Allen Cohen

San Francisco Oracle, Human-Be-IN, History of the Haight-Ashbury

Thursday, April 30, 2004, at 10:23 pm our dear friend Allen Cohen passed away. He just turned 64 on April 23.
If you would like to honor Allen and share an experience, a poem, your feeling on what he meant to you or an inspirational story relating to his life, please send them to nsavage@sfheart.com There is a memorial page at http://www.sfheart.com/cohen.html

Oct 2003: An Eye For an Eye makes the whole world blind poems on 9/11

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Biography and texts

Allen Cohen (e-mail : sforacle@prodigy.net)

Allen Cohen was a young poet from New York, drawn to the Haight-Ashbury by the prevailing bohemian spirit.  One night, he dreamed of a psychedelic “rainbow-colored” newspaper which would be seen throughout the world.  With the support and funding of interested locals, the first issue of “The Oracle” appeared on the streets of the Haight-Ashbury in September, 1966.  With its stunning split-fountain printing and psychedelic artwork, The Oracle was one of the most beautiful newspapers ever printed.  At its peak, over 100,000 copies a month were printed, and true to Allen’s dream, it was indeed seen around the world.

Biography

Allen Cohen was born in 1940 in Brooklyn, New York. He studied philosophy and literature at Brooklyn College and set out on his search for the holy grail leading him to San Francisco in 1963 where he became part of the new American Renaissance in the Haight Ashbury. In 1966 he founded and edited the San Francisco Oracle, the hippie psychedelic, rainbow hued, underground newspaper, and helped produce the Love Pageant Rally and the Human-Be-In.
He has written two groundbreaking books of Poetry – Childbirth is Ecstasy and the Reagan Poems. In 1990 he produced a compilation of the Oracles as The San Francisco Oracle Facsimile Edition. In 2002 he edited an anthology of poems on 9/11,An Eye For An Eye Makes The Whole World Blind. He teaches in public  schools in Oakland And Berkeley and is working on a political book, 25 Ways to Save America Before The Corporations the Fundamentalists and The Militias Take Over Completely.

The San Francisco Oracle.

The legendary psychedelic newspaper of the Haight-Ashbury . Editor Allen Cohen likes to call it “The Rosetta Stone of the Hippies.” Pioneering in its use of graphics, split-stream printing and underground distribution network, the Oracle served as spokesman, catalyst, conscience, and subsistence livelihood for the Haight.

See http://www.redhousebooks.com/catalogs/haightDetails/oracleSet3.htm

ORACLE. Oracle 1–12,  The Haight-Ashbury’s newspaper of record. San Francisco: Oracle, 1966–67.
Oracle no. 1.	Allen Cohen, ed. SF: Oracle, 1966. Tabloid, 12pp., illustrated. copy.  * The Love Pageant Rally issue.
Oracle no. 2.	Allen Cohen, ed. SF: Oracle, 1966. Tabloid, 12pp., illustrated.   * Youth Quake issue. With two illustrations by famed Beat artist Bruce Conner.
Oracle no. 3.	Allen Cohen, ed. SF: Oracle, 1966. Tabloid, 16pp., illustrated.   * Ken Kesey's Graduation Party.
Oracle no. 4.	Allen Cohen, ed. SF: Oracle, 1966. Tabloid, 18pp., illustrated. .  * Dr. Leary and the Love Book issue.
Oracle no. 5.	Allen Cohen, ed. SF: Oracle, 1967. Tabloid, 24pp., illustrated. .  * The Be-In issue.
Oracle no. 6.	First edition, second state.  Allen Cohen, ed. SF: Oracle, 1967. Tabloid, 32pp., illustrated. .  * The Aquarian Age issue. Cover by Rick Griffin. The cover price of the first printing is 15 cents.
Oracle no. 7.	Third edition.  Allen Cohen, ed. SF: Oracle, 1967. Tabloid, 52pp., illustrated. .  * The Houseboat Summitissue.
Oracle no. 8.	Second edition.  Allen Cohen, ed. SF: Oracle, 1967. Tabloid, 40pp., illustrated.   * The American Indian issue. This second edition has a hippie madonna-with-child photo on page 17.
Oracle no. 9.	Mandala man variant, red cover.  Allen Cohen, ed. SF: Oracle, 1967. Tabloid, 32pp.,   * Psychedelics, Flowers and War issue. Mandala man back cover. With Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Michael McClure, and prominent local psychics and scenesters Gavin Arthur and John Cooke.
Oracle no. 10.	Pentagon mandala edition. Orange and purple cover. Cohen, ed. SF: Oracle, 1967. Tabloid, 32pp., illustrated.   * The Politics of Ecstasy issue. On the back cover of this variant is a mandala designed by Peter Legeria, in advance of the Exorcism of the Pentagon on 21 October.
Oracle no. 11.	Red and yellow cover. Allen Cohen, ed. SF: Oracle, 1967. Tabloid, 32pp., illustrated.   * The City of God issue. With Buckminster Fuller, Gary Snyder, and Alan Watts.
Oracle no. 12.	Allen Cohen, ed. SF: Oracle, 1968. Tabloid, 32pp., illustrated. copy.  * Symposium 2000 AD and the Fall issue. With ‘Tap City,’ by Lew Welch; and Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, and art by Alton Kelley, Bob Schnepf, and Martin Linhart.

  More on the Oracle via  http://www.regentpress.net/catalog.html

	A New Look at the Summer of Love by Allen Cohen Yes, it is 35 years ago since San Francisco's biggest concern was how many of America's youth, now known as baby boomers, would descend upon the Haight Ashbury in search of the holy grail of sex, drugs and rock and roll. In the spring of '67 one of the members of the Board of Supervisors considering whether to allow the expected hoards to sleep in Golden Gate Park said, "Would you let thousands of whores waiting on the other side of the Bay Bridge into San Francisco." Of course, in the Haight Ashbury we referred to this holy grail as free love, expanded consciousness and the ecstatic experience. We looked upon that summer as the beginning of a children's crusade that would save America and the world from the ravages of war, and the inner anger that brings it forth, and materialism. We had already identified our lives with the world as a political and social entity, and the planet as a unified environment, an earth household. Love, we believed, would replace fear and small communal groups would replace the patriarchal family and mass alienation. There was two aspects to the experience of the 60s: the resistance to the war, and the psychedelic experience, personified as political activists and hippies. For the most part these two vectors overlapped in the same individuals, so that many of those who actively resisted the Vietnam war had used LSD and smoked marijuana. As a society we have tried to understand the sixties mostly as political resistance to the war, but have mostly ignored and denied the changes in values and culture brought about by psychedelic experiences. It is difficult to estimate how many people used LSD between 1965 and 1975 when the war finally ended. One chemist, who wasn't as productive as some, told me he produced and sold seven million doses. My off the cuff estimate would be that from 10 to 30 million people took LSD on the average of six times. "Tripping" was common in every area of society from the wealthy and politically powerful to the arts, sciences and media. LSD was trendy, exotic, ecstatic, messianic and dangerous. It promised psychological healing and spiritual transcendence and often delivered. It should be acknowledged that it could also cause pain ("bad trips") and psychotic breaks, and even suicides, and in the case of the Manson Family, it was an accomplice to murder. There was an aura of living dangerously on a psychological frontier that was part of its mystique. But given the amount of its use, I would say it was the one of our least destructive national obsessions. Why did so many people take this dangerous voyage? What have been its effects? To understand this we have to reconsider the Haight Ashbury, the Hippies and the Summer of Love. The predominant feeling among the Hippies from about 1965 through the summer of '67 was that they were agents and witnesses of a dawning of a new age. An age in which the warrior spirit, that had vaulted western man to the domination and potential destruction of creation, would be dissolved in the spiritual transcendence of the saint. Ghandi and Martin Luther King were our heroes and we had turned to the rich heritage of Asian mysticism and metaphysics for our inspiration and our practice. We leaped across oceans and through time to pre-Christian mythologies like the American Indian, the Egyptian and the occult and pagan philosophies of Europe. We studied with Buddhists and Indian gurus, native shamans, witches and yogis. We turned from Aristotelian and Christian dualism to the four pronged logic of Vedanta philosophy. We studied the Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching, Alan Watt's books on Zen Buddhism, Black Elk’s visions and Hermann Hesse's novels, especially Siddhartha. We wouldn't leave the house without consulting the I Ching, or our Tarot cards or our astrological charts. Were we being naive or superstitious? No, I think this was the most important and long lasting aspect of the 60s despite the backlash of the 80s.and 90s. It was the beginning of a renaissance in thought and culture similar to the Renaissance that brought Greek and Roman images and ideas back to Europe in the middle ages. Ideas that eventually led to the end of the domination of the Catholic Church, the rise of the nation state, the rebirth of democracy and the development of science. We were becoming world citizens. Peace and love weren't just slogans but states of mind and experiences that we were living and bearing witness to. Living in harmony with the earth was an ideal that we felt and perceived as real experience. We were bringing forth a second Renaissance that would change human culture. In the face of the Cold War and nuclear weapons these changes in philosophical and spiritual orientation would slowly displace the Warrior Spirit and bring us to a new stage of evolution. The transformation of the inner warrior has had its outer effect in the end of the Cold War. Gorbachev said to an American reporter, "I'm going to do a terrible thing to you. I'm going to take your enemy from you." The Summer of Love was the peak of the Haight Ashbury experience. Over 100,000 youth came to the Haight. Hoards of reporters, movie makers, FBI agents, undercover police, drug addicts, provocateurs, Mafioso and about 100,000 more tourists to watch them all followed in their wake. It was chaotic and wonderful and "heavy" as we used to say, and the experience was shared and spread throughout the world. The police and Tac Squad raided the street every weekend gradually driving most of the originators to all parts of the world to plant the seeds of change. The process of cultural liberation began in the seventies with the conscious drive for Women's' Liberation and Gay Liberation and the Black Liberation movement, so brutally feared and attacked by the CIA and FBI. Yes, political reaction set in, but that didn't stop the new ideas from spreading. We have seen the rise of psychological insight, alternative medicine, and spiritual values and practices in the New Age Movement. The tremendous interest in ecology and whole planet thinking began then, and the continuing call to the young to rebellion and awakening, through the liberating effect of rock and roll music in all its permutations emanated from the Sixties. The beginnings of the computer revolution also has its roots firmly in the sixties Many of the founders of the desktop computer had their minds altered by the use of psychedelic drugs. Their revolt against the elitism of the mainframe paralleled the “distrust authority” attitude of the hippies and the anti-war movement. Their minds had been moved by the “language of light.” In the eighties the new ideas and values spread to Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and even China. The deeper meanings of Peace, Love and Community spread through the universality of the music, and the ideas of the pilgrims that had experienced or been influenced by the cauldron of the Sixties. In Prague, Chekoslovakia during the peaceful revolution there, John Lennon's "Imagine" was sung by 200,000 people as they sung the Communist dictatorship down. Esalen Institute had been doing exchanges and training in the former Soviet Union since the Seventies. In Tianamen Square the Chinese students played Beatles' and Rolling Stones' music over loud speakers. Most recently the students marching in the streets of Belgrade against the Milosevic dictatorship were giving flowers to the soldiers standing in their path, as we had done at the Pentagon in 1967. As we approach the millennium, the wave of peace, this eternal yearning of the soul, continues to sweep over the world. Age old rivalries and hatreds and injustices are dissolving. Sometimes the pain heightens before the medicine of mediation and peace can be applied. But things definitely are a-changin' between the Palestinians and Jews, the Muslims and Croats and Serbs, the many colored people of South Africa, and even the British and Irish. As we had predicted, the Sixties generation has entered the White House but with so many forces pulling at its skirts that too much has been compromised to the attacks and resistance of the right wing and reaction has set in like a fog bank. In the rottenness and corruption of the political system and its control by corporate interests and Christian fundamentalism there seems to be a return to the 19th century. But it can only be a brief reflex reaction to the tremendous forces of change that are beginning to transform the world. A new generation of youth are trance dancing in floating laser illuminated warehouse dances called Raves in San Francisco and Acid House and Acid Jazz in England. There is a mood of change that again threatens to overturn the reactionary and puritanical grip on American culture perpetrated by corporate power and religious fundamentalism. The gap between the rich and the poor increases and Corporate arrogance loots the middle class. But the Era of Compassion born in the Sixties, and repressed in the Eighties and crucified in the 90s may be ready to be reborn into the forefront of American culture. Open the door the future is coming through! copyright 1995 Allen Cohen References:
	E-mail to Allen: sforacle@prodigy.net Regent-press at www.regentpress.net
	http://www.woodstocknation.org/sforacle.htm
	http://www.woodstocknation.org/zorro.htm
	http://www.woodstocknation.org/allen1995.htm
	http://www.sixties.com

"ZORRO"
from
HAT POEMS

A man wearing old, brown
     leather jacket, pants
        slipping down his legs,

teeth missing from his mouth,
      one of the mad wraiths
        who haunt North Beach

asks me for a Zorro hat.
        I give him black, flat crown,
wide brim Flamenco dancer hat.

He smiles toothlessly and says,
      "That's it!" He tries it on,
             tilts it and looks into the mirror.

"You think I can do it, man.
       You think I can be Zorro.”
          "You can be whoever you want," I answer.

"Zorro's my hero, man
       like Jesus is yours."
          "No, I am my own hero," I say.

"I got to get the rest of it --
       black on black and some steel."
         He pretends to whip out a sword.

"You think I can do it, man?
      Am I Zorro?"
         "Go for it, if you want."
Will you hold it for me, man.
       I'll be back before Halloween.
          I'll be back."

by
Allen Cohen

Oct 2003: An Eye For an Eye makes the whole world blind poets on 9/11

Regent-press at www.regentpress.com
Book can be ordered from Allen Cohen at
sforacle@prodigy.net

The Fallen Tower - September 11, 2001

Images indelibly burned
into the silver coated mind.
Planes flying into towers,
erotic symbols of power and wealth.
The towers falling in upon themselves
like a person slowly kneeling
in submission to a divine will.
But inside the debris
lie the crushed and torn bodies
of 3000 workers. Their dreams
and their futures terminated.
Their loved ones walking aimlessly
around lower Manhattan holding
the pictures of their lost loves
bled from their computer printers.
Five thousand lines of future history
sucked into death’s black hole.


Words merely describing the images
spreading a dread into the light
while darkness remains adorned
by the ominous moon
and its necklace of stars.


The vast world encircling
web America has secured
to the four directions
is now shattered and torn.
The threads of our security,
our wealth, and enormous power
are ruptured and we will try
to repair the emptiness
and fill it with the marching bands
of military might and righteous anger


The spider will flail and destroy and injure
the guilty and the innocent
and more enemies will find
new ways to blind Cyclops
and defeat Goliath with a slingshot.


We are the leaders.
We who care about all life.
We who imagine a shared humanity
on a lonely planet floating through the heavens.
We who care about our endangered future.
We who are disheartened
about our enormous appetite
exploiting peoples all over the world.
We who want an end to oil politics
and to begin a new era based
on the natural energies
the creation has provided us.
We who need to live
for the well being of all.
We to whom the saints taught
of love and compassion.
We to whom the martyrs in those
crushed buildings and the fiery jets,
their ghosts hovering in our hearts,
have called not to revenge
but to a new crusade
of reconciliation between nations,
between the rich and poor
between humanity and nature
between the present
and our children’s future.

Allen Cohen

Some will interpret our so called liberation of Iraq as similar to the liberation from Egypt but I think this poem undermines that comparison.

Allen Cohen

On the Liberation of Iraq - Passover 2003
                                               for Albert Nieman

Ali, the boy with no hands,
collateral damage
in a barrage from hell,
wants to commit suicide
if Americans can't replace
the hands they burned into oblivion.

In the birthplace of Abraham
in the Garden of Eden
where writing began
where the first laws
were inscribed into stone
America has sacrificed
libraries and museums of antiquities
while protecting the oil ministry
for its records of oil fields
and the Ministry of the Interior
where the secret police dwelled
with there juicy information on every one.

The barbarians have invaded
and it is called liberation
killing mercilessly
but never counting the bodies.

History recalls the Romans slaughtering
500,000 Carthaginians to dominate
trade routes in the Mediterranean.
But the Pentagon won't count
the dead and wounded in the Iraq carnage.

It might frighten the free people
of America and upset Arabs and Europeans.
It might make some patriots
embarrassed, remorseful or shocked
by the horror of war - the burnt bodies
severed limbs, and decapitations,
the children wounded and orphaned,
the mothers bereft of their children and husbands
even the soldiers shoveled in heaps into mass graves.

Then there might be a call
beginning as a whisper and rising
to a shout and then a prayer
for the end of war
for the healing of wounds
for truces and treaties
for nuclear disarmament
for the beating of guns
into food and shelter and medicine.

Then we will awake
from the nightmare of history
and overthrow the yolk of oil and empire.

But there I go again
dreaming of a new paradigm,
an alternative universe
expecting miracles
like Moses and Aaron in Egypt
and Tom Paine in America
and Gandhi in India,
like the creation itself
and the consciousness
that imagines these visions.

Next Year - in a new transfigured world.

Allen Cohen
April 18, 2003 

May 2003

Allen Cohen

The American Muse

Whatever happened to the American Muse?
The Diva whose voice leads us through the labyrinth.
Back in the twenties with the birth of the blues
came Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey peeling away
the shell that smothers the feelings of the nation.
They begat Billie Holiday who led us into the racial darkness.
And she and Lena Horne begat Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn,
Dinah Washington and Della Reese who brought joy into blues
and lit dark tunnels leading closer to the Minotaur.
And they begat the white divas of the big bands
Rosemary Clooney, and Peggy Lee and they brought forth
Judy Garland who sang from the molecules of a healing wound.
And then came the gospel-soul singers Mahalia Jackson and Aretha Franklin
Adding the passion of prayer, the calling forth of the god.
And then came TV and muses appeared to everyone
And From Mahalia and Aretha and Judy came forth Barbara Streisand
who could sing in octaves never heard before.
And then came the sweet calm voice of Joan Baez
bringing serene thoughtfulness in a time of war.

And Joan before the music died begat Janis Joplin roaring
-appearing from blues time long forgotten
a brief flame - muse of the hippie fire.
Then as the muse becomes lost in the labyrinth of mass culture
America begins its decline and the empire is born.

Whitney Houston brings gospel, soul and blues
together with the new public sexuality
and at the same moment rose Madonna
the material girl stripping all pretense from teenage sex.
And Whitney and Madonna begat Mariah Carey
and the voices get higher and louder
screaming out onto the streets and prairies,
and the clothes begin to disappear
shining with sequins and diamonds, flimsy with lace.
And Mariah Carey begets Brittany Spears and
Christina Aguilar and Jennifer Lopez and Star Search
And suddenly rising from the underworld
calling forth the bourgeoisie hypnotized by media
comes Celine Dion flying across stages in Las Vegas
in costumes clinging to invisible curves.

From all over America everyman and every woman
and their children mount their trucks and SUVS
with rifles on their windows and hand guns
and condoms in glove compartments
drawn to the newest muse singing
songs of love and longing
so high and shrill no word can be heard
shouts of a daemonic empire ripping
across an unsuspecting world,
slipping out into the silence of the universe
frightening whatever beings might be awaiting
our call their ears now astounded and deafened.

Where is the American Muse?
We are lost in the labyrinth.
The Minotaur comes ever closer
and we search for the healing voice.

The Bruce Latimore Show – Tribute to A Magical Isle After 600 Shows

thru William Shakespeare and Mike Somavilla.

Shooting toward the coast

through San Francisco

down Highway 1

the ocean kissing

the darkening beaches.

As the sun sets

its rays dart

toward the waves

turning the skies golden.

Ann’s stand up bass

lying quietly in its cover

in the the back of the Honda.

Heading to Pacifica Studio

to play on Bruce Latimore’s

community cable variety show.

Ann wearing white Grecian dress

looking like a goddess

plays stand up bass

while I dressed in rainbow tie dyes

read elegies of Ginsberg or Garcia

or latest political rant

hand poking the air.

Then we move to

Bruce’s Fortress Desk

and talk about Sixties

or the Oracle or children

or Ann’s drawings or paintings.

Bruce cool, no sweat

Prospero on his magical isle

The crew hovering behind camera

fingers keeping track of time.

The next act waiting on deck

600 shows, a cast of thousands

We could be followed or preceded

by Ramblin Jack Elliot,

his cowboy hat aging on his head.

Or Al Jazzbo Collins making

his last appearance before he joins

the jazz bands in heaven.

Or Country Joe singing to

prevent more wars .

Or Fruminous Bandersnatch

remembering rocking Berkeley

Or the many veterans

of the San Francisco Sound

Mike Wilhelm of the Charlatans

Jerry Miller of Moby Grape,

Darby Slick of Great Society

Sam Andrews of Big Brother

Jorma Kaukonen of Jefferson Airplane

Lisa Kindred singing the Blues,

Chet Helms impresario of the Sixties

George Michalski accompanying everyone

with a thousand fingers on the piano,

Rock Scully from inside the Grateful Dead,

Zero carrying the Sound into the nineties.

JC Flyer chronicler of the music

playing with his country band.

The Pacifica fog

surrounds the studio

the ghosts have risen

and come back to life.

Bruce waves his arms.

Like Prospero

requiring some heavenly music

he has brought us all forth

the elves and angels

the known, the unknown

the should be known

the never will be known and

the should never be known

and by his potent art

and rough magic

has worked his purpose

upon the world’s senses.

Allen Cohen

The Love that Stretches Us

April 23, 2003, 63rd birthday

It’s that day again.

Usually I call friends

and party at the Bocce Café

with pasta and wine flowing

jazz trio in the background.

But this year I have turned the curve

toward a possible end of journey.

I have been through blood tests

sound scans, cat scans, MRIs , nuclear scans.

and the medical world of dire possibilities

and invasive hopes that tearing and cutting my body

will revive my threatened life.

Yet, I am feeling well enough

even as the virus and tumors

attack my liver.

While America indulges in belligerent ignorance

my internal war overshadows my will,

obsesses my mind, not with fear

but with a sadness, a sense of loss –

that I will not hold a woman

in my arms again nor

hear Miles Davis again, or Trane

nor Beethoven’s last quartets,

or the Beatle’s “Here Comes The Sun,”

nor watch Barry Bonds stroke another homer.

Will I be able to remember Jackie Robinson

dancing dangerously off third base

then head down stealing home?

Will my spirit be able to dance

to the Dead or the Airplane

as I did flowingly at the Avalon?

Will the sweet smell of Rhododendron petals

follow me through the darkness?

While the doctors guard the frontiers of my body

I search for a kind, compassionate hand

and a miracle herb or mushroom.

I know I want to live.

I have worshipped the muse

waiting for her renewing initiation

into the doors of the word and

what lies behind the dark halls

through which the poem leads.

And I have lived for Peace

to reveal its true implications

for the harmony and survival of the world,

merging the inner peace and

peace with each other and among nations.

And for love – the love that stretches us

beyond ourselves and merges

with unspeakable consciousness

that knows no bounds

the all in one universe

that explosion from a compressed point

from a dynamic infinite thought

creating gases and galaxies and planets,

and all matter seen and unseen

of which we are an appearance

continually wandering and wondering

searching, experiencing flowing and falling

until we pass into something or somewhere else.

a moonless night, a flickering light, a dream.

Allen Cohen

An Afternoon At The Eel River

Sitting alone above the Eel River

The wind playing my eardrum.

The rush of water upon rock

like the cellos in an orchestra.

I sit there beneath a blue sky

between the fog belt and

the hot valley air stream.

So long since I’ve left the city.

A King snake shimmies across

old rusting railroad tracks.

Foundation blocks reveal

an old structure to haul logs

down from the hills

and up from the river

onto waiting flatcars.

The feel of the silence

opening into the aloneness

as if I were the purple vetch

growing amidst the browning

weeds and grasses.

Sitting as always between

the past and future,

between birth and death

a breath added to the wind.