The Artists Workshop Active Anthology Part 2

Tho at this time things are very very bad for us here, i.e., I’m facing a charge of “sales and possession of narcotics” i.e., marijuana, which charge carries a minimum 20-year prison sentence – because one of the local “poets” (whose work will no longer appear here) set up an unthinkably evil situation which enabled the local gestapo to worm their way into the community & really turn things around; also because of this all our money has gone to pay for lawyer, $5000 bond, &c and we are afraid to open another Workshop because of the filthy police here, there is no place (except home) for our bands to perform their music publicly, no place for the poets to read here, as there was so beautifully last year, at the Workshop – all of this is enough to bring anybody down, but amazingly more people continue & begin to write, read, study, play instruments, paint, &c. Some of us have gotten out, e.g. Veryl Blatt, Judy Warner (who’s returned now), Kenny Schooner (still in the Virgin Islands, along w/ Larry Weiner & others), Bill Hutton (in Buffalo – see p. 56 [original edition]), Jim McCracken (who remains in California), George Tysh (now in Paris, where he plans to stay) – all these people were active here, & continue to be active wherever they are.

We have 3 new poets represented in this issue – Dan Milham, whose first poem appears on p. 47 [original]; Allen Van Newkirk (p. 49 [original]); & Chuck Keen (who stays in Ann Arbor but has aligned himself with us here). Their poems printed in this Active Anthology are early efforts but for me hold much promise for the future, both for themselves & for us.

The jazz writings that were advertised for this issue of WORK will be found, with many more, in our second magazine, CHANGE, which is now available at $2.00 per year. So many musicians were beginning to write about their music & the music they listen to that WORK hadn’t enough room for them, & thus CHANGE was born. For any of you who dug the jazz writings in WORK/1, let me offer CHANGE to you as a large second installment.

The review section here grows daily, again all I have to complain about is the lack of room in WORK for all the work that’s been done here. But we will continue to find money for paper & materials so these magazines will continue. The work, comes, on its own.

(& special thanks to Judy Warner & Warner Printing, Flint Michigan, for enabling us to reproduce Leni’s photos of the Berkeley Poetry Conference, which we were happily enabled to attend this summer. We hope they’ll communicate some sense of the tremendous activity that took place there in July 1965.)

John Sinclair

Detroit

18.IX.65

[Editorial note: for historical clarity, the online edition of WORK/2 consists of the writing published in the original Active Anthology section of the magazine. The reviews and photos, mentioned by John above, were indeed part of the legacy volume but are outside the scope of the current web version at this time).

Bill Harris, George Tysh, Robin Eichele , John Sinclair, Minkey, Veryl Blatt , Norman Harper , Judy Warner , Dan Milham, Chuck Keen ,Allen Van Newkirk,Bill Hutton, Jerry Younkins, James Semark, Ron English, Kenneth Schooner