The fourth in the series of Sea Urchin chapbooks is the first publication of William Levy’s poem Alien Bread. William Levy (Baltimore, 1939) attended the University of Maryland and Temple University and taught in the literature department at Shippensburg State College, Pennsylvania, during which period he co-founded the ‘Insect Trust Gazette’, a poetry magazine which…
The summer of 1975 was hot. A heatwave of eighteen consecutive days singed Western Europe and turned its capitals into seething cauldrons. Ira Cohen landed on the soft tarmac of Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris, in August — his mind still filled with the opiate clouds over Kathmandu, where he had lived since 1972 — and stepped into a wildfire of events. Fellow filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky was feverishly working on his…
Over the years Bill Levy has dug up his Jewish roots a number of times to inspect them and check their viability in the godless soil that he walks. Various pieces in ‘The Fanatic’ and ‘Semantikon’, for instance, were written to that end. Another piece, Levy’s probing ’Two coordinates on a map of low revelation’, was published in City Lights Review #4 in 1990…
Poet, publisher and activist Ed Sanders (1939) dropped out of the University of Missouri in 1958 to hitchhike to New York City. There he founded the avant-garde journal ‘Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts’ a couple of years later and opened his ‘Peace Eye Bookstore’, which soon developed into a hotbed of poetry, art and radical activism. In 1964, the year…