A Humble Petition to the President of Harvard.
Phoenix, AZ: Rampart Press, January 1963. Broadside. Folio (12½" X 16"). Titled in red. Limited to 250 copies printed on German mouldmade paper. Fine. Item #42473
First separate printing. Although Beecher didn't graduate from Harvard, he did attend Harvard Graduate School for language and literature in 1926 -- hence his opening declaration here, "I am, sir, so to speak, 'a Harvard man.'" Possibly occasioned by a much later visit by Beecher to his almost-alma (he refers to "Nostalgic reminiscences brought on / by your most recent bulletin"), this delightful piece begins as a tribute to the legendary Harvard literature professor G.L. Kittredge (1860-1941), Shakespeare and Chaucer authority, prim and proper "in forked snowy beard and pearl-grey spats" whose teachings were equally fastidious: "Prince Hamlet / made no unseemly quips anent the thighs / Ophelia spread for him...." -- thus "Nice young men were we / in Kitty's class...." Personal recollections follow before a Lionel Trilling essay ("Commitment to the Modern") found in the "recent bulletin" shows the poet that "you do not change / at Harvard, like castrati whose voices / retain their boyish purity." Harvard's status quo conservative establishment, he suddenly realizes, rub this radical poet the wrong way: "Fend from me, I beg you, sir, / offers of chairs magnates endow. Waylay / me with no teaching sinecure.... Summon me never to recite my verse / before a convocation in my honor / nor to appear in doctoral costume / as orator at Commencement." A wonderfully dark, provocative, humorous poem. One of the great American protest and radical poets, Beecher left his steel mill background to teach English and sociology at various universities; he worked various positions under the New Deal; his first published poem, "And I Will Be Heard" (1940), placed him on the literary map, and the book-length narrative poem "Here I Stand" came the following year; during World War Two he sailed aboard the first racially integrated ship, the S.S. Booker T. Washington, and wrote about those experiences in "All Brave Sailors"; blacklisted from teaching by refusing to sign a state loyalty oath in California in 1950, he became a rancher and farmer in Sonoma County; there he continued writing, founding the award-winning Morning Star Press in 1956 to publish his poetry and other socially-oriented pieces, becoming a gifted and accomplished practitioner in the process; this press then operated from San Francisco, Berkeley, and Jerome, Arizona; renamed it relocated to Scottsdale, Arizona and other locales; "Report to the Stockholders & Other Poems" appeared in 1962 to critical acclaim and "To Live and Die in Dixie" in 1966; these later years were filled with guest teaching positions from Massachusetts to California, and Beecher was in great demand as a lecturer and poetry reader nationwide; descended from famed Abolitionists Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lyman Beecher, much of John Beecher's poetry concerns itself with race relations, labor reform and other social injustices.
Price: $75.00