the offer in other spaces reviewing her work more seriously.) If you get tired of fishing up in the U.P., or wherever, with Mr. Greg Brown, get bored with his endless twaddle about old Iowa farms and buxom aunts, about the trials and tribulations of Billy from the hills, or going on and on about Grandma's fruit cellar just whistle. Better yet just yodel like you did on Jimmie Rodgers Going Home on that Driftless CD. Okay.

*****Reaching For The Stars-With The Apollo Moon Flights In Mind

*****Reaching For The Stars-With The Apollo Moon Flights In Mind 

By Bradley Maxwell

Several years ago, in a period when Larry Turner after years of studied denial and distain began to think about the matter both as a way to clear up his head on the issue and to satisfy a growing curiosity, he through the beauties of modern high-tech got in contact with some old classmates of his from Riverdale High. The fact of the matter was that he had been thinking about doing so for a number of years before that but somehow that studied denial and distain always got in the way. The impetus of an upcoming class reunion, or rather knowledge that it had been almost fifty years since he had graduated from high school with the Class of 1963, had sharpened his senses about clearing things up, getting some questions answered about why so many years ago he had as he called it “brushed the dust off his shoes” from any connection with the town, and those whom he had known there.

Despite the fact that so many years had passed and some questions would never be answered for the simple fact that some of those who would have known the answers to Larry’s inquiries, including his parents and a couple of his best friends who had died in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, he decided to “suck it up” and find out what he could find out about where the roads had gone awry on him. That said Larry was not thinking only about the dramatic and heavy burden of family misunderstanding and the like but about his youth, and about the days when he was in his way filled with wonder, filled with a desire to reach for the stars at a time when that was physically no longer out of the reach of humankind. Yeah, so Larry wanted to think about the days when if he had stuck with it he could have reached for the stars, gone on a different road.  

Getting in contact with old classmates these days from fifty years ago with all the modern social networking apparatuses to choose from is almost as simple as walking across the street in the old days to see if “Jimmy” was home and did he want to go to the courts and play a little hoop. In Larry’s case that was made easier by the simple expedient of Googling on the Internet for the Riverdale High School Class of 1963 and he came up with two quick possible sources of information. First a Facebook page put up by Nora Morris (nee Daley), who had been the Class secretary, had been a head cheerleader, and had been the chief social butterfly on all the committees that mattered in high school, the Fall and Spring dance, class day, prom, and Civic Pride committees. Moreover she still lived in town, still lived in Riverdale, and had a million connections that Larry would make some use of later. The second source which had been linked from the Facebook page was a website dedicated specifically to the upcoming class reunion. So Larry was in business.

Now Larry was not all of the following: a class officer, a sports player, a dance, Fall or Spring, class day, prom, or Civic pride committee member, or any school clubs. So he had not particular affinity with Nora Daley, and she probably did not even know he existed, but he nevertheless contacted her about joining the class website (he had seen nothing on Facebook that except some names, most of which he recognized if he did not know personally, and what they had been doing since high school, which would have helped him in his quest except that link to the class website). He sent her an e-mail via the website saying he wished to join the group.

Now the way this website stuff works, or the way it worked for the Class of 1963, was that all two hundred and seventy-three members of the class who graduated had their class photographs listed on the site (those who had not had their photographs taken for the yearbook simply had their names listed). If you wanted to join the site you just clicked on your name, provided some information, as much as you desired to tell a candid world, clicked on a “submit” icon and you were, pending webmaster Nora’s okay, a member of the site. Larry cleared all those low-bar hurdles and Nora sent him a personal e-mail via the site both to welcome him and to tell him that as he suspected she did not remember him from school.

And why should she have remembered him since in many ways he had been the angry young man, for lots of reasons including a hazardous home-life, had been as filled with teen angst and alienation as Johnny (Marlon Brando) in The Wild One and James Dean in Rebel  Without A Cause  two films which he closely associated himself. Although when he was younger, when he was eleven or twelve, he had been as full as pipe dreams and good will as any kid at Danner Junior High.                            

Nora Daley in her role as class site webmaster, and probably just the way she was as a personality, in order to generate some on-going conversation would put up a bunch of questions on the homepage of the website. Silly things like-who did you have a secret “crush” on, who did you go to the prom with (Larry hadn’t), do you remember those great night before Thanksgiving rallies in support of the football team’s struggle against arch-rival Overton High in the gym (Larry did attend the one senior year), and who was your favorite teacher (Miss Soros, Larry’s  English teacher but she did not like him, or rather thought he was an underachiever, a bad sign in her book).

But Nora also posed more serious questions like how did it feel to live in the red scare Cold War night during school with all those crazy air raid drills which were worthless if you thought about it if the Russians decided to throw the big bomb at us. Like what was your attitude, if any, about the black civil rights movement down south that was filling up all the newspapers and televisions with its details. And like the question that Larry felt very comfortable with-what did you think about the exploration of space and what it would do for humankind (Nora used the more old-fashioned “mankind” reflecting perhaps an older learned ethos in her question).           

Larry was not sure whether Nora was asking these questions based on some rote recitation from some on-line time-line for the late 1950s and early 1960s when those events were current and came up with the questions that way or whether these were issues that she was interested in knowing the answers to for some other purpose. The way the thing worked was that if you had an opinion on a question you would write it up and submit it on that particular class opinion and comment page. Larry had briefly mentioned that he had attended the Thanksgiving football rally in senior year and had written a paragraph about it-mainly about how he was supposed to meet an unnamed girl who promised to be there who never showed up. And that was that.  

Larry did the same thing, or almost the same thing, wrote a couple of paragraphs on the question of space exploration, a subject that had fascinated him when he was in junior high when he fancied himself a budding rocket scientist like a million other kids, a million other guys mainly. He had also mentioned in that posting that he had recently gone down to Washington, D.C. on some business. After that conference was concluded on a whim, or not so much a whim as curiosity  since he was knee-deep in reading Norman Mailer’s literary account of the latter part of the “space race,” the struggle to put a man on the moon, Of A Fire On The Moon, he visited the Air and Space Museum just off the National Mall and noted that the old time thrill of wanting to be a rocket scientist (rather than his profession as a lawyer) came back, including memories about what it was like to have a sense of wonder back in those times. Stuff he had not thought about in many years.    

That little posting got Nora to response and ask him to expand on what he was talking about. About that sense of wonder and intrigue connected with space flight, with being part of, if only vicariously, the efforts to win the space race. Larry’s posting had also prompted several other classmates to tell of their interests, a couple who were actually as he remembered serious about science and were members of Mr. Roberts’ science club after school and who went on to have roles in the NASA programs. Larry wasn’t sure he wanted to expand on what he had written in that first posting but Nora had as the Noras of the world will do “pretty pleased” him into writing something. This is what Larry wrote:   

Space Wars, Circa 1960-by Larry Turner

Nora’s Question: In school in the early 1960s did you ever get caught up in the euphoria over the space program?

“We, all of us, are now old enough and presumably have seen enough of this sorry old world, to have become somewhat inured to the wonders of modern technology. Just witness the miracle of cyberspace that we are communicating through this very minute from all our diverse locations. My answer goes back to the mist of time when humankind had just developed the technology to reach for the stars, and we had the capacity to wonder.

For myself, I distinctly remember, as I am sure that you do as well, sitting in some Riverdale classroom as the Principal came over the P.A. system and hooked us up with the latest exploit in space. John Glenn's trip around the earth comes readily to mind. My friends, I will go back even further, back to junior high school, when we were just becoming conscious of the first explorations of space. The reaction to the news of Sputnik, the artificial satellite that the Russians had put up in 1957, drove many of us to extend our range of scientific knowledge.

I vividly remember trying to make rockets, in the basement of our family apartment, by soldering tin cans together fused with a funnel on top. I also remember taking some balsa wood, fashioning a rocket-type projectile, putting up wiring between two poles, inserting a CO2 cartridge and hammering away. Bang!!! Nothing.

After that failed experiment my scientific quest diminished. Moreover, I, a few years later became much more concerned about the fate of my fellow earthlings and trying to correct a few injustices in this world, but that is another story. Now that I think about it the question posed above really is aimed at those, unlike myself, who moved beyond boyish (or girlish) fantasies and used that youthful energy to get serious about science. Maybe you should tell us your stories.”

That little “dare” prompted William James Bradley, that is the moniker he uses now in his very successful car dealership in Overton, but back then, back when he was Larry’s best friend, or something like that, they never quite figured it all out, he was just Billy, to post the following “true” story about Larry’s early space exploits. This is a very different take on the meager offering that Larry provided. Here is what Billy had to say in his comment in response to Larry’s posting:  

Billy, William James Bradley, comment:

Yeah, I know I haven’t talked to most of you in too long a while like I told you I would when I came on this class website. But Larry Turner’s very somber post at Nora’s request about his youthful interest in space got to me. Got to me when he cut short a lot of the details that really happened back then. Guess who was with him all the way with his rocket science inventions. Yeah, me. 

So I am going to set you straight and tell you all about my best friend, Larry Turner, I always considered him my best friend so I don’t know where that “something like that” came from over at Danner Junior High, and his ill-fated attempts to single-handedly close the space gap they kept talking about once the commies put that Sputnik satellite up in orbit in 1957. Some of you who know me, knew me and my troubles back then at Danner, know that I was still kind of broken up about something around that time. Yeah, for you that don’t know I got caught up in some, well I might as well just come out with it, woman trouble, alright girl trouble, okay. So that colors the story a little, explains why I had time to spend with Larry and his foolish experiments. Just to let you know shortly after these space events I helped Larry with, once I discovered Elvis’ real take on the honeys, One Night Of Sin I got a new girlfriend, well, really an old girlfriend, an old stick girlfriend, Cool Donna O’Toole, that I had, as Larry always kidded me about, “discarded” when love Laura who had ditched me came into view. That isn’t getting us to the Larry space odyssey you’ve been waiting breathlessly to hear about so forward.

And I will get to that in just a second now that I think about it, or the heart of the story, but let me just take a minute to tell you this background story. It seems that Larry had had no objection, and shouldn’t have had, after all of Nora’s prodding, to having his space odyssey story told but he just wanted to tell the story himself. That is why we got that cock and bull whitewash  he posted but after I sent an e-mail and confronted him I said no way, no way on this good green earth are you going to get away with telling it that way. Hell, by the time he got done we were all to be weepy, girl weepy, or something about his tremendous contribution to space science rather than the simple truth- Larry should not be let with fifty miles, no, make that five hundred miles, no, let’s be on the safe side, five thousand miles from anything that could even be remotely used for launching rockets. Yeah, it’s that kind of story.

Besides, here is the real reason that Larry shouldn’t get away with his story, and I told him so. Larry, no question is a history guy, that’s probably why he wound up as a lawyer. He was crazy for people like Abigail Adams, and her husband and son, the guys who used to be Presidents, John and John Quincy, back in the Stone Age, and who Adamsville a few towns over is named after, one of them anyway. He also knows, although I have no clue why, about old times Egypt from going to the Thomas Cromwell Public Library branch at school and taking the Greyhound bus, taking the bus for that reason, can you believe this, over to Boston to the Museum of Fine Arts to check out their mummy stuff, and tombs and how they dressed and all that. Yawn.

Larry was also crazy for reading, not stuff that was required for school reading either, and writing about it, a book guy, no doubt. Get this, as an example that I have never forgotten whenever his name comes up, one time he told me about a book of short stories that he was reading about by a guy, an Irish guy, a chandelier Irish guy, Fitzgerald or something like that, who wrote stories about rich kids, very rich kids, rich guys with names like Basil mooning over rich girls. And rich girls with names like Josephine swooning over guys. Nothing big about that but like I told Larry at the time how was reading that stuff going to do anything for you, for us, trying, trying like crazy to get the hell, excuse my English, out of small town Riverdale. He’s was a cloudy guy see, even if he was my best friend.

But here is something funny, and maybe makes this reading stuff of some use sometimes. Larry read in the Foreword, who the hell, excuse my language again, in this good green earth reads the Foreword, that one of the stories, one of the Basil stories wasn’t published because the publishers didn’t believe back in the early part of the last century that ten and eleven year old boys and girls would be into “petting parties.” Jesus, and I make no excuse for saying that, where had those guys been, and what planet, not earth. Definitely not then in Riverdale with us poor small town boys and girls. So history and book reading that sums up Larry in those days. Does that sound like a guy who can tell a space story, a nuts and bolts space story? No, leave this one to old Billy, he’ll tell it true.

I don’t know about you but I was not all that hopped up about space exploration, space races, or Jules Verne although I will admit that I was a little excited about the idea of those space satellites going up in the sky, those that started with the Soviet Union’s first object in space, Sputnik. But when they started sending robots, monkeys, mice, and small dogs I lost interest. I figured how hard can it be to do the space thing if rodents can make the trip, unmolested. Besides I had my budding career as a rock star of the Elvis sort to worry about so other kinds of stars took a back seat.

Not so Larry. The minute he heard, or maybe it was a little later but pretty soon after, that Sputnik had gone up, that it had been the Russkies who were first in space, he was crazy to enlist in the space race. I swear I had to stop talking to him for a few days because all he wanted to talk about, with that certain demented look in his eye that told you that you were in for a lecture like at school, was how it was every red-blooded student’s, make that every red-blooded American student’s, duty to get moving in aid of the space front. It was so bad that he would not even heard me talk about the latest rock hit without saying, hey, that’s kid’s stuff I got no time for that. Bad, right.

Now this was not about money, you know going around the neighborhood collecting coins for the space program like we did to restore the U.S.S. Constitution when it was all water-logged or whatever happens to wooden ships when they get too old. And it was not about maybe going to the library to get some books to study up on science and maybe someday become a space engineer and go to Cape Canaveral or someplace like that. No this was about our duty, duty see, to go out in the back yard, go down in the cellar, go out in the garage (if you had a garage) and start to experiment making rockets that might be able to make it to space. See what I mean. Deep-end stuff, no question.

Now I already told you, but in case you might have forgotten, Larry was nothing but a books and history guy, and maybe a little music. I had never seen him put a hammer to a nail or anything like that, and I am not sure that he has those skills. I do know that when we were making papier mache dinosaurs in class one time his thing did not look like a dinosaur. Not close. But one day he got me to go with him up to Riverdale Center to the hardware store to get materials for making a rocket. Larry was nothing if not serious in his little projects, at first. At the store we got some balsa wood, nails, aluminum poles, guide wire, a knife built for carving stuff, and about ten CO2 cartridges. The idea was to build a model (or models) and see which ones have the contours to be space-worthy.

Over the next couple of weeks I saw Larry off and on but mainly off because he was spending his after-school time down in the cellar of the apartment house where his family lived working on those balsa wood models. Then one day, one Saturday I think, yeah, it was Saturday he came over to my house looking for help in setting up his launch pad. The idea was that he would put up two aluminum poles, stretch the guide wire between the two poles and demonstrate what he called the aerodynamic flow of his models by attaching his balsa wood models on the wire with a bent nail. Propulsion was by inserting a CO2 cartridge in a crevice in the rocket and hitting one end of the cartridge by lightly hitting it with a nail. I was to observe at the finish while he covered the start. After about half an hour everything was set to go and Dr. Von Turner was ready to set the explosion. Except moon man Larry hit the nail into the cartridge at the wrong place and, if it had not been for some quick leg work that I still chuckle over when I think about it (like now) my friend would have lost an eye. Scratch balsa wood models.

Oh, you thought that was the end of it. Christ no. After catching some hell from his mother (and a little from me) he was back on the trail blazing away. This time though he kept it very low. I didn’t even know about it until he asked me to help him get some materials from that same hardware store and the Rexall Drug Store uptown. So here is the brain-storm in a nut shell. He said he saw the error of his ways in the balsa wood fiasco- he had used the wrong fuel and the whole guide wire thing was awry. This time he intended to simulate (yeah, I didn’t know what that meant either until he told me it was like practically the same but not the real thing, or something like that) a launching like he had seen on television and in the Bell Laboratories Science films we saw at school. Okay, get this, he built, using his father’s soldering iron, a small rocket out of tin soup cans (Campbell’s, naturally, just kidding) with a tin funnel on top and flattened metal for wings. Hey, it really didn’t look bad. The fuel, I swear I do not know all the ingredients but they all came from either the hardware or drug store so that gives you an idea about something. Apparently he read about it somewhere.

So, again on black Saturday, we are off to the back field to launch the spaceship Billy (named after me, of course) into fame and fortune. We set the rocket on a small launch pad that he made; he put in the fuel from a can, and then closed it off with a fuse device at the end. I, as honoree, was to light the match for take-off. I lit the match alright except a funny thing happened- the rocket quickly, very quickly turned into an inferno, and almost me along with it, except I too did some fancy leg work. Christ, Larry enough. And the lesson to be learned- you had better be young, quick, and have your insurance paid up if you are going to hang out with maddened rocket scientists.

After that experiment I think old Larry lost heart. A few days later I saw him reading a book about Abraham Lincoln so I guess the coast was clear. Oh yeah, and at school a week or two later he asked me if I had heard Jerry Lee Lewis’ Breathless yet. Welcome back to Earth, Larry.

Larry laughed when he read Billy’s posting. Sent him an e-mail with one word-Touche. But here is the funny thing Billy’s little missive got him thinking about something he saw at the space museum down in Washington. They had on display for the whole world to see the actual vehicle, or a test model, of the landing craft which the Apollo 11, the first men to land on the moon, used. Larry was amazed by the sight and spent some time looking at all aspects of the vehicle.  What startled him was how amateurish the whole thing looked (as some of the other exhibit did as well). The thing with its odd-ball hooks, its off-center antennae, it patches of foil here, some misshapen boxes there, it funny landing pods looked like something he might have created in those halcyon days when he had enlisted himself in the space program when it counted. His conclusion; maybe he had given up too early on his rocket scientist dreams. Maybe he shouldn’t have been bullied by Billy to go back to reading books and listening to music.     

Thinking about Billy though and his posting Larry began to think about that F. Scott Fitzgerald reference that Billy mentioned. Not about Fitzgerald’s Basil and Josephine stories but about The Great Gatsby and that haunting last few paragraphs that kind of summed up something about humankind. Larry wondered if those Apollo astronauts when they landed on the moon had the same sense of wonder about the prospects for that place as those long ago Dutch sailors did as they saw the first “fresh green breast” of land as they hit Long Island Sound. He hoped so.    

*****From The Pen Of American Communist Party Founder And Trotskyist Leader James P. Cannon

*****From The Pen Of American Communist Party Founder And Trotskyist Leader James P. Cannon

Click below to link to the “James P. Cannon Internet Archives.”

https://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/
 

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From The Pen Of Josh Breslin

Back in the early 1970s after they had worked out between themselves the rudiment of what had gone wrong with the May Day 1971 actions in Washington, D.C. Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris began some serious study of leftist literature from an earlier time, from back earlier in the century. Those May Day anti-Vietnam War actions, ill-conceived as they in the end turned out to be, centered on the proposition that if the American government would not close down the damn blood-sucking war then they, those thousands that participated in the actions, would close down the government. All Sam, Ralph and those thousands of others got for their efforts was a round-up into the bastinado. Sam had been picked off in the round-up on Pennsylvania Avenue as his group (his “affinity group” for the action) had been on their way to “capture” the White House. Ralph and his affinity group of ex-veterans and their supporters were rounded-up on Massachusetts Avenues heading toward the Pentagon (they had no plans to capture that five-sided building, at least they were unlike Sam’s group not that naïve, just surround it like had occurred in an anti-war action in 1967 which has been detailed in Norman Mailer’s prize-winning book Armies Of The Night). For a time RFK (Robert F. Kennedy) Stadium, the home of the Washington Redskins football team) had been the main holding area for those arrested and detained. The irony of being held in a stadium named after the martyred late President’s younger brother and lightening rod for almost all anti-war and “newer world” political dissent before he was assassinated in the bloody summer of 1968 and in a place where football, a sport associated in many radical minds with all that was wrong with the American system was lost on Sam and Ralph at the time and it was only later, many decades later, as they were sitting in a bar in Boston across from the JFK Federal Building on one of their periodic reunions when Ralph was in town that Sam had picked up that connection.

Sam, from Carver in Massachusetts, who had been a late convert to the anti-war movement in 1969 after his closest high school friend, Jeff Mullin, had been blown away in some jungle town in the Central Highlands was like many late converts to a cause a “true believer,” had taken part in many acts of civil disobedience at draft boards, including the one in hometown Carver, federal buildings and military bases. From an indifference, no that’s not right, from a mildly patriotic average young American citizen that you could find by the score hanging around Mom and Pop variety stores, pizza parlors, diners, and bowling alleys in the early 1960s, he had become a long-haired bearded “hippie anti-warrior.” Not too long though by the standards of “youth nation” of the day since he was running a small print shop in Carver in order to support his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed away suddenly of a massive heart attack in 1965 which exempted him from military service. Not too short either since those “squares” were either poor bastards who got tagged by the military and had to wear their hair short an appearance which stuck out in towns like Cambridge, Ann Arbor, Berkeley and L.A. when the anti-war movement started embracing the increasingly frustrated and anti-war soldiers that  they were beginning to run across or, worse, cops before they got “hip” to the idea that guys wearing short hair, no beard, looked like they had just taken a bath, and wore plaid short-sleeved shirts and chinos might as well have a bulls-eye target on their backs surveilling the counter-cultural crowd.

Ralph, from Troy, New York, had been working in his father’s electrical shop which had major orders from General Electric the big employer in the area when he got his draft notice and had decided to enlist in order to avoid being an 11B, an infantryman, a grunt, “cannon fodder,” although he would not have known to call it that at the time, that would come later. He had expected to go into something which he knew something about in the electrical field at least that is what the recruiting sergeant in Albany had “promised” him. But in the year 1967 (and 1968 too since he had extended his tour six months to get out of the service a little early) what the military needed in Vietnam whatever else they might have needed was “cannon fodder,” guys to go out into the bushes and kill commies. Simple as that. And that was what Ralph Morris, a mildly patriotic average young American citizen, no that is not right, a very patriotic average young American citizen that you could also find by the score hanging around Mom and Pop variety stores, pizza parlors, diners, and bowling alleys in the early 1960s, did. But see he got “religion” up there in Pleiku, up there in the bush and so when he had been discharged from the Army in late 1969 he was in a rage against the machine. Sure he had gone back to the grind of his father’s electrical shop but he was out of place just then, out of sorts, needed to find an outlet for his anger at what he had done, what had happened to buddies very close to him, what buddies had done, and how the military had made them animals, nothing less. (Ralph after his father retired would take over the electric shop business on his own in 1991 and would thereafter give it to his son to take over after he retired in 2011.)

One day he had gone to Albany on a job for his father and while on State Street he had seen a group of guys in mismatched military garb marching in the streets without talking, silent which was amazing in itself from what he had previously seen of such marches and just carrying a big sign-Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) and nobody stopped them, no cops, nobody, nobody yelled “commie” either or a lot of other macho stuff that he and his hang out guys used to do in Troy when some peaceniks held peace vigils in the square. The civilian on-lookers held their tongues that day although Ralph knew that the whole area still retained a lot of residual pro-war feeling just because America was fighting somewhere for something. He parked his father’s truck and walked over to the march just to watch at first. Some guy in a tattered Marine mismatched uniform wearing Chuck Taylor sneakers in the march called out to the crowd for anybody who had served in Vietnam, served in the military to join them shouting out their military affiliation as they did so. Ralph almost automatically blurred out-“First Air Cav” and walked right into the street. There were other First Air Cav guys there that day so he was among kindred. So yeah, Ralph did a lot of actions with VVAW and with “civilian” collectives who were planning more dramatic actions. Ralph always would say later that if it hadn’t been for getting “religion” on the war issue and doing all those political actions then he would have gone crazy, would have wound up like a lot of guys he would see later at the VA, see out in the cardboard box for a home streets, and would not until this day have supported in any way he could, although lately not physically since his knee replacement, those who had the audacity to march for the “good old cause.”                          

That is the back story of a relationship has lasted until this day, an unlikely relationship in normal times and places but in that cauldron of the early 1970s when the young, even the not so very young, were trying to make heads or tails out of what was happening in a world they did not crate, and were not asked about there were plenty of such stories, although most did not outlast that search for the newer world when the high tide of the 1960s ebbed in the mid-1970s. Ralph had noticed while milling around the football field waiting for something to happen, waiting to be released, Sam had a VVAW button on his shirt and since he did not recognize Sam from any previous VVAW action had asked if he was a member of the organization and where. Sam told him the story of his friend Jeff Mullin and of his change of heart about the war, and about doing something about ending the damn thing. That got them talking, talking well into the first night of their captivity when they found they had many things in common coming from deeply entrenched working-class cultures. (You already know about Troy. Carver is something like the cranberry bog capital of the world even today although the large producers dominate the market unlike when Sam was a kid and the small Finnish growers dominated the market and town life. The town moreover has turned into something of a bedroom community for the high-tech industry that dots U.S. 495.) After a couple of days in the bastinado Sam and Ralph hunger, thirsty, needing a shower after suffering through the Washington humidity heard that people were finding ways of getting out to the streets through some side exits. They decided to surreptiously attempt an “escape” which proved successful and they immediately headed through a bunch of letter, number and state streets on the Washington city grid toward Connecticut Avenue heading toward Silver Springs trying to hitchhike out of the city. A couple of days later having obtained a ride through from Trenton, New Jersey to Providence, Rhode Island they headed to Sam’s mother’s place in Carver. Ralph stayed there a few days before heading back home to Troy. They had agreed that they would keep in contact and try to figure out what the hell went wrong in Washington that week. After making some connections through some radicals he knew in Cambridge to live in a commune Sam asked Ralph to come stay with him for the summer and try to figure out that gnarly problem. Ralph did, although his father was furious since he needed his help on a big GE contract for the Defense Department but Ralph was having none of that.    

So in the summer of 1971 Sam and Ralph began to read that old time literature, although Ralph admitted he was not much of a reader and some of the stuff was way over his head, Sam’s too. Mostly they read socialist and communist literature, a little of the old IWW (Wobblie) stuff since they both were enthrall to the exploits of the likes of Big Bill Haywood out West which seemed to dominate the politics of that earlier time. They had even for a time joined a loose study group sponsored by one of the myriad “red collectives” that had sprung up like weeds in the Cambridge area. Both thought it ironic at the time, and others who were questioning the direction the “movement” was heading in stated the same thing when they were in the study groups, that before that time in the heyday of their anti-war activity everybody dismissed the old white guys (a term not in common use then like now) like Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and their progeny as irrelevant. Now everybody was glued to the books.

It was from that time that Sam and Ralph got a better appreciation of a lot of the events, places, and personalities from the old time radicals. Events like the start of May Day in 1886 as an international working class holiday which they had been clueless about despite the   May Day actions, the Russian Revolutions, the Paris Commune, the Chinese Revolutions, August 1914 as a watershed against war, the Communist International, those aforementioned radicals Marx, Lenin, Trostky, adding in Mao, Che, Fidel, Ho whose names were on everybody’s tongue (and on posters in every bedroom) even if the reason for that was not known. Most surprising of all were the American radicals like Haywood, Browder, Cannon, Foster, and others who nobody then, or almost nobody cared to know about at all.

As they learned more information about past American movements Sam, the more interested writer of such pieces began to write appreciation of past events, places and personalities. His first effort was to write something about the commemoration of the 3 Ls (Lenin, Luxemburg, and Liebknecht) started by the Communist International back in the 1920s in January 1972, the first two names that he knew from a history class in junior college and the third not at all. After that he wrote various pieces like the one below about the labor party question in the United States (leftist have always posed their positions as questions; the women question, the black question, the party question, the Russian question and so on so Sam decided to stick with the old time usage.) Here is what he had to say then which he had recently freshly updated. Sam told Ralph after he had read and asked if he was still a “true believer” said a lot of piece he would still stand by today:      

 

Frank Jackman comment on founding member James P. Cannon and the early American Communist Party taken from a book review, James P. Cannon and the Early American Communist Party, on the “American Left History” blog:

If you are interested in the history of the American Left or are a militant trying to understand some of the past mistakes of our history and want to know some of the problems that confronted the early American Communist Party and some of the key personalities, including James Cannon, who formed that party this book is for you.

At the beginning of the 21st century after the demise of the Soviet Union and the apparent ‘death of communism’ it may seem fantastic and utopian to today’s militants that early in the 20th century many anarchist, socialist, syndicalist and other working class militants of this country coalesced to form an American Communist Party. For the most part, these militants honestly did so in order to organize an American socialist revolution patterned on and influenced by the Russian October Revolution of 1917. James P. Cannon represents one of the important individuals and faction leaders in that effort and was in the thick of the battle as a central leader of the Party in this period. Whatever his political mistakes at the time, or later, one could certainly use such a militant leader today. His mistakes were the mistakes of a man looking for a revolutionary path.

For those not familiar with this period a helpful introduction by the editors gives an analysis of the important fights which occurred inside the party. That overview highlights some of the now more obscure personalities (a helpful biographical glossary is provided), where they stood on the issues and insights into the significance of the crucial early fights in the party.

These include questions which are still relevant today; a legal vs. an underground party; the proper attitude toward parliamentary politics; support to third- party bourgeois candidates;trade union policy; class-war prisoner defense as well as how to rein in the intense internal struggle of the various factions for organizational control of the party. This makes it somewhat easier for those not well-versed in the intricacies of the political disputes which wracked the early American party to understand how these questions tended to pull it in on itself. In many ways, given the undisputed rise of American imperialism in the immediate aftermath of World War I, this is a story of the ‘dog days’ of the party. Unfortunately, that rise combined with the international ramifications of the internal disputes in the Russian Communist Party and in the Communist International shipwrecked the party as a revolutionary party toward the end of this period.

In the introduction the editors motivate the purpose for the publication of the book by stating the Cannon was the finest Communist leader that America had ever produced. This an intriguing question. The editors trace their political lineage back to Cannon’s leadership of the early Communist Party and later after his expulsion to the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party so their perspective is obvious. What does the documentation provided here show? I would argue that the period under study represented Cannon’s apprenticeship. Although the hothouse politics of the early party clarified some of the issues of revolutionary strategy for him I believe that it was not until he linked up with Trotsky in the late 1920’s that he became the kind of leader who could lead a revolution. Of course, since Cannon never got a serious opportunity to lead revolutionary struggles in America this is mainly reduced to speculation on my part. Later books written by him make the case better. One thing is sure- in his prime he had the instincts to want to lead a revolution.

As an addition to the historical record of this period this book is a very good companion to the two-volume set by Theodore Draper - The Roots of American Communism and Soviet Russia and American Communism- the definitive study on the early history of the American Communist Party. It is also a useful companion to Cannon’s own The First Ten Years of American Communism. I would add that this is something of a labor of love on the part of the editors. This book was published at a time when the demise of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was in full swing and anything related to Communist studies was deeply discounted. Nevertheless, for better or worse, the American Communist Party (and its offshoots) needs to be studied as an ultimately flawed example of a party that failed in its mission to create a radical version of society in America. Now is the time to study this history.

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BOOK REVIEW

NOTEBOOK OF AN AGITATOR- JAMES P. CANNON, PATHFINDER PRESS, NEW YORK, 1971

If you are interested in the history of the American Left or are a militant trying to understand some of the past lessons of our history concerning the socialist response to various social and labor questions this book is for you. This book is part of a continuing series of the writings of James P. Cannon that was published by the organization he founded, the Socialist Workers Party, in the 1970’s. Look in this space for other related reviews of this series of documents on and by an important American Communist.

In the introduction the editors motivate the purpose for the publication of the book by stating the Cannon was the finest Communist leader that America had ever produced. This an intriguing question. The editors trace their political lineage back to Cannon’s leadership of the early Communist Party and later after his expulsion to the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party so their perspective is obvious. What does the documentation provided here show? This certainly is the period of Cannon’s political maturation, especially after his long collaboration working with Trotsky. The period under discussion- from the 1920’s when he was a leader of the American Communist Party to the red-baiting years after World War II- started with his leadership of the fight against the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and then later against those who no longer wanted to defend the gains of the Russian Revolution despite the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution. Cannon won his spurs in those fights and in his struggle to orient those organizations toward a revolutionary path. One thing is sure- in his prime which includes this period- Cannon had the instincts to want to lead a revolution and had the evident capacity to do so. That he never had an opportunity to lead a revolution is his personal tragedy and ours as well.

I note here that among socialists, particularly the non-Stalinist socialists of those days, there was controversy on what to do and, more importantly, what forces socialists should support. If you want to find a more profound response initiated by revolutionary socialists to the social and labor problems of those days than is evident in today’s leftist responses to such issues Cannon’s writings here will assist you. I draw your attention to the early part of the book when Cannon led the Communist-initiated International Labor Defense (ILD), most famously around the fight to save the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti here in Massachusetts. That campaign put the Communist Party on the map for many workers and others unfamiliar with the party’s work. For my perspective the early class-war prisoner defense work was exemplary.

The issue of class-war prisoners is one that is close to my heart. I support the work of the Partisan Defense Committee, Box 99 Canal Street Station, New York, N.Y 10013, an organization which traces its roots and policy to Cannon’s ILD. That policy is based on an old labor slogan- ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’ therefore I would like to write a few words here on Cannon’s conception of the nature of the work. As noted above, Cannon (along with Max Shachtman and Martin Abern and Cannon’s long time companion Rose Karsner who would later be expelled from American Communist Party for Trotskyism with him and who helped him form what would eventually become the Socialist Workers Party) was assigned by the party in 1925 to set up the American section of the International Red Aid known here as the International Labor Defense.

It is important to note here that Cannon’s selection as leader of the ILD was insisted on by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) because of his pre-war association with that organization and with the prodding of “Big Bill’ Haywood, the famous labor organizer exiled in Moscow. Since many of the militants still languishing in prison were anarchists or syndicalists the selection of Cannon was important. The ILD’s most famous early case was that of the heroic anarchist workers, Sacco and Vanzetti. The lessons learned in that campaign show the way forward in class-war prisoner defense.

I believe that it was Trotsky who noted that, except in the immediate pre-revolutionary and revolutionary periods, the tasks of militants revolve around the struggle to win democratic and other partial demands. The case of class-war legal defense falls in that category with the added impetus of getting the prisoners back into the class struggle as quickly as possible. The task then is to get them out of prison by mass action for their release. Without going into the details of the Sacco and Vanzetti case the two workers had been awaiting execution for a number of years and had been languishing in jail. As is the nature of death penalty cases various appeals on various grounds were tried and failed and they were then in imminent danger of execution.

Other forces outside the labor movement were also interested in the Sacco and Vanzetti case based on obtaining clemency, reduction of their sentences to life imprisonment or a new trial. The ILD’s position was to try to win their release by mass action- demonstrations, strikes and other forms of mass mobilization. This strategy obviously also included, in a subordinate position, any legal strategies that might be helpful to win their freedom. In this effort the stated goal of the organization was to organize non-sectarian class defense but also not to rely on the legal system alone portraying it as a simple miscarriage of justice. The organization publicized the case worldwide, held conferences, demonstrations and strikes on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti. Although the campaign was not successful and the pair were executed in 1927 it stands as a model for class war prisoner defense. Needless to say, the names Sacco and Vanzetti continue to be honored to this day wherever militants fight against this system.

I also suggest a close look at Cannon’s articles in the early 1950’s. Some of them are solely of historical interest around the effects of the red purges on the organized labor movement at the start of the Cold War. Others, however, around health insurance, labor standards, the role of the media and the separation of church and state read as if they were written in 2014 That’s a sorry statement to have to make any way one looks at it.

In His 96th Year- A Lawrence Ferlingetti Of The Mind

In His 96^th Year- A Lawrence Ferlinghetti Of The Mind

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Zack James 

Recently after viewing a documentary which was part biopic and part cultural artifact about the life, times and work of self -described San Francisco anarchist poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti Josh Breslin, an old time corner boy from up in textile mill-town Olde Saco in Maine who spent most of his working career working as a journalist wrote up his thoughts about the film. I had, before he left to go retire back up in Olde Saco into the small house his late mother had left him, worked with him as an assistant, a go-fer really, a go-fer for his daily quotient of coffee, booze and whatever other stimulant I could find in the wilds of student-infested Cambridge. I also was a guy, a guy a couple of generations younger that Josh, who he would bounce ideas off of and see if they stuck as he called it, stuck with millennials like me who would except in books or on films be clueless about the things that concerned him.

Josh had known some of Ferlinghetti’s younger circle when he lived on in California at various times earlier in his life before heading back East about twenty years ago to settle into Cambridge. That then younger circle consisted of some of the remnants of the 1950s “beat” generation who knew Jack Kerouac, maybe attended Allen Ginsberg’s famous introduction to serious beat poetry with his landmark Howl, mostly local San Francisco-known poets, who Ferlinghetti was instrumental through his connection with the famous and iconic City Lights Bookstore in getting published and getting some publicity for their works and performances. Add into the mix some residue refugees who survived the summer of love 1967-Haight-Ashbury-Fillimore West counter-cultural explosion that ripped through the West Coast like a tornado in the mid to late 1960s and stayed in Frisco. Add in too some semi-literary lights that Josh met when he spent a couple of years, actually more like three, on Captain Crunch’s yellow brick road converted school bus going up and down that West Coast at a snail’s pace along with a revolving crew of the adventurous, the half-mad, the forsaken and the by vocation homeless. That latter part of the melting pot was connected to Ferlinghetti by Captain Crunch himself, a wild man, real name, Winston Jackson, Yale Class of 1957, who were friends. So Josh knew a goodly part of the Ferlinghetti story well before he saw the documentary.      

One night when Josh was bouncing ideas around with me over a couple of shots of Johnny Walker Red, his favorite whiskey which I too acquired a taste for, he noted that Ferlinghetti brought a certain sense of wonder to his circle and all who have come in touch with him. Wonder a commodity Josh said in short supply these days when everything is cookie-cutter spelled out for you, everything is totally 24/7/365 hyped to you in the media so whatever was meaty in the story, tragedy or human interest got so beaten down that after a couple of days you no longer wanted to hear word one about the damn subject.  He asked me, as he did quite a bit toward the end of his career in Cambridge, to write down stuff as he declaimed (his word) what was on his mind. Here’s what I gathered in from his remarks and you can sift out whether his was blowing smoke, which he was capable of, or had a few decent insights into something gone awry in our society:     

“Yeah, you know at some very young age, well before puberty, most of us get our natural stock of wonder beaten out of us, wonder at the world, wonder about why this is this way and that is that way, and the funny makeup of the nature of the universe, hell, just plain ordinary vanilla wonder. That is why poets, good and bad, are precious commodities in restoring the human balance, in letting us once more check in on the wonder game which their words, their particular scheme of words since they have not had their sense of wonder beaten out of them (no matter how hard in individual cases someone might have tried to do so, poets and poetry not seen as a worthy profession and subject for “from hunger” corner boys and the like).

Every self-respecting radical or progressive in some other field like, for example, Karl Marx in political theory, Picasso in painting, John Holmes in physics, has treasured their friendships with the poets, and rightly so no matter how quirky they get. That quirkiness and the precious commodity of wonder get a full workout by one self-described anarchist poet, Lawrence Ferlinghett as his life’s story unfolds in the documentary under review, Lawrence Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth Of Wonder.      

Today perhaps not as many people outside of the San Francisco Bay area may be as familiar with the work of the still very much alive and active Ferlinghetti, although A Coney Island of the Mind is one of the best-selling poetry collection ever, and this film makes some amends for that short-coming. Of course the Ferlinghetti name might become more familiar in some circles if you put the name with the City Lights Bookstore that he founded and which is still going strong today as a central haven for creative spirits in the area. Or for legal buffs and aficionados his connection with the “pornography” freedom of expression suit brought in the 1950s around publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. That connection between poet and bookstore owner get plenty of exposure here as it should since it is hard to think of say Allen Ginsberg or Gregory Corso two poets active in that same period combining those two skills.

This film, since it doubles up as a short biopic as well as cultural artifact gives plenty of information about the long bumpy ride for Ferlinghetti to first begin unleashing his poetic visions and then tie those words into a new left-wing (anarchist-tinged if anybody is asking) way of looking at society. Not so strangely a lot of his emergence as a poet and central cultural figure was connected when he hit San Francisco in the early 1950s. If  he had found himself in let’s say Cleveland at that time things might have turned out very differently for Frisco along with the Village in New York were oases against the prevailing cookie-cutter, keep your head down, Cold War red scare night where the misfits and renegades found shelter and kindred.        

Of course beside the poetic vision and the bookstore as cultural expression Ferlinghetti, as the film also makes clear, was one of those behind the scenes players who make new cultural explosions happen. He was, although not a “beat” poet himself (his take on the question when asked, endlessly asked and even a slight glance reading of his poems fortifies that position, they are outside the beat framework as to rhythm and sensibilities) and although he was not a “hippie” poet either he was a central figure in both movements as be-bop beat gave way to acid-etched hippie-dom. That “hippie” movement of the 1960s having produced very few literary lights and many fewer poets, poets whose poems are still readable without blushing unlike Ferlinghetti’s or Ginsberg’s which still burn the pages.

Something I did not know since I was on the road a lot in those days and did not keep up with his doings was how many places like May 1968 in Paris and 1959 in Cuba Ferlinghetti had been involved with which surely affected the weight of his more political poems. In the end his prolific run of poetry in all sizes and shapes, especially the now classic A Coney Island of the Mind will be the legacy, will be that little slice of wonder future generations will cling to, cling to for dear life.