Poet Eliot Katz and musician Adam Bernstein collaborate on often political ‘Peace Talk Poems’ album

VIVIAN DEMUTH

ELIOT KATZ

Hoboken poet, author and activist Eliot Katz dedicated his poem “Imagine Again” — from his spoken word album Peace Talk Poems, created in collaboration with composer/bassist Adam Bernstein — to John Lennon. And like the activist Beatle, Katz conjures a world without war. Eliot writes in this hopeful poetic meditation:

Imagine a de-militarized Middle East and then imagine a completely de-militarized world.
It’s not so easy these days, but please try.

“Enough people have to envision a better world before it can be created,” Katz says. “I hope that ‘Imagine Again,’ partly by reminding people of John Lennon’s great song, helps to urge people to continue that envisioning process. But one also has to be a realist and acknowledge that our current world is a long way from that kind of utopian society.

“I think some of our best U.S. and international poetry mixes both the realism of empirical observations, and surrealist utopian vision.”

He and Bernstein recorded this album, which is available at adambernstein.bandcamp.com/album/peace-talk-poems and other streaming sites, to raise their voices in opposition to the Trump administration and wars in Gaza and Ukraine. His poems also honor love, poet Allen Ginsberg and other subjects. Contributing musicians include violinist Claudia Chopek, cellist Eleanor Norton and clarinetist Matt Snyder.

“At my core, I’m an optimist with the belief that humans, if enough people work together effectively, can help create a better world with much less racism, sexism, and homophobia — with no wars and with far more international cooperation; with much less poverty and homelessness; and with healthier medical and environmental policies,” he says.

His poems are illuminated by hypnotic, eerie and contemplative musical accompaniment. Like many of his poems, his elegy to Allen Ginsberg is haunting.

We talked recently about the album, his background, and his life as a writer and activist.

ADAM BERNSTEIN

Q: I love the musical accompaniment. Tell me about how you blended your poetry with the music. How did it come together?

A: Adam and I had done about a dozen live poetry/music collaborations, including at the renowned Court Tavern (in New Brunswick), during our years of living in Central Jersey more than 30 years ago. About a year ago, just as I was starting to organize a poetry/music benefit for NJ Peace Action at Hoboken’s 503 Social Club, I heard some terrific songs from Adam’s then-new album, Waiting for Ceasefire, so I invited Adam to be part of that show. A few months later, Adam asked me if I wanted to work on putting together a digital album of antiwar and anti-Trump poems accompanied by his music and, of course, I jumped on that. Well, I moved quickly on it, since I don’t jump so easily these days with my 68-year-old knees.

We had originally planned on focusing only on antiwar and anti-Trump poems, but after we started the project, things were sounding good and we were really enjoying working together, so we decided to go wider and include some of my best poems through the years on various other themes, including a talk with T. Rex — the dinosaur, not the band; my elegy for Allen Ginsberg; an ode to the vegetable aisle; an elegy for a dear young Central Jersey musician friend of ours, Mark Bradley; and a love poem for my partner, Vivian, from deep in the boreal forest of the Canadian Rockies.

In terms of the process, while we had done live poetry/bass collaborations decades earlier, this time Adam wanted to put several different instruments on each piece, including with a few outside guest musicians. So this time, I read these poems first in Adam’s studio in Queens, and then Adam added the music afterwards. As people know who have followed Adam since he led a 12-piece band, All God’s Children, in New Brunswick in the 1990s, he is an amazingly skilled and inventive musician, so I think he was able to illuminate each of the 18 poems in different ways.

ROBERT FRANK

ALLEN GINSBERG, 1926-1997

Q: I understand that Allen Ginsberg called you “another classic New Jersey bard.” Tell me about your connection to him.

A: Allen Ginsberg was a one-time teacher who I studied with at Naropa Institute in Boulder during the summer of 1980, and then a dear, longtime poet-activist friend until his death in 1997.

I first met Allen briefly in 1976 when a slightly older poet friend, Kevin Hayes, who was hosting Allen’s reading at Rutgers, asked me if I could drive Allen back home to NYC after the reading. That night, Allen gave (Hoboken poet) Danny Shot, Kevin and me a great automobile tour of interesting and historic sites on the Lower East Side on the way to his apartment on East 12th Street.

But I think Allen would have remembered meeting me from my work at Naropa as his apprentice for a month in the summer of 1980, when as a young 23-year-old poet, I helped Allen with his very busy correspondence (via letters and phone calls, before email) and with typing up his sometimes difficult-to-read notebook journals and poems, in exchange for really helpful suggestions about my early poems. One of the things I learned from Allen, including from his poem “Howl,” was the value of mixing realism — including direct perceptions — and surrealism in poetry. The philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote that surrealism, by using images not yet existing in the actual world, can imply the possibility of creating a different and better world.

Two years after I had studied with Allen, I was part of a younger poets’ midnight reading … with Allen reading a few poems to open the event at a large and now-historic 1982 Jack Kerouac Festival at Naropa. Allen really liked the way my poems had improved, and from that night on, he began promoting my work as among his favorite next-generations poets — mentioning me in interviews when he was asked about his favorite younger poets, inviting me to open up for him at some really interesting large readings (including a reading in 1986 at Rutgers that also included Gregory Corso), recommending my work to reading venues and to book and journal publishers, and writing both an introduction and a back-cover blurb for my first full-length book, “Space and Other Poems for Love, Laughs, and Social Transformation.”

Besides appreciating my poetry, Allen also appreciated that I was a political activist, and he was supportive of a number of activist project that I worked on through the years, including an artists against apartheid campaign in the mid-1980s and a national student activist convention at Rutgers in 1998, for which Abbie Hoffman was our main outside advisor. I continue to work with Abbie’s wife and co-organizer, Johanna Lawrenson, on some Abbie-related projects.

I opened up for Allen, along with Cheryl Clarke, at a reading during one of the national student activist convention’s nights. And through the years, Allen always took my phone call … he always answered my letters and sent me letters from many of his foreign travels, and we often went out to a late dinner with small groups after some of his NYC readings. My letters from Allen, and from other well-known poets and activists, have been donated to the NYU Library.

I wrote a personal essay about my poet/activist friendship with Allen, “Recalling Allen,” which is in the prose section of my website, and I also wrote a readable scholarly book about Allen: “The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg.”

Allen died in April 1997, and in 1998, I helped his estate organize a tribute for Allen at NYC’s St. John the Divine Cathedral that drew in 2,500 people. That event included some of Allen’s poet and activist friends, including Bob Rosenthal (as host), Dave Dellinger, Anne Waldman, Andy Clausen and me, and also the musicians Patti Smith, Natalie Merchant, Philip Glass, David Amram, David Greenberg and The Fugs.

I will also be helping Allen’s estate to organize some poetry/music celebrations next June, which would have been Allen’s 100th birthday.

Q: Your elegy on the album for Ginsberg is very moving. Tell me about your writing process and your reference to Chicago ’68 and Rolling Thunder.

A: Mostly, I write poems when I feel moved to write about a subject, often after something meaningful — positive or negative — happens in my life or after reading something that hits me in the news, since, as a longtime political activist, I do like to write a lot of poems about politics, current events and history — in the hopes of both giving some inspiration and energy to activists and progressive thinkers who care about similar issues, and maybe helping to inspire some young people to think about these kinds of political issues in new ways.

Allen’s death in April 1997 from liver cancer was sudden — only a few weeks from his diagnosis. So I wrote my elegy while still very sad and very stunned, just a week or two after his death, and those events you highlight above, from my poem, like Chicago ’68 and Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Tour, were historical references in relation to Allen, whose public history I know very well.

CAROLINE SHOT

Eliot Katz with Danny Shot.

Q: When did you start writing poetry? Can you share a few highlights from your journey?

A: I never liked poetry in high school because it was taught in a way that made it seem irrelevant to contemporary times. In my first year at Rutgers, beginning early 1976, I took a course on “The Beat Tradition in American Literature,” taught by an energetic grad student, Bob Campbell. It started with Walt Whitman and then went on to the Beat Generation writers, including Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac. I was especially drawn to the poetry of Whitman and Ginsberg because their poems addressed American politics and history from progressive perspectives, so you can imagine that it was a great pleasure to later get to know Allen and to have him praise and promote my work.

My longtime friend Danny Shot also took that class, so we basically started writing poetry at the same time, and we did our first poetry reading together in a Rutgers dorm lobby in 1976. Our poems weren’t very good yet, but the drinking age was still 18, there was alcohol flowing, and I think everyone had fun.

Danny and I started Long Shot literary journal in the early 1980s and Danny kept it going until 2004 … and we have continued to do many readings together through the years, even recently in spaces like the Hoboken Historical Museum, where Danny is the poet-in-residence, and in NYC’s Bowery Poetry Club. Danny and I were also recently, about a year ago, made national Beat Poet Laureates by a Beat Laureate Foundation based in Connecticut.

Some of the highlights of my poetry career would have to include the publication of each of my 10 or so authored and edited poetry books, including a big project of putting together an anthology of translated U.S. protest poetry for a French publisher in the mid-1990s; the dozen readings that I did with Allen Ginsberg through the years that always had much larger audiences than any other readings I was part of; helping to organize a big Poetry and the Public Sphere Conference at Rutgers in 1997, where I read with Sonia Sanchez; and the many dozens, or maybe a few hundred, readings that I’ve done and/or organized as part of activist rallies or as fundraisers for progressive groups, since combining poetry and political activism is probably the thing that, after the actual writing, is the thing that I most enjoy doing in my public poetry life.

A cover of an issue of Long Shot.

Q: Do you have other professional paths you’d like to discuss?

A: While being a poet, which doesn’t earn many people a living, I’ve worked a good variety of paid jobs, including as a printer, a runner of NJ Shore boardwalk games, as an editor and proofreader, as a grant writer and newsletter writer for nonprofit human rights law groups, and as a housing advocate with the Central Jersey-based Middlesex Interfaith Partners with the Homeless, where I worked in the late 1980s and 1990s with some terrific advocates, including Janet Jones and Bob Nasdor, to help create and help run housing and food programs that are still ongoing.

Q: What poets and authors do you admire or enjoy reading?

A: Most of the poets I admire, both U.S. and international poets, are political poets in at least some of their work. For many years in the past, U.S. poets who wrote about political ideas or issues were ignored or undervalued by mainstream literary critics. I think that has changed in recent years, largely because of the popular desire to challenge the rightward, inhumane and anti-environmental drift both here in the U.S. with Trump, and also in many other countries in the world.

For one example of this turn … it was just a few years ago that the NY Times Book Review devoted an entire issue to political poetry, which would have been unheard of in past decades.

Some of my favorite poets and some of the poets who have influenced me most include, from earlier centuries and from the first half of the 20th century: William Blake, Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Muriel Rukeyser, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Charles Reznikoff, Mahmoud Darwish, Yehuda Amichai, André Breton, and the Romantic-era poets Keats and Shelley. And from the second half of the 20th century up until now: Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Adrienne Rich, Alicia Ostriker, Andy Clausen, Jayne Cortez, Jim Cohn, Enid Dame, Amiri Baraka, Janine Pommy Vega, Sonia Sanchez, Danny Shot, Anne Waldman, Pedro Pietri, and the youngest poet I’ve named, Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian poet from Gaza.

The cover of Eliot Katz and Adam Bernstein’s “Peace Talk Poems” album.

Q: Will you be presenting this album in the area soon?

A: I hope so, but we’ve been focusing so much on getting this recording out that we haven’t tried to book any shows yet.

Q: How does your mother’s background as a Holocaust survivor impact your work and life?

A: My late mom was a Holocaust survivor, having been taken by train with her family of 10 from Hungary to Auschwitz in 1944. My mother, along with two sisters, survived Auschwitz and two other Nazi concentration camps, while her parents and five other siblings were murdered in the Auschwitz gas chambers during their first night in Auschwitz. My father was born and grew up in Pennsylvania and he served in the army during WWII. I was born in 1957, and for much of my life, up until 1994, my parents always emphasized the fact that my mother was a Holocaust survivor who had lost most of her family in Auschwitz, but they rarely wanted to remember or discuss details about my mother’s experiences. It seemed like trying mostly not to remember was the way that people of my mother’s generation were told to deal with the PTSD of being a Holocaust survivor.

It was in 1994 — partly because of having seen “Schindler’s List,” the only Holocaust-related movie that she would ever watch — that my mother wanted to start telling her Holocaust-survivor stories.

So in 1994, I taped a long interview with my mom about her Holocaust experiences, and I transcribed it as part of a long poem that I wrote called “Liberation Recalled,” which a number of my poet friends think is my most important poem. That poem, which was published in my poetry book “Unlocking the Exits” and which is also on my website and will be the title poem of a book of mine being translated into Italian, is about 60 pages long, divided into 39 sections. Every other section is a transcribed part of that interview that I did with my mom, divided as much as possible into 10-syllable lines to resemble, at least in my own mind, the timeless story of Milton’s pentameter-organized poem, “Paradise Lost.” The other sections in between are my own verses on contemporary and historical issues, and I meant that juxtaposition of my mother’s Holocaust memories with my own more contemporary verses to offer an exploration of key questions of historical and intergenerational legacy.

Knowing from my earliest childhood memories that my mother was a Holocaust survivor certainly influenced me to care about politics and human rights, thus helping to motivate me to spend my entire adult life as a progressive political activist, and to care about issues like racism, sexism, homophobia, homelessness, poverty, climate change and war. Of course, there are different ways of taking up lessons from the Holocaust. There are some more conservative people — conservative at least on Middle East issues — who take the lesson of the Holocaust to be the need to support the country of Israel no matter what it does, even under the most violent and far-right government in its history. I have always taken the lessons of the Holocaust to include a more universal lesson about human rights — that it is morally wrong to kill large numbers of civilians of any ethnic group, even if it is the far-right government of current-day Israel that is doing this brutal killing.

Q: Tell me about “Where to Write Names” and “To Speak Up or Not to Speak Up,” your pieces about Gaza on the album.

A: Of course, my answer to this question would follow up on how I ended my answer to the previous question: that I’ve always throughout my adult life been against the killing of civilians. And if I was against, which I was, the Hamas killing of 1,000 civilians on 10/7/23, including dozens of children, I think it makes sense that I would also be against the killing of tens of thousands of innocent Gazan civilians, including now over 20,000 children, who had nothing to do with the 10/7 attacks. And between the fact that the military of the far-right Israeli government was using 2,000-pound bombs in crowded civilian areas and the fact that Israeli journals like 972 were quoting high-level Israeli officials saying that large number of civilian deaths would be acceptable even if the target was a low-level Hamas member who may not even have been in the area being targeted, it became impossible for me to believe that the Israeli military was trying to avoid harming innocent civilians, including children.

But let me also start another way. The poem of mine that has circulated more than any other, including being cited in a number of scholarly books about antiwar poetry, is a 9/11-related poem called, “When the Skyline Crumbles.” That was a poem I wrote just a few days after the attacks on the World Trade Center, when I was working in Soho, not very far from the WTC. I wrote that poem to criticize the 9/11 attacks on a large NY civilian population and to mourn the victims of the attacks — and also to criticize the Bush administration for talking right away about plans to massively bomb Afghanistan and Iraq, in attacks that seemed likely to kill large numbers of innocent civilians in both countries who had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Probably because I was early in criticizing the over-the-top U.S. response from an antiwar perspective, that poem was picked up by a website, MobyLives, and then cited and quoted from at the beginning and end of a widely circulated AP story about art after traumatic events — a story that highlighted and quoted from my poem alongside mentions of much more well-known art like Picasso’s “Guernica” and Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War.”

So when I first heard about the 10/7/23 attacks by Hamas — a fundamentalist religious group that has a rejectionist charter — and then immediately heard Israeli officials, including Netanyahu — whose Likud party is a far-right party with a rejectionist charter that almost mirrors the Hamas charter by calling for a Greater Israel and rejecting the possibility of a two-state solution — calling for an over-the-top military revenge-response, I felt like I had felt after the 9/11 attacks. I was horrified by the 10/7/23 Hamas attacks, and I was also opposed to a large-scale retaliation that would likely, in the small area of Gaza, kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians, and that also ended up destroying to rubble so much of Gaza’s housing and schools.

Adam Bernstein, right, with Eliot Katz.

One of my antiwar pieces on Peace Talk Poems, “Never Again for Whom,” describes my belief in universal human rights and against the killing of large numbers of civilians from any ethnic group by members of any other ethnic group. And I know from my discussions with Adam that Adam feels the same way.

Of course, no religious or ethnic group is monolithic and I have been encouraged to see antiwar Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace here in the U.S. and Standing Together in Israel protesting this brutal war. That poem of mine ends with a statement that I believe even most Israelis will come eventually to regret that brutal scale of the war on Gaza, and it was interesting to me that a recent National Book Award went to the book, “One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.”

So, after having opposed the Hamas killings of Israeli civilians on 10/7/23, I soon began writing a lot of poems to oppose the brutal over-the-top Israeli military response in Gaza … I was paying close attention to news reports, including from progressive English-language news sites on the internet because the mainstream U.S. media coverage was very narrow and pro-war. I also spoke at a few local peace rallies, reading poems and calling for a ceasefire. As I said above, as the son of a Holocaust-survivor mom, I am always against the mass killing of civilians of any ethnic group. I began to call the Israeli assault a genocide.

As you might guess, I have been drawn into some heated debates about Israel’s war on Gaza, with a few old former friends and with a fair number of strangers, both in person and online …

I do believe that far more people will be critical of this genocide when looking back from the future. Sadly, that is too often the way that history works when it comes to past atrocities. I do hope that the look back from the future will include a future with a two-state solution and with security for civilians in both Palestine and Israel, and throughout the Middle East and the planet.

Q: Tell me about your inspiration for writing “Whose Side is God On.”

A: I wrote this poem in 2020 as a statement against Trump being elected as president for a then-second term, and as a statement of bewilderment about why so many Christian fundamentalists could support someone with Trump’s glaring non-Christian values when it comes to his long-held racism, financial corruption, anti-environmental views, right-wing economic policies, and his history of having been accused of a range of sexual assaults, including rape, by over two dozen women. I’ve written many more poems, and more recent poems, against Trump that we didn’t have time to record, and I posted a free online book on my website before the 2020 election, called “President Predator: Poems to Help Make America Trump-Free Again.” I’m sorry now that I didn’t think to update that book and re-post it before the 2024 election.

For information, visit eliotkatzpoetry.com

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