The Portable Sixties Reader

by Unknown

• ISBN13: 9780142001943
• ISBN10: 0142001945
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-12-31
• Publisher: Penguin Classics

Summary

From civil rights to free love, JFK to LSD, Woodstock to the Moonwalk, the Sixties was a time of change, political unrest, and radical experiments in the arts, sexuality, and personal identity. In this anthology of more than one hundred selections of essays, poetry, and fiction by some of America's most gifted writers, Ann Charters sketches the unfolding of this most turbulent decade. The Portable Sixties Readeris organized into thematic chapters, from the Civil Rights movement to the Anti-Vietnam movement, the Free Speech movement, the Counterculture movement, drugs and the movement into Inner Space, the Beats and other fringe literary movements, the Black Arts movement, the Women's movement, and the Environmental movement. The concluding chapter, "Elegies for the Sixties," offers tributes to ten figures whose lives-and deaths-captured the spirit of the decade. Edited with an introduction by Ann Charters

Author Biography

Ann Charters has had a forty-year involvement in reading, collecting, and writing about the literature of the Counterculture. She edited The Portable Beat Reader, The Portable Jack Kerouac, two volumes of Kerouac's Selected Letters and Beat Down to Your Soul.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xiii
The Sixties: A Chronology	p. xvii
Struggling to be Free: The Civil Rights Movement
"The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King"	p. 6
"Letter from a Birmingham Jail"	p. 24
from Rosa Parks: My Story	p. 41
From Coming of Age in Mississippi	p. 45
"Where Is the Voice Coming From?"	p. 51
"The March"	p. 57
"The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll"	p. 63
"Ballad of Birmingham"	p. 65
"For the Union Dead"	p. 67
"The Ballot or the Bullet"	p. 70
"The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?"	p. 80
From Dreamer	p. 86
End it! and End it Now! The Anti-Vietnam War Movement
"Original Child Bomb"	p. 108
"What's Happening in America (1966)"	p. 119
"Life at War"	p. 124
"Overheard over S.E. Asia"	p. 127
"The Teeth Mother Naked at Last"	p. 128
"Let Sleeping Dogs Lie"	p. 137
"How to Maintain a Peaceful Demonstration"	p. 141
from The Armies of the Night: "A Confrontation by the River"	p. 155
from "On the Perimeter"	p. 159
from Dispatches	p. 168
"The Man I Killed"	p. 171
from Born on the Fourth of July	p. 176
"Attack the Water"	p. 179
"Tunnels"	p. 181
"Hanoi Hannah"	p. 183
"'You and I Are Disappearing'"	p. 184
"2527th Birthday of the Buddha"	p. 185
"Prisoners"	p. 185
"Nude Interrogation"	p. 186
"Facing It"	p. 187
Why Can We Not Begin New? The Free Speech Movement and Beyond
"Battle of Berkeley Talking Blues"	p. 196
"Put My Name Down"	p. 197
"Hey Mr. Newsman"	p. 199
"There's a Man Taking Names"	p. 200
"I Walked Out in Berkeley"	p. 200
From The Free Speech Movement	p. 202
"The Rules of the Game ... When You're Busted"	p. 205
"Wanted: Hip Cops"	p. 207
"Demonstration or Spectacle As Example, As Communication--or How to Make a March/Spectacle"	p. 208
from Hell's Angels: "The Dope Cabala and a Wall of Fire"	p. 212
"Testament for My Students, 1968-1969"	p. 221
"Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir"	p. 228
"The Police Band"	p. 238
"Che's Last Letter"	p. 241
"The Coming of the Purple Better One"	p. 243
"Yeats in the Gas"	p. 253
"I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die": the Counterculture Movement
"I Feel Like I'm Fixin'-to-Die Rag"	p. 261
"Talking Non-Violence"	p. 263
"Superbird"	p. 264
"Janis"	p. 265
"The little Phenomena"	p. 266
from Ringolevio	p. 270
"A Minstrel Show or: Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel"	p. 276
"Psychedelic Rock Posters: History, Ideas, and Art"	p. 291
"The Rolling Stones--At Play in the Apocalypse"	p. 306
"New Speedway Boogie"	p. 315
"Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play 'The Star-Spangled Banner' at Woodstock"	p. 317
Adrift in the Age of Aquarius: Drugs and the Movement into Inner Space
"Turning On the World"	p. 331
"The Holidays at Millbrook--1966"	p. 343
from The Teachings of Don Juan	p. 350
from House Made of Dawn	p. 362
"Letters from Mexico"	p. 367
"Pills and Shit: The Drug Scene"	p. 377
from The Basketball Diaries	p. 388
Living in the Revolution: the Beats and Some other Literary Movements at the Edge
"The Hustings"	p. 397
Letters to Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky, 1961-1962	p. 400
"Kral Majales"	p. 404
"Revolutionary Letters #1, 3, 5, 8"	p. 408
"Poke Hole Fishing After the March"	p. 412
from Ghost Tantras	p. 414
"Grandfather Was Queer, Too"	p. 420
"Visitor: Jack Kerouac in Old Saybrook"	p. 421
"The Cleveland Wrecking Yard"	p. 429
from Notes of a Dirty Old Man	p. 435
Out of the Fire: the Black Arts Movement and the Reshaping of Black Consciousness
"The Black Arts Movement"	p. 446
from Think Black 1965-1967	p. 454
"Malcolm Spoke/who listened?"	p. 456
"The Idea of Ancestry"	p. 458
"Conjugal Visits"	p. 460
"A Dance for Ma Rainey"	p. 462
"My Poem"	p. 464
"It Is Deep"	p. 466
"Numbers, Letters"	p. 469
"Eldridge Cleaver--Writer"	p. 471
from Soul on Ice	p. 478
"Song"	p. 484
"Why They Are in Europe?"	p. 486
["We Knew Our Loneliness and Told It"]	p. 486
With Our Arms Upraised: the Women's Movement and the Sexual Revolution
from The Feminine Mystique	p. 493
from Sexual Politics	p. 504
"Poem"	p. 512
"Lady Lazarus"	p. 513
"The Abortion"	p. 518
"The Addict"	p. 520
"The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator"	p. 522
"About Marriage"	p. 523
"The Mutes"	p. 525
"Belly Dancer"	p. 527
"Ringless"	p. 528
from How I Became Hettie Jones	p. 531
from SCUM Manifesto	p. 536
"A New Egalitarian Life Style"	p. 539
In Defense of the Earth: the Environmental Movement
from Silent Spring	p. 547
from Wildlife in America	p. 549
"Revolutionary Letter #16"	p. 559
"What You Should Know to Be a Poet"	p. 560
"Revolution in the Revolution in the Revolution"	p. 561
"Smokey the Bear Sutra"	p. 562
"Preface To Hermit Poems, The Bath"	p. 565
["I Know a Man's Supposed to Have His Hair Cut Short"]	p. 567
["Apparently Wasps"]	p. 568
["I Burn Up the Deer in My Body"]	p. 569
["Whenever I Make a New Poem"]	p. 569
["Step Out onto the Planet"]	p. 570
"The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings"	p. 571
"To the Unseeable Animal"	p. 572
"The Serpents of Paradise"	p. 574
from The Way to Rainy Mountain	p. 581
Ten Elegies for the Sixties
Archibald MacLeish--"Hemingway"	p. 589
Michael McClure--from Ghost Tantras, #39	p. 590
Eric Von Schmidt--"Kennedy Blues"	p. 591
John Berryman--from The Dream Songs, #172	p. 593
Etheridge Knight--"The Sun Came"	p. 594
Don L. Lee--"Assassination"	p. 595
Lawrence Ferlinghetti--"Assassination Raga"	p. 596
Allen Ginsberg--"On Neal's Ashes"	p. 600
Marilyn Hacker--"Elegy"	p. 601
The Harvard Crimson--"Kerouac, 1922-1969"	p. 604
Selected Bibliography	p. 607
Acknowledgments	p. 615
Alphabetical List of Authors and Titles	p. 623
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