Soon after Ischa Meijer was born in Amsterdam in 1943, he and his parents were deported by the Nazis to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The young Jewish family survived the camp and returned to Amsterdam after the war, where two more children were born. Fearing the rise of communism in Europe, Meijer’s parents and their children moved to Paramaribo in the early 1950s but, unable to adjust to life in Surinam, returned to Amsterdam a couple of years…
A Black Revolutionary’s Life in Labor, subtitled Black Workers Power in Detroit by Michael Hamlin with Michele Gibbs is a personal narrative in which Hamlin candidly talks about the horrors of growing up black in America from a Mississippi sharecropper’s plantation to Korean War soldier, and ultimately truck driver for the Detroit News and his increasing rage at the system. Hamlin, a key organizer of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and a leader of…
German artist and activist Gustav Metzger was born to Jewish parents in Nuremberg in 1926. Having found refuge from the Nazis in the UK in 1939 and having been awarded a grant by the Jewish community there after the war, he was able to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in the late 1940s. His experience of mankind’s destructive capabilities during World War II led him to formulate his concept of Auto-Destructive Art in…
The opening lines of Ed Sanders’s poem For Ted Berrigan recall the origin of the friendship between the two poets on the Lower East Side, where Sanders had moved from Kansas City and Berrigan from Tulsa via Chicago in the early 1960s. The poem is one of two that have been printed in the joint Moloko & Sea Urchin edition In Honor of Ted Berrigan by Ed Sanders, which also contains glyphs and contact prints from Ed’s archive with photos taken on 29 January 1964 at Café Le Metro, New York. Originally created as a PDF for Ron Padgett in 2009, Sanders’s Berrigan tribute…
Henri Michaux was born in Namur, Belgium in 1899 and spent his childhood in Brussels, where he studied medicine until he dropped out of university at the age of 21. Inspired by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Lautréamont, Michaux concentrated on his own literary experiments in 1922. Michaux’s early writings were mainly published in the French-Belgian avant-garde magazine Le Disque vert, for which he edited a…