60's Radical Surrealist Broad-sheet of Poetry & Revolution: Guerrilla, free newspaper of the streets, Volume 2, Number 2 (Surrealists, 1925 - Artists & Writers Militia, 1968 ) Revolution... Poetry

New York, 1968. First edition. A very good cop, a few corner tape marks and pin pricks, folds.. 17x 22 inches. Published by Allen Van Newkirk, later arrested for holding up a Toys-R-Us store in 2005, and who in the 1960s charged the stage during a Kenneth Koch reading firing a pistol (loaded with blanks) declaring "death to bourgeois poets," the free newspaper of the streets was an important if short lived publication helping to shape the counterculture's understanding of surrealism's relationship to contemporary social movements, and is perhaps best summed up by the subtitle of this issue taken from the surrealists' open letter in 1925: "Art matters little to us, we profoundly hope that revolutions, wars, and the colonial insurrections will annihilate this Western civilization whose vermin you defend even in the Orient, and we call upon this destruction as the least unacceptable state of things for the mind...We assert that we have found treason and whatever else can harm the security of the State more reconcilable with poetry than the sale of 'large quantities of lard' to a nation of pigs and dogs."

Includes poetry and quotes from Ed Dorn, LeRoi Jones, Surrealists, Rimbaud, Smohalla, Nez Perce tribe, Diane Di Prima, Sam Abrams, Robert Kelly, Margaret Randall, Victor Hernandez Cruz, and others. And an illustration, attributed to "CHE," of a modified weapon designed to launch Molotov cocktails.

Scarce. OCLC locates only six copies of this issue: NYU, Yale, Univ. Kansas, Univ. Indiana, Northern Illinois Univ. While we could locate a few auction and sales records for other issues, we could find none for this issue.

References: (Inventory #: 46364)