Author: BEECHER, John
Title: Inquest
Description: San Francisco, Morning Star Press, 1957. Leaflet. Small 4to (7" X 11"). Front wrapper features rubber block print by Barbara Beecher. Hand set and hand printed by Beecher. Fine. First separate printing. This moving poem eulogizes William K. Sherwood, a young cancer researcher who on June 17, 1957 swallowed poison -- two days before he was to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Beecher, whose strong feelings about McCarthy's tactics were well known, must have spontaneously composed this angry and moving poem, set the type and printed this leaflet post haste in order to produce it within the same month as Sherwood's suicide. The poem even makes subtle reference to the "fierce resentment of being televised" mentioned in his suicide note. Beecher pointedly describes "his sweating face / on TV screens across the land, a kind / of super-pillory where all may mock / and spit at him, his wife and children shamed / in all the circles where they move.." Beecher concludes, "And so he took the poison. What would you / have had him do, members of the Committee?" One of the great American protest and radical poets, Beecher left his steel mill background to teach English and sociology at various universities; he worked various positions under the New Deal; his first published poem, "And I Will Be Heard" (1940), placed him on the literary map, and the book-length narrative poem "Here I Stand" came the following year; during World War Two he sailed aboard the first racially integrated ship, the S.S. Booker T. Washington, and wrote about those experiences in "All Brave Sailors"; blacklisted from teaching by refusing to sign a state loyalty oath in California in 1950, he became a rancher and farmer in Sonoma County; there he continued writing, founding the award-winning Morning Star Press in 1956 to publish his poetry and other socially-oriented pieces, becoming a gifted and accomplished practitioner in the process; this press then operated from San Francisco, Berkeley, and Jerome, Arizona; renamed Rampart Press, it relocated to Scottsdale, Arizona and other locales; "Report to the Stockholders & Other Poems" appeared in 1962 to critical acclaim and "To Live and Die in Dixie" in 1966; these later years were filled with guest teaching positions from Massachusetts to California, and Beecher was in great demand as a lecturer and poetry reader nationwide; descended from famed Abolitionists Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lyman Beecher, much of John Beecher's poetry concerns itself with race relations, labor reform and other social injustices. .

Keywords: Poetry


See more books from our catalog: Books