Frank Beacham's Journal

Václav Havel, Czech playwright, essayist, poet, philosopher, dissident and statesman, was born 86 years ago today

Václav Havel, Czech playwright, essayist, poet, philosopher, dissident and statesman, was born 86 years ago today.

From 1989 to 1993, Havel served as the first democratically elected president of Czechoslovakia in 41 years. He then served as the first president of the Czech Republic (1993–2003) after the Czech-Slovak split.

Within Czech literature, he is known for his plays, essays and memoirs. His educational opportunities limited by his bourgeois background, Havel first rose to prominence within the Prague theater world as a playwright.

Havel used the absurdist style in works such as The Garden Party and The Memorandum to critique communism.

After participating in Prague Spring and being blacklisted after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, he became more politically active and helped found several dissident initiatives such as Charter 77 and the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted.

His political activities brought him under the surveillance of the secret police and he spent multiple stints in prison — the longest, for nearly four years, between 1979 and 1983.

Havel's Civic Forum party played a major role in the Velvet Revolution that toppled communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989. He assumed the presidency shortly thereafter, and was reelected in a landslide the following year and after Slovak independence in 1993.

Havel was instrumental in dismantling the Warsaw Pact and expanding NATO membership eastward. Many of his stances and policies, such as his opposition to Slovak independence, condemnation of the Czechoslovak treatment of Sudeten Germans after World War II and granting of general amnesty to all those imprisoned under communism, were very controversial domestically.

As such, Havel continually enjoyed greater popularity abroad than at home.

Havel continued his life as a public intellectual after his presidency, launching several initiatives including the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, the VIZE 97 Foundation and the Forum 2000 annual conference.

Havel's political philosophy was one of anti-consumerism, humanitarianism, environmentalism, civil activism and direct democracy. He supported the Czech Green Party from 2004 until his death.

He received numerous accolades during his lifetime including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Gandhi Peace Prize, the Philadelphia Liberty Medal, the Order of Canada, the Four Freedoms Award, the Ambassador of Conscience Award and the Hanno R. Ellenbogen Citizenship Award.

He is considered, by some, one of the most important intellectuals of the 20th century.

Havel died on the morning of December 18, 2011 at age 75.

Shel Silverstein, poet, singer-songwriter, cartoonist, screenwriter and author of children's books, was born 92 years ago today

Shel Silverstein, circa 1968

Photo by Alice Ochs

Shel Silverstein, poet, singer-songwriter, cartoonist, screenwriter and author of children's books, was born 92 years ago today.

Silverstein grew up in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago and attended Roosevelt High School. Later, he went the University of Illinois before he was expelled. He then attended Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and Roosevelt University for three years, until 1953 when he was drafted into the Army. He served in Japan and Korea.

Silverstein began drawing at age seven by tracing the works of Al Capp. "When I was a kid — 12 to 14, around there — I would much rather have been a good baseball player or a hit with the girls, but I couldn't play ball. I couldn't dance. Luckily, the girls didn't want me. Not much I could do about that. So I started to draw and to write. I was also lucky that I didn't have anybody to copy, be impressed by,” he told Publisher’s Weekly.

“I had developed my own style. I was creating before I knew there was a Thurber, a Benchley, a Price and a Steinberg. I never saw their work till I was around 30. By the time I got to where I was attracting girls, I was already into work, and it was more important to me. Not that I wouldn't rather make love, but the work has become a habit."

After returning to Chicago, Silverstein began submitting cartoons to magazines while also selling hot dogs at Chicago ballparks. His cartoons began appearing in Look, Sports Illustrated and This Week.

In 1957, Silverstein became one of the leading cartoonists in Playboy, which sent him around the world to create an illustrated travel journal with reports from far-flung locales. During the 1950s and 1960s, he produced 23 installments called "Shel Silverstein Visits..." as a feature for Playboy.

Employing a sketchbook format with typewriter-styled captions, he documented his own experiences at such locations as a New Jersey nudist colony, the Chicago White Sox training camp, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, Fire Island, Mexico, London, Paris, Spain and Africa.

Silverstein's passion for music was clear early on as he studied briefly at Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University. His musical output included a large catalog of songs — a number of which were hits for other artists, most notably the rock group, Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show.

He wrote Tompall Glaser's highest-charting solo single "Put Another Log on the Fire," "One's on the Way" (a hit for Loretta Lynn) and "25 Minutes to Go," sung by Johnny Cash, about a man on Death Row with each line counting down one minute closer.

Silverstein also wrote one of Johnny Cash's best known hits, "A Boy Named Sue." Other songs co-written by Silverstein include "the Taker" by Waylon Jennings and "On Susan’s Floor” by Gordon Lightfoot and a sequel to "A Boy Named Sue" called: "Father of a Boy Named Sue" which is less known, but he performed the song on television on The Johnny Cash Show.

He also penned a song entitled "F*** 'em" which is lesser known and contained a reference to "f*** children."

Silverstein styled himself as Uncle Shelby in some works. Translated into more than 30 languages, his books have sold over 20 million copies.

On May 10, 1999, Silverstein died at age 68 of a massive heart attack in Key West, Florida.

Leonard Cohen was born 88 years ago today

Leonard Cohen in concert at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, May 17, 2009

Photo by Frank Beacham

Leonard Cohen was born 88 years ago today.

A Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, poet and novelist, Cohen often explored religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal relationships.

The critic Bruce Eder wrote an assessment of Cohen's overall career in popular music, writing, "[Cohen is] one of the most fascinating and enigmatic. . . singer/songwriters of the late '60s. . . [and] has retained an audience across four decades of music-making. . . Second only to Bob Dylan (and perhaps Paul Simon) [in terms of influence], he commands the attention of critics and younger musicians more firmly than any other musical figure from the 1960s who is still working at the outset of the 21st century."

The Academy of American Poets has commented more broadly on Cohen's overall career in the arts, including his work as a poet, novelist and songwriter, stating that "[Cohen's] successful blending of poetry, fiction, and music is made most clear in Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs, published in 1993, which gathered more than two hundred of Cohen's poems . . . several novel excerpts, and almost sixty song lyrics. . .While it may seem to some that Leonard Cohen departed from the literary in pursuit of the musical, his fans continue to embrace him as a Renaissance man who straddles the elusive artistic borderlines."

Cohen was born in Westmount, an English-speaking area of Montreal, Quebec, into a middle-class Jewish family. His mother, Marsha (Masha) Klonitsky, was the daughter of a Talmudic writer, Rabbi Solomon Klonitsky-Kline of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry.

His paternal grandfather, whose family had emigrated from Poland, was Lyon Cohen, founding president of the Canadian Jewish Congress. His father, Nathan Cohen, who owned a substantial clothing store, died when Cohen was nine years old.

On the topic of his family, Cohen said "I had a very Messianic childhood." He told Richard Goldstein in 1967: "I was told I was a descendant of Aaron, the high priest."

Cohen attended Roslyn Elementary School and, from 1948, Westmount High School, where he was involved with the student council and studied music and poetry. He became especially interested in the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca. As a teenager, he learned to play the guitar, and formed a country-folk group called The Buckskin Boys.

Although he initially played a regular acoustic guitar, he soon switched to playing a classical guitar after meeting a young Spanish flamenco guitar player who taught him "a few chords and some flamenco." Cohen frequented Saint-Laurent Boulevard where he went for fun, and ate at places such as the Main Deli Steak House.

According to journalist David Sax, the Main Deli was where Cohen and one of his cousins would go to "...watch the gangsters, pimps and wrestlers dance around the night."

Cohen also enjoyed visiting the previously raucous bars of Old Montreal as well as Saint Joseph's Oratory, which had the closest restaurant near Westmount where he and his friend, Mort Rosengarten, could go for coffee and a smoke. After moving out of Westmount, Cohen purchased a place in the previous working-class neighborhood of Montreal's Little Portugal on Saint-Laurent Boulevard where he read his poetry at various surrounding clubs.

It is also during his time there in the small neighborhood that he wrote the lyrics to what would become some of his most famous songs.

In 1951, Cohen enrolled at McGill University, where he became president of the McGill Debating Union and won the Chester MacNaghten Literary Competition for the poems "Sparrows" and "Thoughts of a Landsman."

Cohen published his first poems in March, 1954 in the magazine CIV/n. The issue also included poems by Cohen's poet-professors (who were also on the editorial board), Irving Layton and Louis Dudek. Cohen graduated from McGill the following year with a B.A. degree.

His literary influences during this time included William Butler Yeats, Irving Layton (who taught political science at McGill and became both Cohen's mentor and friend), Walt Whitman, Federico Garcia Lorca and Henry Miller.

His first published book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956), was published by Dudek as the first book in the McGill Poetry Series the year after Cohen's graduation. The book contained "poems written largely when Cohen was between the ages of fifteen and twenty." Cohen dedicated the book to his late father. The well-known Canadian literary critic, Northrop Frye, wrote a review of the book in which he gave Cohen "restrained praise."

After completing his undergraduate degree, Cohen spent a term in McGill's law school and then a year (1956–1957) at the School of General Studies at Columbia University. Cohen described his graduate school experience as "passion without flesh, love without climax."

Consequently, Cohen left New York and returned to Montreal in 1957, working various odd jobs and focusing on the writing of fiction and poetry, including the poems for his next book, The Spice-Box of Earth (1961), which was the first book that Cohen published through the Canadian publishing company, McClelland & Stewart.

Fortunately for Cohen, his father's will provided him with a modest trust income, sufficient to allow him to pursue his literary ambitions for the time, and The Spice-Box of Earth was successful in helping to expand the audience for Cohen's poetry, helping him reach out to the poetry scene in Canada, outside the confines of McGill University. The book also helped Cohen gain critical recognition as an important new voice in Canadian poetry.

One of Cohen's biographers, Ira Nadel, stated that "reaction to the finished book was enthusiastic and admiring...the critic Robert Weaver found it powerful and declared that Cohen was 'probably the best young poet in English Canada right now.'"

Cohen continued to write poetry and fiction throughout much of the 1960s and preferred to live in quasi-reclusive circumstances after he bought a house on Hydra, a Greek island in the Saronic Gulf. While living and writing on Hydra, Cohen published the poetry collection Flowers for Hitler (1964), and the novels, The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966).

His novel, The Favourite Game, was an autobiographical bildungsroman about a young man who discovers his identity through writing. Beautiful Losers received a good deal of attention from the Canadian press and stirred up controversy because of a number of sexually graphic passages.

In 1966, Cohen also published, Parasites of Heaven, a book of poems. Both Beautiful Losers and Parasites of Heaven received mixed reviews and sold few copies. Subsequently, Cohen published less, with major gaps, concentrating more on recording songs.

In 1978, he published his first book of poetry in many years, Death of a Lady's Man (not to be confused with the album he released the previous year with the similar title, Death of a Ladies' Man).

It was not until 1984 that Cohen published his next book of poems, Book of Mercy, which won him the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award for Poetry. The book contains 50 prose-poems, influenced by the Hebrew Bible and Zen writings. Cohen himself referred to the pieces as "prayers.”

In 1993, Cohen published Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs, and in 2006, after 10 years of delays, additions and rewritings, Book of Longing. The Book of Longing is dedicated to the poet, Irving Layton.

Also, during the late 1990s and 2000s, many of Cohen's new poems and lyrics were first published on the fan website, The Leonard Cohen Files, including the original version of the poem "A Thousand Kisses Deep" (which Cohen later adapted for a song).

Cohen's writing process, as he told an interviewer in 1998, is "like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I'm stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it's delicious and it's horrible and I'm in it and it's not very graceful and it's very awkward and it's very painful and yet there's something inevitable about it."

In 1967, disappointed with his lack of financial success as a writer, Cohen moved to the United States to pursue a career as a folk music singer-songwriter. During the 1960s, he was a fringe figure in Andy Warhol's "Factory" crowd. Warhol speculated that Cohen had spent time listening to Nico in clubs and that this had influenced his musical style.

His song, "Suzanne," became a hit for Judy Collins and was for many years his most covered song. After performing at a few folk festivals, he came to the attention of Columbia Records representative, John H. Hammond, who signed Cohen to a record deal.

Cohen's first album was Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967). Although Hammond was originally supposed to produce the record, he was ill and was replaced by the producer, John Simon. Simon and Cohen clashed over instrumentation and mixing. Cohen wanted the album to have a spare sound, while Simon felt the songs could benefit from arrangements that included strings and horns.

According to biographer, Ira Nadel, although Cohen was able to make changes to the mix, some of Simon's additions "couldn't be removed from the four-track master tape." Nevertheless, the album became a cult favorite in the U.S., as well as in the UK, where it spent over a year on the album charts.

Several of the songs on that first album were covered by other popular folk artists, including James Taylor and Judy Collins. Cohen followed up that first album with Songs from a Room (1969) (featuring the often-recorded "Bird on the Wire") and Songs of Love and Hate (1971).

Both of these albums were produced in Nashville by Bob Johnston, who helped Cohen achieve the sparer sound that he'd been after on his first album. Johnston also joined Cohen on two subsequent live tours, playing organ and piano. In 1970, Cohen toured for the first time, with dates in the United States, Canada and Europe, and appeared at the Isle of Wight Festival.

He toured again in Europe and Israel in 1972 with some of the same band-mates, including Charlie Daniels and his producer, Bob Johnston. The band was nicknamed "The Army." Both tours were represented on the Live Songs LP. Leonard Cohen Live at the Isle of Wight 1970 was released in 2009.

The 1972 tour was also filmed by Tony Palmer under the title, Bird on a Wire, which was shown re-cut under Cohen's guidance in 1974. It was only released to the public in 2010, reconstructed according to Palmer's original version.

In 1971, the film director, Robert Altman, featured "The Stranger Song," "Winter Lady" and "Sisters of Mercy" (all from Cohen's debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen) on the soundtrack for his Western film, McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

In 1976, Cohen embarked on a new major European tour with a new band and changes in his sound and arrangements, again, in support of his The Best of Leonard Cohen release (in Europe retitled as Greatest Hits).

Laura Branigan was one of his back-up singers during the tour, and the set-list included the unreleased songs "Everybody's Child" (a.k.a. "Blessed Is the Memory") and "Storeroom" (both released as bonus tracks to 2007 reissue of Songs of Leonard Cohen), and the new song "Do I Have to Dance All Night?" (which was released as a single with the song, "The Butcher," in a single available in Europe only).

From April to July, Cohen gave 55 shows, including his first appearance at the famous Montreux Jazz Festival. After the European tour of 1976, Cohen again attempted a new change in his style and arrangements. His new 1977 record, Death of a Ladies' Man (one year later, in 1978, was released.

Cohen also released a volume of poetry with the coyly revised title, Death of a Lady's Man), was co-written and produced by Phil Spector, known as the inventor of the "Wall of Sound" technique, which backs up pop music with many layers of instrumentation, an approach very different from Cohen's usually minimalist instrumentation.

The recording of the album was fraught with difficulty — Spector reportedly mixed the album in secret studio sessions, and Cohen said Spector once threatened him with a crossbow. Cohen thought the end result "grotesque," but also "semi-virtuous."

The record was released by Spector's label, Warner, and was returned to Columbia's Cohen catalog in the late 1980s. Cohen did not take part in the album's promotion, but in his tours of 1979, 1980 and 1985, he performed two songs from the album, "Memories" and "Iodine." However, Cohen chose not to include any of the album's songs on his later compilations, More Best of Leonard Cohen and The Essential Leonard Cohen.

"Hallelujah" was first released on Cohen's studio album Various Positions in 1984. The song had limited initial success, but found greater popularity through a 1991 cover by John Cale which formed the basis for a later cover by Jeff Buckley. "Hallelujah" has been performed by almost 200 artists in various languages.

The use of the album track, "Everybody Knows," from I'm Your Man in the 1990 film, Pump Up the Volume, helped expose Cohen's music to a younger audience. The song also featured prominently in fellow Canadian Atom Egoyan's 1994 film, Exotica.

In 1992, Cohen released The Future, which urges (often in terms of biblical prophecy) perseverance, reformation and hope in the face of grim prospects. Three tracks from the album – "Waiting for the Miracle," "The Future" and "Anthem" – were featured in the movie, Natural Born Killers, which also promoted Cohen's work to a new generation of U.S. listeners.

In 1994, Cohen retreated to the Mt. Baldy Zen Center near Los Angeles, beginning what became five years of seclusion at the center. In 1996, Cohen was ordained as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk and took the Dharma name Jikan, meaning "silence." He served as personal assistant to Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi.

Although around 2000 there was a public impression that Cohen would not resume recording or publishing, he returned to Los Angeles in May, 1999. But there was trouble ahead.

Sylvie Simmons explains, in her 2012 biography on Cohen that Kelley Lynch, Cohen's longtime manager, "took care of Leonard's business affairs … [and was] not simply his manager but a close friend, almost part of the family."

However, Simmons notes that in late 2004, Cohen's daughter Lorca began to suspect Lynch of financial impropriety, and when Cohen checked his bank accounts, he noticed that he had unknowingly paid a credit card bill of Lynch's for $75,000 and also found that most of the money in his accounts was gone (including money from his retirement accounts and charitable trust funds).

Cohen would discover that this theft had actually begun as early as 1996 when Lynch started selling Cohen's music publishing rights despite the fact that Cohen had no financial incentive to do so at the time.

On October 8, 2005, Cohen sued Kelley Lynch, alleging that she had misappropriated over $5 million from Cohen's retirement fund leaving only $150,000. Cohen was sued in turn by other former business associates. These events placed him in the public spotlight, including a cover feature on him with the headline, "Devastated!," in Canada's Maclean's magazine.

In March, 2006, Cohen won a civil suit and was awarded $9 million by a Los Angeles County superior court. Lynch, however, ignored the suit and did not respond to a subpoena issued for her financial records. As a result it has been widely reported that Cohen never was able to collect the awarded amount.

In 2007, U.S. District Judge Lewis T. Babcock dismissed a claim by Cohen for more than $4.5 million against Colorado investment firm Agile Group, and in 2008 he dismissed a defamation suit that Agile Group filed against Cohen. Cohen has been under new management since April, 2005.

On March 1, 2012, Kelley Lynch was arrested in Los Angeles for violating a permanent protective order that forbade her from contacting Cohen, which she had ignored repeatedly. On April 13, the jury found her guilty on all charges. On April 18, she was sentenced to eighteen months in prison and five years probation.

Cohen told that court, "It gives me no pleasure to see my onetime friend shackled to a chair in a court of law, her considerable gifts bent to the services of darkness, deceit and revenge. It is my prayer that Ms. Lynch will take refuge in the wisdom of her religion, that a spirit of understanding will convert her heart from hatred to remorse, from anger to kindness, from the deadly intoxication of revenge to the lowly practices of self-reform."

To replenish his bank accounts, Cohen went back on tour — his first in 15 years. It began on May 11, 2008 in Fredericton, New Brunswick to wide critical acclaim, and was extended until Winter of 2010. The schedule of the first leg in Summer of 2008 encompassed Canada and Europe, including performances at The Big Chill, the Montreal Jazz Festival and on the Pyramid Stage at the 2008 Glastonbury Festival.

Cohen died on November 7, 2016, at the age of 82 at his home in Los Angeles. Cancer was a contributing cause. According to his manager, Cohen's death was the result of a fall at his home on the night of November 7, and he subsequently died in his sleep. His death was announced on November 10.

Here, Leonard Cohen performs “Tower of Song”

Leonard Cohen meets Allen Ginsberg after a concert of Ginsberg’s poetry at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles, 1988

Photo by Frank Beacham

Leonard Cohen on Janis Joplin at the Chelsea Hotel

Leonard Cohen performs "Closing Time," 1992

Dorothy Parker was born 129 years ago today

Parker works at her typewriter in 1941

Dorothy Parker was born 129 years ago today.

Parker was an American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist, best known for her wit, wisecracks and eye for 20th Century urban foibles.

From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, Parker rose to acclaim — both for her literary output in such venues as The New Yorker and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting.

Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed as her involvement in left wing politics led to a place on the Hollywood blacklist. Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a "wisecracker." Nevertheless, her literary output and reputation for her sharp wit have endured.

Also known as Dot or Dottie, Parker was born Dorothy Rothschild to Jacob Henry and Eliza Annie Rothschild at 732 Ocean Avenue in Long Branch, New Jersey, where her parents had a summer beach cottage.

Parker wrote in her essay, "My Hometown," that her parents got her back to their Manhattan apartment shortly after Labor Day so she could be called a true New Yorker.

She grew up on the Upper West Side and attended Roman Catholic elementary school at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament on West 79th Street with sister Helen, despite having a Jewish father and Protestant stepmother. Parker once joked that she was asked to leave following her characterization of the Immaculate Conception as "spontaneous combustion."

Parker sold her first poem to Vanity Fair magazine in 1914 and, some months later, was hired as an editorial assistant for another Condé Nast magazine, Vogue. She moved to Vanity Fair as a staff writer after two years at Vogue.

In 1917, she met and married a Wall Street stockbroker, Edwin Pond Parker II, but they were separated by his army service in World War I. She had ambivalent feelings about her Jewish heritage given the strong antisemitism of that era and joked that she married to escape her name.

Her career took off while she was writing theatre criticism for Vanity Fair, which she began to do in 1918 as a stand-in for the vacationing P. G. Wodehouse. At the magazine, she met Robert Benchley, who became a close friend, and Robert E. Sherwood. The trio began lunching at the Algonquin Hotel on a near-daily basis and became founding members of the Algonquin Round Table.

The Round Table numbered among its members the newspaper columnists Franklin Pierce Adams and Alexander Woollcott. Through their re-printing of her lunchtime remarks and short verses, particularly in Adams' column, "The Conning Tower,” Dorothy began developing a national reputation as a wit.

One of her most famous comments was made when the group was informed that former president Calvin Coolidge had died. Parker remarked, "How could they tell?" Parker's caustic wit as a critic initially proved popular, but she was eventually terminated by Vanity Fair in 1920 after her criticisms began to offend powerful producers too often.

In solidarity, both Benchley and Sherwood resigned in protest. When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, Parker and Benchley were part of a "board of editors" established by Ross to allay concerns of his investors.

Parker's first piece for the magazine appeared in its second issue. Parker became famous for her short, viciously humorous poems, many about the perceived ludicrousness of her many (largely unsuccessful) romantic affairs and others wistfully considering the appeal of suicide. The next 15 years were Parker's greatest period of productivity and success.

In the 1920s alone, she published some 300 poems and free verses in Vanity Fair, Vogue, "The Conning Tower" and The New Yorker as well as Life, McCall's and The New Republic.

Parker died on June 7, 1967 of a heart attack at the age of 73.

In her will, she bequeathed her estate to the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. foundation. Following King's death, her estate was passed on to the NAACP. Her executor, Lillian Hellman, bitterly but unsuccessfully contested this disposition. Her ashes remained unclaimed in various places, including her attorney Paul O'Dwyer's filing cabinet, for approximately 17 years.

In 1988, the NAACP claimed Parker's remains and designed a memorial garden for them outside their Baltimore headquarters. The plaque reads:

Here lie the ashes of Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) humorist, writer, critic. Defender of human and civil rights.

For her epitaph she suggested, “Excuse my dust”

Ed Sanders — poet, singer, social activist, environmentalist, author, publisher and longtime member of the band, The Fugs — is 83 years old today

Ed Sanders — poet, singer, social activist, environmentalist, author, publisher and longtime member of the band, The Fugs — is 83 years old today.

Born in Kansas City, Sanders dropped out of the University of Missouri in 1958 and hitchhiked to New York City's Greenwich Village to attend New York University. He graduated in 1964 with a degree in Greek.

Sanders wrote his first notable poem, "Poem from Jail," on toilet paper in his cell after being jailed for protesting the launch of nuclear submarines armed with nuclear missiles in 1961.

In 1962, he founded the avant-garde journal, Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts.

Sanders opened the Peace Eye Bookstore at 383 East Tenth Street in what was then the Lower East Side. The store became a gathering place for bohemians, writers and radicals. On January 1, 1966, police raided Peace Eye Bookstore and charged Sanders with obscenity, charges he fended off with the aid of the ACLU.

Notoriety generated by the case led to his appearance on the February 17, 1967 cover of Life Magazine, which proclaimed him "a leader of New York's Other Culture.”

In late 1964, Sanders founded The Fugs with Tuli Kupferberg. The band broke up in 1969 and reformed in 1984. On October 21, 1967, Sanders helped The Fugs and the San Francisco Diggers in an attempt to "exorcise" the Pentagon.

In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

In 1971, Sanders wrote The Family, a profile of the events leading up to the Tate-LaBianca murders. He attended the Manson group's murder trial, and spent time at their residence at the Spahn Movie Ranch. There have been two updated editions of The Family, the most recent in 2002.

The Process Church of the Final Judgement sued Sanders's U.S. publisher for defamation over a chapter linking them with Manson's activities. The case was settled by the publisher, who removed the disputed chapter from future editions.

The Process Church then sued Sanders's British publisher, but lost the suit and were forced to pay the defendant's legal fees. Sanders is the founder of the Investigative Poetry movement.

His 1976 manifesto, Investigative Poetry, published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books, had an impact on investigative writing and poetry during the ensuing decades. In the 1990s, Sanders began utilizing the principles of Investigative Poetry to create a series of book-length poems on literary figures and American History.

Among these works are Chekhov, 1968: A History in Verse and The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg. In 1998, Sanders began work on a nine-volume America, A History in Verse. The first five volumes, tracing the history of the 20th Century, were published in a CD format with over 2,000 pages in length.

Sanders received a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry in 1983, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry in 1987. His, Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century, Selected Poems 1961–1985, won an American Book Award in 1988.

In 1997, he received a Writers Community residency sponsored by the YMCA National Writer's Voice through the Lila Wallace Readers Digest Fund. The same year he was also awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. In 2000 and 2003, he was Writer-in-Residence at the New York State Writers Institute in Albany, New York.

Sanders lives in Woodstock, New York, with his wife of over 50 years, Miriam R. Sanders, the writer and painter. He publishes the online Woodstock Journal.

He also invents musical instruments, including the Talking Tie, the microtonal Microlyre and the Lisa Lyre, a musical contraption involving light-activated switches and a reproduction of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa.

Here is Sanders in a reading for his book, “Fug You”

Charles Bukowski, poet, was born 102 years ago today

Charles Bukowski was born 102 years ago today.

A German-born American poet, novelist and short story writer, Bukowski’s writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles.

It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books. In 1986, Time Magazine called Bukowski a "laureate of American lowlife.”

Regarding Bukowski's enduring popular appeal, Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, "the secret of Bukowski’s appeal. . . [is that] he combines the confessional poet’s promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero."

Bukowski’s family settled in South Central Los Angeles in 1930, the city where Charles Bukowski's father and grandfather had previously worked and lived. In the '30s, the poet's father was often unemployed. In his early teens, young Charles had an epiphany when he was introduced to alcohol by a friend.

"This [alcohol] is going to help me for a very long time," he later wrote, describing the genesis of his chronic alcoholism. As he saw it, alcohol was a method he could utilize to come to more amicable terms with his own life.

Bukowski died of leukemia on March 9, 1994, in San Pedro, California at age 73, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp. His gravestone reads: "Don't Try,” a phrase which Bukowski uses in one of his poems, advising aspiring writers and poets about inspiration and creativity.

Bukowski explained the phrase in a 1963 letter to John William Corrington:

"Somebody at one of these places [...] asked me: 'What do you do? How do you write, create?' You don't, I told them. You don't try. That's very important: 'not' to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks you make a pet out of it."

Here is “Charles Bukowski: The Wicked Life of America's Most Infamous Poet”

Diane Di Prima, female Beat Generation poet, was born 88 years ago today

Diane Di Prima with Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) at the Cedar Tavern, New York City

Photo by Fred W. McDarrah

Diane Di Prima, female Beat Generation poet, was born 88 years ago today.

Born in Brooklyn, Di Prima attended Hunter College High School and Swarthmore College before dropping out to be a poet in Manhattan. Her official online biography notes that she is "a second generation American of Italian descent" and that “her maternal grandfather, Domenico Mallozzi, was an active anarchist and associate of Carlo Tresca and Emma Goldman."

Di Prima began writing as a child and by the age of 19 was corresponding with Ezra Pound and Kenneth Patchen. Her first book of poetry, This Kind of Bird Flies Backward, was published in 1958 by Hettie and LeRoi Jones' Totem Press.

Di Prima spent the late 1950s and early 1960s in Manhattan, where she participated in the emerging Beat movement. She spent some time in California at Stinson Beach and Topanga Canyon, returned to New York City and eventually moved to San Francisco permanently.

Di Prima was a bridge figure between the Beat movement and the later hippies, as well as between East Coast and West Coast artists. She edited The Floating Bear with Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and was co-founder of the New York Poets Theatre and founder of the Poets Press.

In 1966, she spent some time at Millbrook with Timothy Leary's psychedelic community and printed the first two editions of "Psychodelic Prayers" by Leary in 1966. In 1969, she wrote a fictionalized, erotic account detailing her experience in the Beat movement titled, Memoirs of a Beatnik.

From 1974 to 1997, Di Prima taught Poetry at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, sharing the program with fellow Beats Allen Ginsberg (co-founder of the program), William Burroughs and Gregory Corso.

In 2001, she published Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years. In the late 1960s, she moved to California, where she became involved with the Diggers and studied Buddhism, Sanskrit, Gnosticism and alchemy. In 1966, she signed a vow of tax resistance to protest the war in Vietnam.

She also published her major work, Loba, in 1978, with an enlarged edition in 1998. Her selected poems, Pieces of a Song, was published in 1990 and a memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman, in 2001. She is also a prose writer, memoirist, playwright and social justice activist.

Di Prima authored nearly four dozen books, with her work translated into more than 20 languages. In 2009, Di Prima was named the Poet Laureate of San Francisco.

Di Prima died on October 25, 2020, at San Francisco General Hospital. She was battling several health issues such as Parkinson's Disease and Sjogren's Syndrome. However, she did not suffer any cognitive impediment and was working on several books until two weeks prior to her death.

Wendell Berry is 88 years old today

Wendell Berry is 88 years old today.

A novelist, poet, public intellectual, environmental activist, cultural critic and farmer, Barry is a prolific writer who has written dozens of novels, short stories, poems and essays.

He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He is also a 2013 Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 1958, Barry attended Stanford University's creative writing program as a Wallace Stegner Fellow, studying under Stegner in a seminar that included Edward Abbey, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Ernest Gaines, Tillie Olsen and Ken Kesey.

Berry's first novel, Nathan Coulter, was published in April, 1960. In 1965, Berry moved to a farm he had purchased, Lane's Landing, and began growing corn and small grains on what eventually became a 125-acre homestead.

His land is near Port Royal, Kentucky, in north central Kentucky, and his parents' birthplaces, and is on the western bank of the Kentucky River, not far from where it flows into the Ohio River. Berry continues to reside, farm and write at Lane's Landing. He has written about his early experiences on the land and about his decision to return to it in essays such as "The Long-Legged House" and "A Native Hill."

In the 1970s and early 1980s, Berry edited and wrote for the Rodale Press, including its publications Organic Gardening and Farming and The New Farm.

From 1987 to 1993, he returned to the English Department of the University of Kentucky. Berry has written at least twenty-five books of poems, sixteen volumes of essays and eleven novels and short story collections. His writing is grounded in the notion that one's work ought to be rooted in and responsive to one's place.

Berry has criticized Christian organizations for failing to challenge cultural complacency about environmental degradation, and has shown a willingness to criticize what he perceives as the arrogance of some Christians.

On February 10, 1968, Berry delivered "A Statement Against the War in Vietnam" during the Kentucky Conference on the War and the Draft at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

On June 3, 1979, he engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience against the construction of a nuclear power plant at Marble Hill, Indiana. He describes "this nearly eventless event" and expands upon his reasons for it in the essay "The Reactor and the Garden."

On February 9, 2003, Berry's essay titled "A Citizen's Response to the National Security Strategy of the United States" was published as a full-page advertisement in The New York Times.

Berry opened the essay — a critique of the G. W. Bush administration's post-9/11 international strategy — by asserting that "The new National Security Strategy published by the White House in September, 2002, if carried out, would amount to a radical revision of the political character of our nation."

Berry's nonfiction serves as an extended conversation about the life he values. According to him, the good life includes sustainable agriculture, appropriate technologies, healthy rural communities, connection to place, the pleasures of good food, husbandry, good work, local economics, the miracle of life, fidelity, frugality, reverence and the interconnectedness of life.

The threats Berry finds to this good simple life include: industrial farming and the industrialization of life, ignorance, hubris, greed, violence against others and against the natural world, the eroding topsoil in the United States, global economics and environmental destruction.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, the English romantic poet, was born into a wealthy, aristocratic family in Sussex, England on this day in 1792 — 230 years ago

Percy Shelley

Posthumous painting by Joseph Severn, 1845

Percy Bysshe Shelley, the English romantic poet, was born into a wealthy, aristocratic family in Sussex, England on this day in 1792 — 230 years ago.

The heir to his wealthy grandfather’s estate, Shelley was educated at Eton and Oxford. But after six months at the university, he was expelled for refusing to admit he wrote a controversial essay. Not long afterward, the 18-year-old youth eloped with the 16-year-old, Harriet Westbrook, daughter of a tavern owner.

The couple lived on a small income from their families and had two children. Shelley became a disciple of radical reformer, William Godwin, and fell in love with Godwin’s daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.

Shelley and Godwin fled to Europe in 1814 and married after Harriet committed suicide two years later. Shelley was denied custody of his and Harriet’s two children.

Most of Shelley’s poetry at this time was politically oriented — lobbying for social justice.

Shelley’s inheritance did not pay all the bills, and the couple spent much of their married life abroad, fleeing Shelley’s creditors. While living in Geneva, the Shelleys and their close friend, Lord Byron, challenged each other to write a compelling ghost story. Only Mary Shelley finished hers, later publishing the story as Frankenstein.

Meanwhile, Shelley wrote poetry. Some of his best work, including his masterpiece, Prometheus Unbound (published 1820), “Ode to the West Wind” and “To a Skylark,” was written while the couple lived in Italy in about 1810.

The Shelleys had five children, but only one lived to adulthood. After Percy Shelley drowned in a sailing accident when Mary Shelley was only 24, she edited two volumes of his works.

She lived on a small stipend from her father-in-law, Lord Shelley, until her surviving son inherited his fortune and title in 1844. She died at the age of 53. Although she was a respected writer for many years, only Frankenstein and her journals are still widely read today.

James Baldwin was born 98 years ago today

James Baldwin was born 98 years ago today.

A novelist, essayist, playwright, poet and social critic, Baldwin's essays, such as the collection, Notes of a Native Son (1955), explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies and tensions of racial, sexual and class distinctions in Western societies.

Some Baldwin essays are book-length, including The Fire Next Time (1963), No Name in the Street (1972) and The Devil Finds Work (1976). His novels and plays fictionalize fundamental personal questions and dilemmas amid complex social and psychological pressures thwarting the equitable integration of not only blacks yet also of male homosexuals.

Baldwin depicts the individual homosexual’s quest for acceptance in his second novel, Giovanni's Room, in 1956. It was written well before the equality of homosexuals was widely espoused in America. Baldwin's best-known novel is his first, Go Tell It On The Mountain, in 1953.

When Baldwin was an infant, his mother, Emma Berdis Jones, divorced his father because of drug abuse and moved to Harlem where she married a preacher, David Baldwin. The family was very poor. James spent much time caring for his several younger brothers and sisters.

At age ten, he was beaten by a gang of police officers. His adoptive father, whom James in essays called simply his father, appears to have treated James — versus James's siblings — with singular harshness. His stepfather died of tuberculosis in summer of 1943 soon before James turned 19.

The day of the funeral was James's 19th birthday, his father's last child was born, and Harlem rioted. The portrait is the opening his essay, "Notes of a Native Son.” The quest to answer or explain familial and social repudiation — and attain a sense of self — became a motif in Baldwin's writing.

James attended the prestigious, mostly Jewish DeWitt Clinton High School, in Bedford Park, Bronx, where, along with Richard Avedon, he worked on the school magazine. Baldwin was its literary editor.

After high school, Baldwin studied at The New School, finding an intellectual community.

At age 14, Baldwin joined the Pentecostal Church and became a Pentecostal preacher. The difficulties of life, as well as his abusive stepfather, who was a preacher, delivered him to the church. During a euphoric prayer meeting, Baldwin converted, and soon became junior minister at the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly. He drew larger crowds than his father did.

At 17, Baldwin came to view Christianity as falsely premised, however, and later regarded his time in the pulpit as a remedy to his personal crises. Still, his church experience significantly shaped his worldview and writing. For him, "being in the pulpit was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion was worked."

Baldwin once visited Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam, who inquired about Baldwin's religious beliefs.

"I left the church 20 years ago and haven't joined anything since," Baldwin answered.

"And what are you now?," Elijah asked.

"I? Now? Nothing. I'm a writer. I like doing things alone," Baldwin responded.

Baldwin died in 1987 at age 63.

His influence on other writers was profound. Toni Morrison edited the Library of America’s two-volume editions of Baldwin's fiction and essays, and a recent collection of critical essays links these two writers.

One of Baldwin's richest short stories, "Sonny's Blues," appears in many anthologies of short fiction used in introductory college literature classes.

In 1987, Kevin Brown, a photo-journalist from Baltimore, founded the National James Baldwin Literary Society. The group organizes free public events celebrating Baldwin's life and legacy.

Above photo by Mark Anstendig