Ishmael Reed and Stan Rice: October 4, 1973
The Poetry Center presents Ishmael Reed and Stan Rice, reading from their contemporary works, in this early black & white video, at San Francisco State University. They are introduced, both at the start of the event, by Poetry Center director Kathleen Fraser. Reed covers a span of many of his best-known poems from his two books Conjure, a selected poems from his work of the past decade (University of Massachusetts Press, 1972) and Chattanooga (Random House, 1973). He also reads, from manuscript, his novel-in-progress Flight to Canada (Random House, 1976), then closes his reading with “Poem Delivered Before Assembly of Colored People at Glide Memorial Church, October 4th, 1973, And Called to Protest Recent Events in the Sovereign Republic of Chile.”
"We’re in San Francisco, twenty-three days into the CIA-backed Pinochet September 11 coup d’état against Salvador Allende’s government, nineteen days after Víctor Jara’s murder, and eleven days after the death in a Santiago clinic of Pablo Neruda. The poet was known to have prostate cancer. Also there was said and reported to be a doctor-administrated injection or oral dose of something deadly in the mix" (from "For Mnemosyne," at Open Space).
Stan Rice, at the time on the Creative Writing faculty at San Francisco State, follows, reading a dozen poems that would appear the following year in his debut book, Some Lamb (The Figures, 1975), involving the early death of his and his wife Anne's child, Michelle, at age six from leukemia.
- Publisher
- American Poetry Archives
- Location
- The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University
- Date
- 1973-10-04
- Event Run Time
- 01:12:37
- Contributors
- Kathleen Fraser
- Rights
©© American Poetry Archives. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For all other uses please email poetry@sfsu.edu.
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