HAPPY BIRTHDAY

April 2, 1945 ~ born Anne Waldman in Millville, is a poet, performance artist, literary theorist, feminist, and cultural activist. Waldman, with Ginsberg, founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and she remains a Distinguished Professor of Poetics.

Anne Waldman: Poetry in Performance (youtube)

April 4, 1928 ~ born in St. Louis, Missouri, Maya Angelou, poet, journalist, an actor of screen and stage, a director, a civil rights activist, a Pulitzer Prize nominee and a professor.
Maya Angelou (wikipedia)

April 11, 1944 ~ Csaba Polony, Artist/Writer/Editor/Publisher of Left Curve magazine for 38 years, which grew from an obscure Bay Area journal to an internationally acclaimed compilation of critical thought, political analysis, and artistic expression. Csaba died peacefully at his home on March 9, 2014.
Csaba Polony.com

March 2, 1927 ~ poet Philip Lamantia was born in San Francisco's Excelsior neighborhood to Sicilian immigrants. In his freshman year in high school, he saw a retrospective exhibition of Dali and Miró, which made such a strong impression that he embraced Surrealism. He was a Member of the San Francisco Beat Generation poets and The Surrealist Movement in the United States. Lamantia died of heart failure on March 7 at his apartment in San Francisco. He was 77.

April 16, 1844, born, Anatole France, poet, journalist, and novelist in Paris. He was a member of the Académie française, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921. On May 31, 1922, France's entire works were put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum of the Roman Catholic Church.
Anatole France (Wikipedia)

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. ~Anatole France

April 18, 1925
~ HAPPY BIRTHDAY ~ BOB KAUFMAN ~

(photo: Bob Kaufman @ Jean Carlisle)
Poet Bob Kaufman was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. In 1959, Bob Kaufman was a founder of Beatitude magazine.

"He was an original voice. No one else talked like him. No one else wrote poetry like him."
...Lawrence Ferlinghetti

April 15, 1452 ~ Leonardo da Vinci was born on this day. Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian polymath, being a scientist, botanist, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, and writer. He has often been described as the archetype of the renaissance man.

April 23, 1941 ~ Allen Cohen was born in Brooklyn, New York, and in the early '60s he was a writer, a poet and one of the founders and editor of the SF Oracle underground rainbow newspaper, first published in the Haight in September 1966. Allen was a visionary and a champion for peace and justice and an inspiration to his generation. Wavy Gravy said Allen Cohen was "tie-dyed to the bone," and many believe it was Allen Cohen who was the inspiration for the song "When you're going to San Francisco." Allen died on April 30, 2004, one week after his 64th birthday.

This year EARTH DAY will be FRIDAY, APRIL 22, 2022