A Poet's Revolution by Hollenberg Donna

Author:Hollenberg, Donna
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520272460
Publisher: University of California Press

Nothing

will do but

to taste the bitter

taste. No life

other, apart from.92

Denise also participated in a variety of political activities with her students at MIT, where she taught a poetry workshop one evening a week during the 1969– 1970 academic year. The atmosphere on college campuses in and around Boston was very tense by then, as students worried about the impending draft lottery that would follow the abolition of student deferment. One flashpoint had been the strike at Harvard in April 1969, during which a student occupation of University Hall had been “busted” by Cambridge police. This had been followed by a vigil at MIT for a missing GI who had taken sanctuary in the Stratton Student Center. Although the police were not called in, the MIT campus was similarly polarized. By the following winter, radical student representatives from campuses on both sides of the Charles River established an office in Cambridge to coordinate rallies and demonstrations on the Boston Common, as well as a series of “actions” at area schools including Harvard, MIT, Boston University, and Northeastern. Any demonstration on one campus drew student radicals from other campuses, who joined in acts of revolutionary solidarity.

Poet Mark Pawlak, who was a student in Levertov’s poetry workshop at MIT that year, recalled her participation in one such action, a demonstration at Northeastern University on January 22, 1970, against a speech given by S. I. Hayakawa, president of San Francisco State College. “Hayakawa was a lightning rod who attracted student protesters wherever he spoke,” because he had been widely praised by Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and Ronald Reagan for refusing to negotiate with student activists and their supporters. Denise was scheduled to give a poetry reading at the Old Cambridge Baptist Church on the evening of Hayakawa’s speech, a commitment she wanted to keep, but she also wanted very much to participate in the demonstration. With Pawlak and Margo Taft, another student in her class, she devised a plan “to mollify her disappointment that she could not be at two places at once.” She would go to the church as planned, and they would go across town to the demonstration. They would telephone what was happening there to a church staffer, who would pass the messages to her and, through her, to her audience. After the reading, “she and any audience members she could persuade to accompany her, would cross the river and add their voices to the protest against Hayakawa.”

This sounded like a good idea to Mark and Margo, who knew Denise’s considerable powers of persuasion. They proceeded to the Northeastern campus, where police and demonstrators were battling near the auditorium where Hayakawa was speaking. Twice they left the skirmish to find a telephone booth, reporting back to the church and encouraging Denise to join them with as many people as she could bring. Owing to a flaw in their plan, however, Denise did not arrive at the expected T stop. Instead, having taken another line, she emerged from the subway at a spot where a melee prevented Mark and Margo from reaching her.

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