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50 Years Ago This Week: the Love Book Arrests to Ban Lenore Kandel’s Poetry
Censorship at the cusp of the Beats and the Summer of Love
I am the god-animal, the mindless cuntdeity the hegod-animal
is over me, through me we are become one total angel
united in fire united in semen and sweat united in lovescreamsacred our acts and our actions
sacred our parts and our personsFrom "To Fuck with Love Phase II", The Love Book by Lenore Kandel
“When a society is afraid of its poets, it is afraid of itself. A society afraid of itself stands as another definition of hell.” -Lenore Kandel
50 years ago this week,on November 15, 1966, San Francisco police inspectors arrested workers at the Psychedelic Book Shop and at City Lights Bookstore for possession of pornography with intent to sell.
The material in question? A book of poetry, The Love Book, by Lenore Kandel, whose brilliant work weaves together themes of sex, zen, and the political and cultural climate of the sixties.
You can see some footage of an ensuing protest here.
The police action to remove the book was part of a symbolic power-wielding by newly elected right-wing celebrity-cum-govenor, Ronald Reagan.
As Peter Coyote describes in Sleeping Where I Fall:
In 1966, Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California, promising to punish the mouthy students acting up in Berkeley and to fry the inmates on San Quentin’s death row. His victory signaled a sea change in the social climate, and about a week later, the Psychedelic Shop was raided by the police, who seized copies of Lenore’s erotic poems, The Love Book. These graphic paeans to monogamous love and sex had been published before, and since you could walk into any street corner and buy hard-core pornography or open a men’s magazine for steamier stuff, our community perceived this as Reagan’s attack on the psychedelic culture.
The case went to trial in April 1967. From an article by Jeffrey M. Burns:
The high point for the defense came with their initial witness — the poet herself, Lenore Kandel. Ms. Kandel added a theatrical dimension to the…
