Aurelia Goes to a Poetry Reading

Aurelia Plath's medical-secretarial student sat down with her for tutoring and then Aurelia said, Do you mind if just this once we cut this short and double up next time, because there's a poetry reading on campus I want to go to. Would you like to come with me? Aurelia also hoped to talk with the poet. The student went, but doesn't remember his name.

1977. Antifa AF. Read the title poem here.

This Cape Cod Community College senior, 1973, took several courses with Mrs. Plath and was tutored her senior year. I am tracing and talking with Aurelia's Boston University and Cape Cod former students because 1) it's never been done and 2) for firsthand witnesses it's now or never. I was curious which poet Aurelia interrupted their work for.

It was April 11, 1973 and they heard John Beecher (1904-1980), gritty political poet, Deep South labor and civil rights activist (related to those Beechers), "a premature antifascist writing about black oppression since the 1920s when people didn't want to hear about it. Even a lot of black people didn't want to hear about it," he told the college paper. His Collected Poems (Macmillan) were in press.

I never heard of John Beecher even though he went to Harvard. Somehow Aurelia had. John Howard Griffin, his friend, had a doctor dye him black and wrote Black Like Me (1961), and Aurelia had read it and wrote Sylvia about it (6 December 1962). It took stunts like Griffin's and demonstrations and oral-tradition poets like Beecher declaiming race murders and maimed workers to stir middle-class America --  morally, and its young people first. Beecher was an old white radical field-agitator academic serious as hell with no sacred cows. He'd be chased off of campuses with pitchforks now.

Those with delicate ladylike sensibilities probably would not alter their schedules to see and hear him.

Currently we have only scraps of info about Aurelia Plath's politics, but with this discovery they are now consistent across six decades.

Beecher recorded these LPs for Folkways in 1968 and 1977, now on the Smithsonian website; see the two albums' liner notes (PDFs) to read the poems for free and in full.