Mitchel Cohen

Red Balloon Poetry Conspiracy #2 & #3 [Roque Dalton, Abbie Hoffman]

Brooklyn: Red Balloon, 1975 - 1976. Two volumes. Each mimeographed and corner stapled.
14 x 8 1/2 in. 8pp and 14pp. Very good, with bumping to edges and corners. Item #10432

Two rare issues of Red Balloon Poetry Conspiracy, a publication of revolutionary poetry edited by Mitchel Cohen, with contributors such as Abbie Hoffman, Steve Becker, and Zoe Best. The Red Balloon collective grew out of the Independent Caucus of SDS at SUNY Stony Brook in 1968-1969, the most politically violent period in Stony Brook's history; by the time of this publication, the collective was located inBrooklyn.

Issue number three includes an original poem by Abbie Hoffman "For Victor Jara," written in homage to the Chilean folksinger and revolutionary who was brutally murdered by the Pinochet regime. We find no record of the poem published elsewhere. The second issue honors murdered guerilla-poet Roque Dalton, with a poem by collective member Zoe Best, and the third issue includes a poem released after Dalton’s death, with no author attribution, though an ambiguous suggestion by the editors that it may be the work of Dalton himself.

The Red Ballon Poetry Conspiracy collective was politically active throughout the 1960s and ‘70s; in 1978, the collective drove down to West Virginia to support the coal miners’ wildcat strike. Red Balloon had collected three large truckloads of food at Stony Brook and sent them to independent groups of miners. Union officials told collective members that they didn't want “noJews or Commie food,” leading the collective to work directly with the friendly strikers who would set up an autonomous distribution network. Red Balloon also published a semi-regular offset tabloid with a wider distribution; this is the scarcer mimeograph production published by their poetry wing. The New York City Municipal Archives includes a file on the Red Balloon Collective as part of the New York City Police Department's Intelligence records, indicating that they were under police surveillance in the 1970s.

A rare document of an underexamined anarcho-Marxist direct action and poetry collective. Three holdings in OCLC of any issue as of September 2025.

Price: $350.00