Sure it's naive! But that's the star in the soul.
by Chuck Taylor
Even the first time I read this book, smaller than in the City Lights Edition of the early 1970's, I wanted to believe that a revolution through love was possible. I so much wanted to believe, but had read Crane Brinton's On Revolution where he says revolutions usually fail unless the army is converted. Flower power, the chant of Ginsberg, and the flowers in the rifle barrels was a start, but then the murders at Kent State, the murders of the black panthers. Revolutionary Letters faces the issue straight on this country refuses even today to face--that we must radically change our ways because we are eating up the planet, only now it's happening much faster due to the development of China and India. The mixture of high idealism and practicality in these poems is pure genius. I wish we'd have listened. I wish we'd listen now.
03/28/2011
Originally posted at Exquisite Corpse - www.corpse.org
by Andrei Codrescu
Talk about timing! When the first edition of the Revolutionary Letters appeared in 1971, the U.S. was making its first world-wide bid for a merger between a collapsing economy and the Apocalypse. The war in Southeast Asia was spreading, half the young men in America were dying in the jungle, while the other half was ready to abandon the "american way of life" for good. And on top of all that, the old people who sent their kids to war or banished them from the house, couldn't sell enough vacuum cleaners to justify their existence or generate enough taxes for the war. Those of us who navigated the cosmos without a map, looked with exceedingly critical eyes at all the proffered maps, and there were plenty of them. The Revolutionary Letters couldn't have arrived at a more opportune time: in poem-form they were a guide for how to live, steeped in the anger and emotion we all felt. "not western civilisation, but civilization itself/ is the disease which is eating us" (no. 32) followed by ''turn off the power, turn on/ stars at night, put metal/ back in the earth, or at least not take it out/ anymore" (no. 34) and "take vitamin B along with amphetamines, try/ powdered guarana root.../it is an up/ used by Peruvian mountainfolk." All that must seem so new to the freshly panicked, was spelled out with passion in these poem-manifesto-wisdom works: the energy crisis, the need to renew the polis on love for human beings, the murderous greed of capital, the urgency of returning to sacred roots, and a whole new outlook on nature. The revised and new letters in this edition, continue filling in the radical philosophy the poet developed over a lifetime, a philosophy that was a guidebook in 1971 and it's a still better one in 2008. There is an increasing feeling for the cosmos, the result of magical and buddhist practice, but there is never a slackening of practical detail, or a loosening of the poet's grip on the gritty and very real world we are in. The Revolutionary Letters is one of the masterworks of late 20th century poetry that proves its mettle every time the world goes to hell, which it is doing now (again).
01/07/2009
