Prose
Prose
With the death of David McReynolds after a fall in his apartment at age 88, the country lost one of its kindest, most dedicated, and most principled and passionate advocates for peace and social justice. I was friends with David …
For link to the New York Times letters page, published in the hard copy edition of the paper on 3/18/17 and posted in the NYT online edition on 3/17/17, see: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/17/opinion/proposed-cuts-in-the-trump-budget.html To the Editor: Sean Spicer, the president’s press secretary, …
NY Times Letter to the Editor criticizing Trump’s proposed budget Read more »
The late poet Allen Ginsberg, who was a teacher and friend, knew that issues of media and language were crucial to our prospects for building a real and humane democracy in America. Allen was an avid reader of the alternative …
By Eliot Katz About a week before leaving for a 12-day summer vacation, I sent The New York Times a Letter to the Editor, which they published on June 20, 2006. In my letter, I addressed an op-ed column by …
Abbie Hoffman: American Dissident and Political Organizer Extraordinaire By Eliot Katz One of the most well-known and influential American activists of the 20th century, Abbie Hoffman liked to call himself an American dissident and community organizer. As historian Howard Zinn …
Abbie Hoffman: American Dissident and Political Organizer Extraordinaire Read more »
New Brunswick, New Jersey in the 1980s was a pretty good microcosm of America. It was a multi-ethnic city with pockets of both wealth and poverty. It hosted the state’s major public university, Rutgers. It was the hometown of the …
Introduction to Andy Clausen’s Home of the Blues: More Selected Poems By Eliot Katz The first time that I saw Andy Clausen read poetry was in the summer of 1980, at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Andy was scheduled …
To paraphrase the radical pamphleteer and world citizen, Tom Paine, we are living in times that try people’s souls. Under the disastrous administration of George W. Bush and a corrupt conservative Congress, we find ourselves in the midst of an …
(Book Published by Beatdom Books, 2016) By Eliot Katz In both his poetry and his life, Allen Ginsberg was one of the most politically engaged writers of his era. Influenced by such key literary predecessors as William Blake and Walt …
Preface to “The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg” Read more »
Eight Techniques for Creating Memorable Political Poems: An Excerpt from Eliot Katz’s The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg (Beatdom Books, 2016) In any library with a decent-sized poetry collection, one can find plenty of books that look at the …