The Summer of Love and Walter Lowenfels
What I remember about the radical poet, Walter Lowenfels, was his vast generosity, and commitment to the word. He wrote a book entitled, The Revolution is to be Human, a slogan which has guided my life and work. He believed that change comes from young people and nurtured those friendships throughout his lifetime, encouraging new writers at the time like Clarence Major, Marge Piercy, and Ishmael Reed. Walter also confronted the New York Times Book Review section, and wrote an editorial which was called “The White Poetry Mafia,” accusing the establishment of failing to review and publish a burgeoning group of new Black writers.

He had come from a wealthy family of butter manufacturers, but gave up the soft life to throw in his lot with the literary expatriates in Europe including Michael Fraenkel, Henry Miller and Anais Nin. Throughout his lifetime he was a member of the American Communist Party, able to reconcile his discomfort with bureaucracy with a greater commitment to change.


Visting Walter on the Hudson
Between 1966 and 1971 when I attended the City College of New York, on occasional Saturdays I’d take the railroad from Grand Central Station in New York City and visit Walter and his wife Lillian in their Peekskill, New York cottage. Once I’d arrived at the station, I’d call. In a few minutes he’d pick me up in a light blue car, almost shaking his hand loose from his wrist waving to me through the window. Then we’d drive back to the cottage where he parked between several trees, and flung open the front door. Our afternoon had begun.

For hours Walter held court in a kitchen alcove talking about different poets, anthologies he was putting together, the birds outside his window, fruit and cheese, all with equal knowledge. He was a hummingbird sampling everything within his field of energy. “Do you know this writer?” he asked. “Do you know this music?” he inquired. I sadly shook my head and accepted whatever he pushed across the table for me to examine, only able to turn a few pages before he leaped to the next subject.

Walter vibrated with palpable energy, hovering in that conversion place between matter and energy, a black beret angled over a nest of wispy grey threads that resisted encampment. He’d always serve me something to drink, lemonade or coffee, whatever was available in the kitchen, a small and narrow space which seemed to have been imported from a trailer with coffee grounds spread everywhere.

Meeting Lillian Lowenfels
His wife, Lillian, daughter of a Yiddish scholar and humorist, occasionally summoned Walter from their bedroom, or emerged herself sitting in a wheelchair. By the time I’d met Lillian, she had suffered several strokes and seemed to be held together by pillows and white cord. Her face was frozen in a permanent grimace. She always stayed for just a short time. Walter solicitously escorted her back to their bedroom. “Lillian, be careful how you move. You’ll hurt yourself.”

Lillian translated Spanish poetry and had co-edited as well as financed some of Walter’s anthologies. When he returned to the kitchen he’d point to several photographs on the piano mantle of a dark-haired siren and say, “She was so beautiful before she got sick,” as if to ask me to see beyond the woman whose body was occupied by pain.

I’d first met Walter during a Communist Party convention in New York City. During those years I’d attended so many meetings, I can’t remember the particulars, except to see a large hall with bridge tables covered in white tablecloths. It was toward the end of the summer, hopelessly hot without air conditioning. I was getting tired of speeches. I was a newly recruited youth. I wanted to be in the company of worldwide revolutionary artists who had caught my attention: Neruda, Casals, Picasso, all Pablos -- Berthold Brecht, Paul Robeson, Ben Shahn, the Hollywood 10 and many others who’d been called to testify in front of the witch-hunting McCarthy Committee including Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, and Stella Adler.

Walter was also circling the back of the hall. "Are you Lenore?" he asked, extending his hand.

Technology and Language
I’d just gotten to know Walter who was involved in editing the Cultural Commission’s publication, “Dialog Magazine,” a mash-up of the “New Masses,” which itself was modeled upon “The Masses,” published between 1911 and 1917. Walter had gotten wind of fresh blood around the Cultural Commission and always eager to befriend a young person, invited me within his circle. This was more toward the latter years of his life. (He died in 1976.) Walter was beginning to embark on a series of anthologies, excited by the success of The Writing on the Wall: 108 American Poems of Protest published in 1969 by Doubleday & Company, Inc.

Walter published my first poem which ended with the line, “this bioluminescence still swimming in the dark.” I was excited by the relationship between science and language. So was Walter. He wrote about it a lot in a great many of his books. From “Every Poem Is A Love Poem” included in The Portable Walter edited by Robert Gover, International Publishers, 1968:

“I am trying to break through this language to get to
                  fireboxes
                  Cooper-Bessemer compressors
                  magnetic films
without the copperbelt lining that keeps my hope
                  from exploding out of this typewriter,
                  desk, window, through the pines, down the
                  Little Egg Harbor River, across the
                  Continental Shelf...” 

Or from The Poetry of My Politics, Volume 2 of My Many Lives self-published in 1968:

“My campaign against nostalgia has its base in language, i.e., to use the language of today for today’s emotions: the clean, new, scientific word, woven into the fabric of the poem so quietly the reader doesn’t sense anything but the contemporary pulse modulation. That’s the test of language – that it is alive with today’s electronics – not Ben Franklin’s kite key.”

Summer of Love
So why am I thinking of Walter?

This Labor Day Weekend past, I attended the 40th anniversary Summer of Love celebration together with 40,000 other people in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, everyone dressed in a version of the sixties, tie-dyed, tattooed, and carrying cell phones. There were clouds of a sweet-smelling substance emanating from different points from within the crowd.

Just imagine. More than 40,000 people who had streamed to the park, finding their way on public transportation or struggling with parking, babies carried on shoulders, men and women who’d been the flower children of yesteryear either as part of the Haight-Ashbury scene, a movement that put free community clinics on the map, or who had been located someplace else, and members of a younger generation now wanting to sniff the air in more ways than one; everyone hoping to reconnect with something that had been magical, to feel the spark, to be alive once again with hope. How do I know? I saw it on all of our faces. Then there was the music, lead guitarists or saxophonists from different bands, or almost fully constituted bands and by listening to them, we time traveled back to that era.

There was an ongoing effort to make the day-long celebration more than an exercise in nostalgia, people at the podium addressing a need to keep the resistance going. However, no one mentioned the word, revolution, at least none that I heard. I thought that was curious. Maybe the terrorists of the world and George Bush have co-opted that word for their own use. Or maybe we’ve become tired of hearing it.

Have we become jaded? Do we no longer believe that change can happen, or is that kind of thing only reserved for Hillary Clinton being elected president?

As for Walter, I miss his courage. I miss his ability to constantly reinvent his work and play with language. I miss his insistence on being relevant and honest about love and politics.

Today I know he’d be involved with computers, zipping along on a high-speed connection to the Internet, exploring new metaphors and keeping his light burning in face of humanity’s ongoing war with itself. I think if he was around he’d explore the meaning of this new global consciousness, how we are serving up each others culture and language through a medium that concentrates the world into a gateway that moves as we move through our lives.

In a world of literary dog-eat-dog, Walter helped anyone who was dedicated to the Word.

He heaped food on me, the first thing any young writer needs, the first thing anyone needs.