A Humble Petition to the President of Harvard

Phoenix, AZ: Rampart Press, 1963. Broadside. Folio (12½" X 16"). Titled in red. Limited to 250 copies printed on German mouldmade paper. Fine. First separate printing -- and although this broadside was never issued signed, Beecher's wife and printing partner, artist Barbara Beecher (1925-2016), handsomely signed a very small number in pencil at lower right and this is one such example. Although Beecher didn't graduate from Harvard, he did attend Harvard Graduate School for language and literature in 1926 -- hence his opening declaration here, "I am, sir, so to speak, 'a Harvard man.'" Possibly occasioned by a much later visit by Beecher to his almost-alma (he refers to "Nostalgic reminiscences brought on / by your most recent bulletin"), this delightful piece begins as a tribute to the legendary Harvard literature professor G.L. Kittredge (1860-1941), Shakespeare and Chaucer authority, prim and proper "in forked snowy beard and pearl-grey spats" whose teachings were equally fastidious: "Prince Hamlet / made no unseemly quips anent the thighs / Ophelia spread for him...." -- thus "Nice young men were we / in Kitty's class...." Personal recollections follow before a Lionel Trilling essay ("Commitment to the Modern") found in the "recent bulletin" shows the poet that "you do not change / at Harvard, like castrati whose voices / retain their boyish purity." Harvard's status quo conservative establishment, he suddenly realizes, rub this radical poet the wrong way: "Fend from me, I beg you, sir, / offers of chairs magnates endow. Waylay / me with no teaching sinecure.... Summon me never to recite my verse / before a convocation in my honor / nor to appear in doctoral costume / as orator at Commencement." A wonderfully dark, provocative, humorous poem. 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 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.