poetry

Erich Muehsam was born in Berlin in 1878 into a fairly well-to-do Jewish family. Soon after his family moved to Luebeck in north Germany where his father worked as a pharmacist (in fact the pharmacy is still there).

Remembering Jim Duke
"I started performing poems as a timid person with a stutter but the spirit of the times soon converted me into a bellowing bull." Jim Duke

“The voice played like a human saxophone.” Nicholas Zurbrugg

Louisa Bevington was born into a Quaker family on 18th May 1845, in St. John’s Hill, Battersea. The occupation of her father was described as a “gentleman”. She was the oldest of eight children, seven of whom were girls. She started writing verse at an early age.

Virgilia d’Andrea
Born Sulmona-Abruzzi, Italy, 11 February 1890, died New York, 20 March 1932

Labor power on the market,
Firepower on the battlefield,
It is all one merely two
Aspects of the same monster.
The Dragon and the Unicorn

Philip Levine was born in the industrial city of Detroit to parents of Russian Jewish origin in 1928. Detroit was the home of Father Coughlin, a notorious anti-Semitic Catholic priest who broadcast on the radio every Sunday. He spent most of his childhood and adolescence fighting people who wanted to beat him up because he was Jewish.

The late 1960s and the 1970s were strange and violent years in Italy.