Ted Wilentz was an old and I hoped close friend , "back in the day!"
Together, Ted his brother, Eli, and I initiated the Totem-Corinth Book
series, which included Allen Ginsberg's first, unpublished book of poetry,
"Empty Mirror" (Fee Dawson's cover), Kerouac's ..."Golden Eternity" (Dawson
cover), O'Hara's "Second Ave" (w Larry Rivers' cover) my own first, "Preface
To A Twenty Volume Suicide Note" (w/ the Basil King cover... before he turned
 "white"  watching TV and  helped turn me "black").
      The Wilentz Bros (Corinth)  and I (Totem)  did  Snyder, Whalen, "Four
Young Lady Poets", Olson's still underunderstood "Projective Verse",  The
Moderns, a hardcover anthology of fiction, Burroughs, Rumaker, Creeley, Di
Prima, Dorn, Shelby, Metcalf, Kerouac , Eastlake, Rechy , Woolf, Edson,
Dawson, Jones...edited by LeRoi Jones before any of them guys, save Kerouac,
had much rep. ('Apr '63).
      This was a few months before JFK got iced (Nov '63) by the same
forces in the caucasian crib right now, with it's Counterfeit President for a
Fake Democracy!
That was one step away from all that, another toward this.

      Two years later Malcolm was murdered, and that whole era got in the
wind.
     Add the other Kennedy and Dr. King, and even the bizaare backwardness
of giving Totem Corinth entirely to the Wilentzes, which I did in some fit of
 continuing  rage at Malcolm's assassination  seems merely historical and
distant than understandable.
     Looking back, as if memory were as real as the future, I remember Ted
as one of the uncynical optimists of that age, and though our later relations
were wallpapered with some of the rude  crankery of those and these times,
facing each other, no matter, as diverse sons of two nations side by side and
one inside the other, we tried to be  as useful to each other and  as honest.
as our socialization would permit. Which every time I look at Bush 2 or The
Colon, is worth accolades, even if only  to each other, over our shoulders,
from our  twinned selves.

Amiri B, June 2001

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