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FREEDOMWAYS                                FOURTH QUARTER 1966

beatniks" and from "Abomunist Manifesto" "...Abomunists demand
statehood for North Beach." North Beach is an artist's colony located
in San Francisco, where many "bohemians" reside. Of course, this
is an "escape" from the realities which exist in North Beach as
everywhere else during this formidable period of American life.
  It should be noted in the poem "To My Son Parker Asleep In 
The Next Room," he expresses man's invincible strength to triumph
over the problems of nature and his intrinsic power of self-will. This
sentiment is sharpened in the final lines:
      On this shore, you are all men before, forever, eternally
      free in all things.
      On this shore, we shall raise our monuments of stones,
      of wood, of mud, of color, of labor, of belief, of being,
      of life, of love, of self, of man expressed
      in self-determined compliance, of willful revolt,
      secure un this avowed truth, that no man is our master
      nor can any ever be, at any time in time to come.
   This short collection is divided into three parts: "Poems," "Second April" and "Abomunist Manifesto." In part one Kaufman laments the obliteration of the many young lives during the bombings of Hiroshima. In the "Benediction" he parallels this accursed act with the slower eradication of life among the Black people living in the South:
        America I forgive you . . . I forgive you
        Nailing black Jesus to an imported cross
        Every six weeks in Dawson, Georgia.
        America I forgive you . . . I forgive you
        Burning Japanese babies defensively-
        I realize how necessary it was.
        Your ancestor had beautiful thoughts in his Brain.
        His descendants are experts in real estate.
        Your generals have mushrooming visions.
        Every day your people get more and more
        Cars, televisions, sickness death dreams.
        You must have been great
        Alive
  Is Hollywood the center of film art? Kaufman firmly disbelieves this. He sees Hollywood as an atmosphere of demoralizing conditions which have infected the lives of many. He ironically expresses this in "Hollywood" with the final line:
  Hollywood I salute you, artistic cancer of the universe!

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