February 1969: Pete O’Neal talks about the formation of the Kansas City chapter of the Black Panther Party.

“Charlotte Hill O’Neal is known by several names. Residents of the Arusha region of northern Tanzania, where she has lived for decades, call her Mama C as Charlotte is difficult for Tanzanians to pronounce. Others call her Mama Africa because of the scarification on her cheeks and the ring piercing her nose, and because she encourages the local youth to be proud of their culture and heritage. Her Orisha spiritual name is Osotunde Fasuyi. She was initiated several years ago as a priestess in the Yoruba belief system, which originated about 10 000 years ago in present-day Nigeria. Enslaved Africans brought it to the Americas and the Caribbean, where it syncretised with other belief systems and is now practised throughout these areas. Charlotte is bedecked in jewellery and beads. Some items represent…

“Robert Creeley’s ‘I Know a Man’ is in many ways a signature poem. Few poems we choose to discuss on PoemTalk are such. Many are downright unrepresentative. This one might indeed be unrepresentative but if a person knows just one Creeley poem this is probably it. It’s been much written about. InThe San Francisco RenaissanceMichael Davidson explores the ‘Beat ethos’ with a detailed reading of ‘I Know a Man.’ Similarly, PoemTalkers Randall Couch, Jessica Lowenthal and Bob Perelman find beat here — but also its counterargument, and/or a rejoinder to its dark depth and to the beat propensity for driving nowhere (or somewhere) fast. Robert Kern in boundary 2 — a 1978 essay — finds postmodern poetics in the Creeleyite anthem: in a nutshell, composition as recognition. Cid Corman (himself the topic of an upcoming PoemTalk) finds and commends the ‘basic English’ of the poem, comparing it…

“The city’s Parks Department opened a new photography exhibition at Central Park’s Arsenal Gallery that displays more than 40 archived photographs from the department’s collection. Called ‘Streets In Play: Katrina Thomas, NYC Summer 1968,’ the exhibit features images taken by the late photographer Katrina Thomas, who in 1968 was hired by NYC Mayor John Lindsay and tasked with capturing the city’s summer initiative, ‘Playstreets,’ in which residential blocks were closed to vehicles and instead equipped for recreational activity. Lindsay originally commissioned the photos for publicity, and to show proof that the city had been ‘compensating for a lack of investment in low-income, racially segregated neighborhoods,’ according to a press release. Thomas’ keen eye and affinity for capturing natural-looking moments brought to life ‘a child’s-eye view of the possibilities for play and delight in less-than-hospitable environments.’ Many high-profile photographers of the time had been capturing life on the city streets, aiming…

“Hud is a 1963 American Western film directed by Martin Ritt and starring Paul Newman, Melvyn Douglas, Brandon deWilde, and Patricia Neal. It was produced by Ritt and Newman’s recently founded company, Salem Productions, and was their first film for Paramount Pictures. Hud was filmed on location on the Texas Panhandle, including Claude, Texas. Its screenplay was by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. and was based on Larry McMurtry‘s 1961 novel, Horseman, Pass By. The film’s title character, Hud Bannon, was a minor character in the original screenplay, but was reworked as the lead role. With its main character an antihero, Hud was later described as a revisionist Western. The film centers on the ongoing conflict between principled patriarch Homer Bannon and his unscrupulous and arrogant son, Hud, during an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease putting the family’s…

Left to right: Claude Simon, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Pinget, publisher Jérôme Lindon, Samuel Beckett, Nathalie Sarraute

“The Nouveau Roman (French pronunciation: ​[nuvo ʁɔmɑ̃], ‘new novel’) is a type of 1950s French novel that diverged from classical literary genres. Émile Henriot coined the term in an article in the popular French newspaperLe Monde on May 22, 1957 to describe certain writers who experimented with style in each novel, creating an essentially new style each time. Most of the founding authors were published by Les Éditions de Minuit with the strong support of Jérôme Lindon. Alain Robbe-Grillet, an influential theorist as well as writer of the Nouveau Roman, published a series of essays on the nature and future of the novel which were later collected in Pour un Nouveau Roman. Rejecting many of the established features of the novel to date, Robbe-Grillet regarded many earlier novelists…

John Coltrane Handwritten – A Love Supreme (1965)

“Spiritual jazz (or astral jazz) is a sub-genre of jazz that originated in the United States during the 1960s. The genre is characterized by its chaotic and noisy version on jazz that focuses on transcendence and spirituality. John Coltrane‘s A Love Supreme (1965) is considered a landmark album in the genre. During the 1960s in the United States, the civil rights movement was occurring,^[2] causing societal change, political movements, and the desire of the marginalized to have their voices heard. As a result, African-American people were given more freedom to celebrate their culture and to express themselves religiously.^[2] This lead to a desire to push the conventions of jazz, with some artists choosing to search for transcendence and spirituality in their music. John Coltrane released A Love Supreme in 1965, which was generally considered the birthplace…

Taxicab driver at the wheel with two passengers, N.Y.C. 1956

“Diane Arbus (… March 14, 1923 – July 26, 1971) was an American photographer. Arbus’s imagery helped to normalize marginalized groups and highlight the importance of proper representation of all people. She photographed a wide range of subjects including strippers, carnival performers, nudists, people with dwarfism, children, mothers, couples, elderly people, and middle-class families. She photographed her subjects in familiar settings: their homes, on the street, in the workplace, in the park. ‘She is noted for expanding notions of acceptable subject matter and violates canons of the appropriate distance between photographer and subject. By befriending, not objectifying her subjects, she was able to capture in her work a rare psychological intensity.’ In his 2003 New York Times Magazine article, ‘Arbus Reconsidered,’ Arthur Lubow states, ‘She was fascinated by people who were visibly creating their own identities—cross-dressers…

The New York Times brings news that is not new to anyone who reads this blog. A movement is rising to revive Christian domination of public and private life, and it is a movement fueled by racists. It is specifically opposed to the separation of church and state, and it seeks to destroy public education, ban abortion, censor teaching about race and racism, as well as gender and sexuality.

This movement was behind Trump’s election and used this irreligious man as their instrument to gain power and control of the Supreme Court.

The article begins:

Three weeks before he won the Republican nomination for Pennsylvania governor, Doug Mastriano stood beside a three-foot-tall painted eagle statue and declared the power of God.

“Any free people in the house here? Did Jesus set you free?” he asked, revving up the dozens before him on a Saturday afternoon at a Gettysburg roadside hotel.

In this Oct. 21, 1969, photo is author Jack Kerouac who only lived in St. Petersburg, Fla., a handful of years before he died there in 1969. But the Sunshine City still claims him as its own. One hundred years ago on March 12, Kerouac was born in Lowell, Mass.

“In this silent five minutes of 16mm film, Jack Kerouac is considering Lower Manhattan. He’s on 3rd Avenue and 6th Street with Ginsberg, Lucien Carr and the Carr family, appearing to be partaking in the hippest meal of the day, brunch, in all his casual glory. While Ginsberg takes care of pleasantries and corrals all in attendance, he makes special check-ins with his notoriously moody friend, coming up to him here and there to speak quietly and closely. Maybe it’s my imagination, but Kerouac seems to be appeasing Ginsberg with this midday family outing. It seems he might feel uncomfortable…

The 1962 “Sedan” plowshares shot displaced 12 million tons of earth and created a crater 320 feet (98 m) deep and 1,280 feet (390 m) wide

“Project Plowshare was the overall United States program for the development of techniques to use nuclear explosives for peaceful construction purposes. The program was organized in June 1957 as part of the worldwide Atoms for Peace efforts. As part of the program, 31 nuclear warheads were detonated in 27 separate tests. A similar program was carried out in the Soviet Union under the name Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy. Successful demonstrations of non-combat uses for nuclear explosives include rock blasting, stimulation of tight gas, chemical element manufacture, unlocking some of the mysteries of the R-process of stellar nucleosynthesis and probing the composition of the Earth’s deep crust, creating reflection seismologyvibroseis data which has helped geologists and follow-on…