The Poetic Spirit

IssueMay 2008
Feature by PN staff

Whisper & Shout, described as a “new irregular and guerrilla publication” aiming to “print poems and features of guts and sensitivity”, edited by Dennis Gould and published in February 1968:

I disrespect Governors and Government, Lawmakers and Law. I respect conscience and direct nonviolent actions. Disobedience and Love are two gentle but fierce commandments of anarchists and pacifists involved in this trivial and consuming society. Disobedience and Love are two themes of poets and poems concerned by our powerful almighty authorities’ rule of benevolent violence....
Just one man with one gun makes mockery of human gentleness.

For any man with any gun, in whatever name, democracy or communism/reactionary violence or revolutionary violence, is a fascist as soon as he pulls the trigger.

Therefore, to remove political and social violence, we, anarchists and pacifists, who are actively concerned must construct individual and political nonviolence, to be effective in every situation of human conflict.

In this way our 20th century Pacifist equivalent of the necessary 19th century Marxist analysis will begin to engage the minds of contemporary people of every kind.

Until such an effort is made, a profound analysis of the modern industrialized/policed and militarized state, we shall flounder on from public demonstration to private way-ahead conference to little lasting effect.

We have to create a revolution at a level of human intellect and emotion which will engage the same professional commitment and contracts that the professional armies up to now have had within their intelligence corps... which even so were never very high!

As poets we have no other duty but to write and read our poems for those we love: those friends we help: those strangers we meet only in our cinerama dreams.

As poets we have no other pleasures than to write/read/sing our poems for the breakdown of this rigid unspontaneous society, for every such society. Only the dead are uncommitted! Sing On!

Topics: History, Culture