Over the weekend, I found out how timely my recent Jack Kerouac post was when I stumbled over a notice at Flavorwire announcing that the legendary counterculture magazine Evergreen Review was about to undergo a 21st century reboot. Here’s the word…

One of the most influential and essential American literary publications will return to readers after a long hiatus. Today it was announced that Evergreen Review, the longtime project of storied editor and publisher Barney Rosset (who passed away in 2012), will return in a partnership with the independent publisher OR Books. The joint venture will bring Evergreen’s properties — including titles by Samuel Beckett and Marguerite Duras — under the management of OR’s innovative direct-to-consumer publishing model.

Evergreen began in 1957 as a quarterly distributed in the form of trade paperbacks. Its first issue, a harbinger of what would follow for two decades, featured Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, and an interview with Jazz drummer Baby Dodds. The second issue showcased a pre-On the Road Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder, among many others.

The Review would go on to become the premier publisher of countercultural literature in the United States. Among the epic catalog of writers it launched or helped establish: Susan Sontag, Jean Genet, Ocatavio Paz, Robert Coover, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, and William S. Burroughs, whose Naked Lunch was first excerpted in its pages.

Music, politics, sex, and art were also widely represented by Evergreen. Gerald Ford famously maligned the magazine on the floor of Congress for printing the likeness of Richard Nixon next to a nude photo. And the Review’s offices were bombed in 1968, after issue #51’s cover, which featured a portrait of Che Guevara, infuriated anti-Castro Cubans.

OR also announced today that it will publish Barney Rosset’s autobiography, The Subject Is Left Handed, in winter of 2016. Rosset, born in Chicago, is remembered as one of the most active and important editors and publishers in the history of American letters. He is perhaps most famous for publishing the uncensored versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer. Both publications led to protracted legal battles that placed obscenity and censorship at the center of literary discourse.

Celebrating the return of ER, here’s Jack Kerouac’s classic poem “October in the Railroad Earth” which was published in the second, Beat-oriented issue of Evergreen Review‘s original run…

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Writer Amiri Baraka was born Everett Leroi Jones in 1934, but changed his name in 1961. Baraka’s poetry included insightful and incendiary critiques of social mores and politics during a time when the American way of life at home and at work, in the bedroom and the boardroom and at the ballot box was being held up to a harsh light and called into question.

In his musical, propulsive verses, Baraka asked a lot of questions of his country and his neighbors and himself. He was also that rare artist who transitioned from the philosophizing and experimenting of the Beat culture of the 1950′s to immerse himself in the direct action of the creative revolutions of the 1960′s. Kerouac couldn’t manage the cross-over, but Baraka did, following right behind Allen Ginsberg — the Beat writer whom Baraka’s insistent lines most clearly recalled. Here’s what Reality Studios has to say about Baraka’s Beat credentials:

My interest in Jones centers on his Beat phase lasting until the mid 1960s. This work would make an outstanding collection. In 2000, Brown University showcased its Jones holdings and the Beat pieces really spoke to me. I was especially struck by Jones’ work as an editor. It seems like he had his hands in every major magazine coming out of New York City in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Yugen, Floating Bear, Kulchur. This does not include his founding of Totem Press and that press’s publications with Cornith Books. Jones published Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Ed Dorn, Diane Di Prima, and Paul Blackburn.

More recently, Baraka proved he still knew how to ruffle feathers in high places when his 2002 poem “Somebody Blew Up America” questioned the official story behind the 9/11 attacks, creating enough controversy to lose Baraka his status as New Jersey’s Poet Laureate. Here’s the Beatdom take on the controversial poem:

With the death of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., (who visited Baraka’s Newark home a week before his murder), he left the mostly-white Bohemian literary scene and the environs of the East Village to take up a more radical stance towards Black Nationalism. But despite his distancing himself from the Beats in the mid-sixties, Baraka read poetry and attended panel discussions at Beat-haven Naropa Institute through the 1980-90s, and remained friends with Ginsberg until Allen’s death in 1997.

More recently his poem, “Somebody Blew Up America,” brought an end to his New Jersey “Poet Laureate” post when Governor Jim McGreevey took umbrage to the poem’s questioning of the events surrounding the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Centers. The “Who?’ of the exploding owl in the poem echoes the angst of Ginsberg’s voice in “Howl.” Having heard Ginsberg recite live from ten feet away, this writer finds both poems equally as exciting and important.

Here is Amiri Baraka reading “Somebody Blew Up America”

The poet died today. He was 79.

If you’re interested in more about Baraka’s Beat roots, download this outstanding, complete .pdf collection of Yugen from Reality Studio.

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Frank O’Hara would’ve turned 87 in March if he hadn’t been hit by a dune buggy on Fire Island in 1966. O’Hara was a category straddling artist who wouldn’t be boxed-in by the preconceived boundaries that separated – and continue to separate – artists and the people who organize and comment on their work.

O’Hara curated exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and he also wrote arts criticism. He was also one of the most-celebrated of the post-Beat poets and was the de facto face of the New York School of poetry. He denounced the company of the New York literati, preferring to hang out with painters like Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell and Larry Rivers. Like these artists, O’Hara thought of his individual poems as records of the process that created them, and of his poetry as a whole as a kind of creative diary of his life.

Here is a short film that stays focused on the man and his work, and features a number of readings of some of the poet’s better known pieces. “Having a Coke with You” is the slam-bang closer here, but the whole provides a nice primer on O’Hara. This short doc is one of twelve portraits of poets from Richard O. Moore’s USA: Poetry series from 1966. O’Hara died weeks after this footage was shot, making the following scenes read like both snapshots of a creative life and a too-soon memorial.