Preface

The sixties : a chronology

pt. 1. Struggling to be free : the civil rights movement

The dangerous road before Martin Luther King / James Baldwin

Letter from a Birmingham jail / Martin Luther King, Jr.

from Rosa Parks : my story / Rosa Parks

from Coming of age in Mississippi / Anne Moody

Where is the voice coming from? / Eudora Welty

The march / Calvin Trillin

The lonesome death of Hattie Carroll / Bob Dylan

Ballad of Birmingham / Dudley Randall

For the Union dead / Robert Lowell

The ballot or the bullet / Malcolm X

The civil rights movement : what good was it? / Alice Walker

from Dreamer / Charles Johnson

pt. 2. End it! And end it now! The anti-Vietnam War movement

Original child bomb / Thomas Merton

What's happening in America (1966) / Susan Sontag

Life at war ; Overheard over S.E. Asia / Denise Levertov

The teeth mother naked at last / Robert Bly

Let sleeping dogs lie / David Lance Goines

How to maintain a peaceful demonstration / Ann Charters

from The armies of the night : a confrontation by the river / Norman Mailer

from On the perimeter / Robert Chatain

from Dispatches / Michael Herr

The man I killed / Tim O'Brien

from Born on the fourth of July / Ron Kovic

Attach the water / Janice Mirikitani

Tunnels ; Hanoi Hannah ; You and I are disappearing ; 2527th birthday of the Buddha ; Prisoners ; Nude interrogation ; Facing it / Yusef Komunyakaa.

pt. 3. Why can we not begin new? The free speech movement and beyond

Battle of Berkeley talking blues / Dave Mandel

Put my name down / Lee Felsenstein

Hey Mr. Newsman / Richard Kampf

There's a man taking names / Dan Paik

I walked out in Berkeley / Richard Schmorleitz, Dan Paik

from The free speech movement ; The rules of the game ... when you're busted ; Wanted : hip cops / David Lance Goines

Demonstration or spectacle as example, as communication

or how to make a march/spectacle / Allen Ginsberg

from Hell's Angels : the dope Cabala and a wall of fire / Hunter Thompson

Testament for my students, 1968-1969 / Kay Boyle

Smoking dope with Thomas Pynchon : a sixties memoir / Andrew Gordon

The police band / Donald Barthelme

Che's last letter / Abbie Hoffman

The coming of the purple better one / William S. Burroughs

Yeats in the gas / Edward Sanders

pt. 4. "I feel like I'm fixin' to die" : the counterculture movement

I feel like I'm fixin'-to-die Rag ; Talking non-violence ; Superbird ; Janis / Country Joe McDonald

THE little PHENOMENA / Douglas Blazek

from Ringolevio / Emmett Grogan

A minstrel shoe or : civil rights in a cracker barrel / R.G. Davis

Psychedelic rock posters : history, ideas, and art / Sally Tomlinson

The Rolling Stones

at play in the apocalypse / Michael Lydon

New speedway boogie / Robert Hunter

Because my father always said he was the only Indian who saw Jimi Hendrix play 'The star-spangled banner' at Woodstock / Sherman Alexie.

pt. 5. Adrift in the age of Aquarius : drugs and the movement into inner space

Turning on the world / Timothy Leary

The holidays at Millbrook

1966 / Diane di Prima

from The teachings of Don Juan / Carlos Castaneda

from House made of dawn / N. Scott Momaday

Letters from Mexico / Ken Kesey

Pills and shit : the drug scene / Lenny Bruce

from The basketball diaries / Jim Carroll

pt. 6. Living in the revolution : the beats and some other literary movements at the edge

The hustings / Charles Olson

Letters to Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky, 1961-1962 / Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Kral Majales / Allen Ginsberg

Revolutionary letters #1, 3, 5, 8 / Diane di Prima

Poke hole fishing after the march / Gary Snyder

from Ghost tantras / Michael McClure

Grandfather was queer, too / Bob Kaufman

Visitor : Jack Kerouac in old Saybrook / John Clellon Holmes

The Cleveland wrecking yard / Richard Brautigan

from Notes of a dirty old man / Charles Bukowski.

pt. 7. Out of the fire : the black arts movement and the reshaping of black consciousness

The black arts movement / Larry Neal

from Think black 1965-1967 / Don L. Lee

Malcolm spoke/who listened? / Haki R. Madhubuti

The idea of ancestry / Etheridge Knight

Conjugal visits ; A dance for Ma Rainey / Al Young

My poem / Nikki Giovanni

It is deep / Carolyn M. Rodgers

Numbers, letters / Amiri Baraka

Eldridge Cleaver

writer / Ishmael Reed

from Soul on ice / Eldridge Cleaver

Song ; Why they are in Europe? ; [We knew our loneliness and told it] / Allen Polite

pt. 8. With our arms upraised : the women's movement and the sexual revolution

from The feminine mystique / Betty Friedan

from Sexual politics / Kate Millett

Poem / Muriel Rukeyser

Lady Lazarus / Sylvia Plath

The abortion ; The addict ; The ballad of the lonely masturbator / Anne Sexton

About marriage ; The mutes / Denise Levertov

Belly Dancer ; Ringless / Diane Wakoski

from How I became Hettie Jones / Hettie Jones

from SCUM manifesto / Valerie Solanas

A new egalitarian life style / Gloria Steinem.

pt. 9. In defense of the earth : the environmental movement

from Silent spring / Rachel Carson

from Wildlife in America / Peter Matthiessen

Revolutionary letter #16 / Diane di Prima

What you should know to be a poet ; Revolution in the revolution in the revolution ; Smokey the Bear Sutra / Gary Snyder

Preface to Hermit poems, the bath ; [I know a man's supposed to have his hair cut short] ; [Apparently wasps] ; [I burn up the deer in my body] ; [Whenever I make a new poem] ; [Step out onto the planet] ; The song Mt. Tamalpais sings / Lew Welch

To the unseeable animal / Wendell Berry

The serpents of paradise / Edward Abbey

from The way to Rainy Mountain / N. Scott Momaday

pt. 10. Ten elegies for the sixties

for Ernest Hemingway : Hemingway / Archibald MacLeish

for Marilyn Monroe : from Ghost tantras, #39 / Michael McClure

for John F. Kennedy : Kennedy blues / Eric Von Schmidt

for Sylvia Plath : from The dream songs, #172 / John Berryman

for Malcolm X : The sun came / Etheridge Knight

for Martin Luther King, Jr. : Assassination / Don L. Lee

for Robert F. Kennedy : Assassination raga / Lawrence Ferlinghetti

for Neal Cassady : On Neal's ashes / Allen Ginsberg

for Janis Joplin : Elegy / Marilyn Hacker

for Jack Kerouac : Kerouac, 1922-1969 / The Harvard Crimson

Selected bibliography

Acknowledgments

Alphabetical list of authors and titles.