Far Out: Poems of the '60s

By Wings Press

Far Out: Poems of the '60s includes poems by over 80 poets who remember that tumultuous decade from a wide range of vantage points. This collection brings to life the experiences of people who vividly remember the effects of the assassinations of Medgar Evars, JFK, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, who lived through the period of the Vietnam War and the protests against it, and who experienced the rise of Second-Wave Feminism, the Civil Rights Act and the emergence of the Black Power Movement, as well as the Apollo 11 moon landing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781609405021

Book preview

Miss Tree by Jim Harter

Far Out: Poems of the ’60s © 2016

by Wings Press

All rights revert to the individual editors, authors, and artists.

Frontispiece: Miss Tree © 2003 by Jim Harter.

Used by permission of the artist.

ISBN: 978-1-60940-501-4 (Paperback)

E-books:

ePub: 978-1-60940-502-1

Mobipocket/Kindle: 978-1-60940-503-8

Library PDF: 978-1-60940-504-5

Wings Press

627 E. Guenther

San Antonio, Texas 78210

Phone/fax: [phone]

On-line catalogue and ordering:

www.wingspress.com

Wings Press books are distributed to the trade by Independent Publishers Group

www.ipgbook.com

Cataloging In Publication:

Far Out: Poems of the ’60s / edited by Wendy Barker and Dave Parsons.

      pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-60940-501-4 (paperback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-502-1 (epub ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-503-8 (kindle-mobipocket ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-504-5 (library pdf ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: American poetry--20th century. | Nineteen sixties--Poetry. | Counterculture--United States--Poetry. | United States--Social conditions--Poetry. | BISAC: POETRY / American / General.

LCC PS615 .F28 2016

811/.508--dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015047081

Except for fair use in reviews and/or scholarly considerations, no portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the author or the publisher.

CONTENTS

Preface

I. THE PRELUDE:

what’s that sound

II. DISMANTLING:

r-e-s-p-e-c-t

III. ACCELERATION:

the times a changing

IV. ENACTMENTS:

people get ready

V. WAR PHOTOGRAPHS:

there’s a man with a gun over there

VI. SEX (EDUCATION):

baby, light my fire

VII. DRUGS AND ROCK ’N’ ROLL:

dance beneath the diamond sky

VIII. AFTERMATH

the answer, blowing in the wind

About the Poets

Acknowledgments

For all the veterans:

from Selma to Vietnam to Kent State,

from Columbia to San Francisco State,

Greenwich Village to Haight-Ashbury …

PREFACE

Who first said If you remember the ’60s you weren’t there? Was it Grace Slick (according to Jerry Hopkins in Bangkok Babylon, 2006)? Or Paul Kantner (in The New Yorker in 1991)? Or Judy Collins, George Harrison, or even Robin Williams? But whoever is responsible for this flip, all-too-glib statement with its sly drug-related allusion could not have read the dazzling range of poems we’ve included here in Far Out: Poems of the ’60s.

In December 2009, driving to Houston’s Hobby Airport for Wendy’s flight back to San Antonio after she’d given a reading at Montgomery College, where Dave teaches, we conceived the plan for compiling this collection. Each of us had recently published poems dealing with our experiences during the explosive decade of the ’60s—Dave’s collection, Color of Mourning (Texas Review Press), included a hefty section of poems about his years serving in the U.S. Marine Corps and then working his way through college in Austin; and Wendy’s novel in prose poems, Nothing Between Us: The Berkeley Years (Del Sol Press), traced interracial experiences while teaching ninth-grade English in West Berkeley, a few blocks from the newly formed Black Panthers headquarters.

During the drive, Dave observed that whenever he read poems from his book about coming of age in Austin during the ’60s, listeners rushed up to him after the reading to give thanks for bringing a particular memory to mind or to relate their own experiences. Eyes on the road, hands on the wheel of his Nissan Xterra, Dave casually mentioned to Wendy that he’d been thinking about doing an anthology of Austin ’60s poems. Wendy said that she had also been receiving similar enthusiastic reactions to her ’60s poems, and not only from people old enough to remember those years. Then she burst out, Hey, what if we co-edited a collection of poems by poets nationwide about the ’60s? And Far Out: Poems of the ’60s was born.

Dave shared the fact that he had been profoundly moved by William Jay Smith’s much-lauded Cherokee Lottery, which includes poems in the voices of Indians, soldiers, bystanders, and politicians during the Trail of Tears, the forced removal from their homelands of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw Nations. What better way, Dave continued, to relate historical events than through vividly realized poems? Of course, we are in no way comparing the realities of most lives in the U.S. during the 1960s to the displacement of tens of thousands during the horrendous, shameful Trail of Tears. Naturally our focus would be entirely different, incorporating poems written from the point of view of those who were alive in the ’60s, writing of their own distinctive experiences.

And as we began to discuss our goals for the book, we immediately agreed that we were interested in poems that expressed specific personal histories or reflections on the period between 1958 or 1959 and 1971 or 1972—from the years leading up to the ones we associate most with the ’60s to the years immediately following. We also knew from the outset we did not want to include poems simply railing in general terms about ideology, the war, drugs, feminism, music, or civil rights. And this would not be a book of poetry written during the ’60s, but mainly of poetry looking back—of, oh yes, of people actually remembering the ’60s!

Of course, we’ve made a couple of exceptions (to prove the rule?). We couldn’t omit, for instance, Diane Wakoski’s furious, iconic early feminist poems Filling the Boxes of Joseph Cornell from Inside the Blood Factory (1968) or Love Letter Postmarked Von Beethoven from The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems (1972). We also believed it essential to include two of Rita Dove’s elegant, powerful poems from On the Bus With Rosa Parks (W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), even though it was in 1955 that Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat in the white section of a Montgomery, Alabama bus. But since historians call that incident the birth of the American Civil Rights Movement, which burgeoned during the ’60s, we simply couldn’t omit Rosa and The Enactment.

But why a book about the decade of the ’60s? Why not the ’50s, or the ’70s? And why divide time by decades at all? Every era strikes us as having its own particular zeitgeist, though some periods affect us afterward more than others, which, we would argue, is the case with the ’60s. The assassinations of Medgar Evers (1963), John F. Kennedy (1963), Malcolm X (1965), Martin Luther King (1968), and Robert Kennedy (1968) sent shock waves into all corners of the United States. Many have argued that the assassination of JFK signaled the end of innocence in our country. In 1966, on the University of Texas campus in Austin, Charles Whitman shot forty-three people, killing thirteen of them in a massacre that introduced our country to the idea of mass murder in a public space and spurred the creation of SWAT teams across the nation.

The U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, at the outset viewed as necessary to prevent a Communist take-over of South Vietnam, increased during the ’60s, with troop levels tripling in 1961 and 1962 and rising even further in 1964 and 1965. After the death of JFK and the Gulf of Tonkin incident of 1964, opposition to the war escalated. The growing resistance, especially among the young, pitted generations, even family members, against each other, and ultimately resulted in an end to the draft and the conversion of our country’s military into an all-volunteer force.

Student protests across the country at the University of California at Berkeley, Jackson State University, Columbia University, and Kent State University led to massive violence. During the ’60s, those under thirty—who for the first time in U.S. history outnumbered their elders—were challenging older folks in unprecedented ways, as the youthful counterculture became a significant, volatile force. Beyond our own borders, social turmoil, often accompanied by violence and even massacres, occurred in France, Mexico, Brazil, Poland, Spain, China, Germany, and Czechoslovakia.

Other hierarchies in our nation were shaken up by the rise of Second-Wave Feminism and the Civil Rights Movement. In 1963, Betty Friedan’s bestselling The Feminine Mystique was published and the Equal Pay Act was passed. NOW (the National Organization for Women) was formed in 1966. FDA approval of the Pill in 1960 led to 12.5 million women using oral contraceptives by 1967. Martin Luther King gave his I Have a Dream speech before hundreds of thousands in Washington, D.C. in 1963; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 authorized federal action against segregation in public accommodations, public facilities, and employment; the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed after large demonstrations in Selma, Alabama; and the Fair Housing Act, prohibiting discrimination by race in housing, was passed in 1968, by which time many Black radicals were pushing not for peaceful integration, but for Black Power.

The Chicano Movement, a continuation of the 1940s Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, was inspired not only by the African-American Civil Rights Movement but also by the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican nationalist group. El movimiento brought about numerous changes in education, politics, the criminal justice system, art, the church, health, employment, and housing—and gave birth to Chicano literature. The United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, formed in 1962 by Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and Philip Vera Cruz, used non-violent tactics such as boycotts, marches, and strikes to improve working conditions. The organization’s name was changed to the United Farm Workers Union in 1972. Rodolfo Corky Gonzáles’ poem Yo Soy Joaquin helped define the meaning of being a Chicano; the epic poem was adapted into a film in 1969 by Luis Valdez, who himself had founded El Teatro Campesino. In 1968, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) was founded.

Also inspired by the African-American Civil Rights movement were Native Americans. In 1964, a group of Sioux occupied San Francisco Bay’s Alcatraz Island for four hours; between 1969 and 1971, as many as four hundred Native Americans from numerous tribes occupied the island, which brought international attention to the situation of indigenous peoples in the U.S. and set a precedent for Indian activism, as well as leading to the passage of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975. The American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded in Minneapolis in 1968, and worked closely with the Rainbow Coalition to protest human rights violations.

The Stonewall riots of 1969—prompted by undercover police harassment and suppressed by the New York City Police riot squad—led to large demonstrations by gays and lesbians in Greenwich Village, and eventually to the first Gay Pride marches, the founding of gay rights organizations, and the work toward establishing LGBT rights in the United States.

Previously held boundaries of all sorts were dissolved, including the one between Earth and the heavens. In 1961 President Kennedy proclaimed before Congress his goal of landing a man on the moon within the decade. In 1962, John Glenn was the first American to orbit Earth; in 1969, Neil Armstrong of the Apollo 11 crew walked on the moon. And back on Earth, the modern environmental movement began in the ’60s—Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published in 1962, the Clean Air Act was passed in 1963, the first Whole Earth Catalog appeared in 1968, and Friends of the Earth was founded in 1969.

All these changes were mind-blowing, to use the lingo of the times. No wonder Bob Dylan’s song from 1964 might be the best anthem of all for this period, for the times were radically a changin’. As Morris Dickstein puts it in his Gates Of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (W. W. Norton & Company, 1977), during these years the moral lives of Americans went through a sea change.

Not surprisingly, popular music expresses much of the ’60s’ zeitgeist. Identification with particular musical groups or singers can also say much about where a person was—or who that person was—during the ’60s. When the two of us, for instance, began listing memorable lyrics in an attempt to provide subtitles for the separate sections of this anthology, how our choices differed! Dave was all Bob Dylan, Buddy Holly, and The Rolling Stones; Wendy: Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, the Mamas and the Papas. Though of course we merged on the Beatles, on Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Simon and Garfunkel, and The New Christy Minstrels. But a list of the era’s most beloved musicians and musical groups could go on forever, including Janis Joplin, The Supremes, Miles Davis, Pete Seeger, Dionne Warwick, Carlos Santana, Linda Ronstadt, Marvin Gaye, Blood, Sweat, and Tears, and anything out of Motown.

Obviously, this is not the place to list all the music, the cultural and political struggles and events, all the happenings from the ’60s—if we did, there would be no room for the richly varied poems included here. When we put out our invitations for poets to submit work for our collection, we were not prepared for the avalanche of poems we received, from writers who were born long before the Baby Boom—the population explosion that began after WWII in the mid-1940s—and even from writers who were still children in the ’60s. But of course, the majority of our contributors were in their teens or twenties during the decade. We only wish we could have included more of the many fine poems offered to us!

We extend our gratitude to Sonya Barrera Eddy, whose organizational help at the initial stages of our project made it possible for us to continue. And without the efficient, superb assistance of Stephanie Schoellman throughout, the book would never have been born. We cannot thank her enough. We are grateful to Bryce Milligan of Wings Press for his enthusiastic, dedicated commitment. We are also grateful to our spouses for their support, to Wendy’s husband Steven G. Kellman for assiduous fact-checking and copy-editing and to Dave’s wife Nancy Parsons for her reliable memory and artist’s eye. And, of course, we owe gigantic thanks to all the writers whose poems contribute to the multitextured strands that comprise Far Out: Poems of the ’60s, which we hope serves to portray the rich weave, the variegated textures of this kaleidoscopic era. Those Were the Days, My Friend, sang the Limelighters in the early 1960s and Mary Hopkin a bit later, in 1968. May this collection vividly recall—and validate—the days of this decade for those who lived through them and bring them to life for those too young to have been there with us.

—Wendy Barker and Dave Parsons

I.

THE PRELUDE

what’s that sound

Chana Bloch

Chez Pierre, 1961

The skirt’s all wrong and the shoes

pinch: thin straps

and little pointed heels. Borrowed clothing.

She crosses her legs under the table.

Uncrosses them.

Heat rises heavy, a raincloud

gathering moisture.

His hand comes down over hers.

Look at those couples: their lives

are already a downpour.

She can’t imagine me yet

though she’s starting that puzzled

tuck around the mouth,

the one I’m just getting used to.

He draws little Os on her palm

with a fingernail, laughing, taking

his time. I still

carry her with me, unfinished,

into the hazard

of other people’s hands,

I live with her choices.