This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.
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! 382