In the fall of 1970, I saw a notice in a newspaper that the British poet Michael Horowitz was putting on a poetry reading. I had purchased a copy of his anthology, CHILDREN OF ALBION, just the week before and had been spending a fair amount of time reading the work of Adrian Mitchell, Roger McGough, Brian Patten, Pete Brown, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Spike Hawkins, John Cotton, Anselm Hollo, Edwin Morgan, Tom Raworth, Gael Turnbull, and John Arden. Fortunately, I spotted the notice just in time to attend and read one of my own poems. The most memorable moment in the evening was Bernard Kops’s “Shalom Bomb,” which was received with considerable appreciative laughter and applause. It would take me years to fully absorb everything I learned from his poem and his performance of it, but even as I was hearing it out loud, I recognized that it was a crucial early lesson in poetry directed to the public sphere. Given the history of terrorism by bad actors the past half-ceniury, on behalf of any number of dubious causes and insidious organizations, Kops’s poem remains one of te great rebukes of that kind of reprehensible behavior that I have ever encountered.
You can find Kops’s poem in Horowitz’s anthology, CHILDREN OF ALBION, as well as on-line.
https://www.andrewwhitehead.net/blog/shalom-bomb-for-peace
About Bill Mohr