Do not go gentle!… Poets strike against Trump on Jan. 15

Alan Kaufman, center, holding “Poetry Is Free!” sign, at the San Francisco Poets Strike in 1993. Reading, at right, is John Ross, who was the leading American journalist covering Subcommander Marcos in Chiapas at that time. At far left is Neelu Cherkovski, the great writer Charles Bukowski’s best friend and biographer. Police had shut down a poetry reading at The Blue Monkey Cafe for lack of an “entertainment permit.” Kaufman subsequently called a strike of 10 poets on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall. “The police came in riot gear,” Kaufman recalled. "But so did camera teams from all the major networks. It was an election year and no one wanted to see cops dragging poets off the steps of City Hall. We ended up getting the permit law revoked.” The event was reported in the national media, including Time magazine. — Alan Kaufman, center, holding “Poetry Is Free!” sign, at the San Francisco Poets Strike in 1993. Reading, at right, is John Ross, who was the leading American journalist covering Subcommander Marcos in Chiapas at that time. At far left is Neelu Cherkovski, the great writer Charles Bukowski’s best friend and biographer. Police had shut down a poetry reading at The Blue Monkey Cafe for lack of an “entertainment permit.” Kaufman subsequently called a strike of 10 poets on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall. “The police came in riot gear,” Kaufman recalled. “But so did camera teams from all the major networks. It was an election year and no one wanted to see cops dragging poets off the steps of City Hall. We ended up getting the permit law revoked.” The event was reported in the national media, including Time magazine.

BY ALAN KAUFMAN | Rage, rage against the dying of the light — and the coming of the Trump… .

On Sun., Jan. 15, I will lead, with Michael Rothenberg of One Hundred Thousand Poets For Change, a nationwide strike of citizen-poets: Poets Against Trump. From New York to Los Angeles and New Orleans to Austin, poets will assemble at their respective city halls and other locations to voice their opposition and commitment to struggle.

In Manhattan, we will gather on the steps of City Hall at exactly 1 p.m. Not only are all poets welcome to read but visual artists can bring works of protest art. Any caring citizen with something to declare in the space of a short poem can have his or her say, too.

Then, on Sat., Jan. 21, a Million Women’s March will rally in Washington, D.C., to voice a courageous mass opposition to the Trump presidency. There will also be women’s marches in New York City, San Francisco and other cities.

Meanwhile, in New York, Maria de Losangeles, an undocumented immigrant artist, has spearheaded We Make America, a tremendous new progressive effort comprised of chiefly women artists and veteran activists. Also in New York, Theresa Byrnes, the performance artist, has organized nights of exhibition and symposia at her E. Ninth St. East Village gallery to launch a new artistic front against Trump.

“Let Us” is my anthemic tribute to the love and dream that inspires such efforts: a paean to the poets, artists and bus riders who comprise a new civil rights movement in which we must all represent with the power of our art and the dedication of our ideals. It is a call to be a force not only for compassionate change but fiery revolt against the coming oppression.

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LET US

For the Poets of January 15 and the Women of January 21

By Alan Kaufman

Let us

take ourselves aboard a bus

and travel to the dispossessed

and let us praise their dreamless eyes and hardened smiles

with rogue words of truth

in the killing fields of their hopes

the slum wards and ragged towns and stolen farms

Let us take to them the carnival of our mad and scattered lives