NEWS & LETTERS, June - July 2009
Franklin Rosemont, publisher-poet
Poet Franklin Rosemont passed away on April 12 in Chicago. He was a significant thinker and publisher.
Rosemont was raised with an appreciation of the labor movement. As a teenager he was greatly influenced by Black scholar St. Clair Drake. He encountered the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) through Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, "a book about freedom," and a few years later he became a major factor in revitalizing the IWW. He and his young colleagues, including lifelong partner Penelope Rosemont, began publishing the important journal The Rebel Worker and established Solidarity Bookshop. In 1966 the Rosemonts founded the Chicago Surrealist Group, which has continued its activities to the present day.
IN THE 1970S FRANKLIN and Penelope Rosemont were part of the group who helped revitalize the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, which reissued out-of-print revolutionary classics, as well as new works and rediscovered works by revolutionary working-class writers like T-Bone Slim and Covington Hall.
As Marxist-Humanists we appreciate the dialogue with Rosemont which began in the early 1960s when the IWW's Fred Thompson "...handed me a copy of Raya Dunayevskaya's Marxism and Freedom and said, 'Here's a book that shows that old Hegel made some sense after all'" (Dancin' in the Streets! [2005]). Rosemont's important essay on "Karl Marx and the Iroquois" (1989) remains perhaps the most original and creative response to Dunayevskaya's Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution (1982).
Rosemont also knew that Joe Hill was worthy of the near-600 pages which he devoted to him in Joe Hill: The IWW & the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture (2003). Franklin Rosemont will be missed. But through his visionary contributions as poet, publisher and incendiary he will remain present at the crucial moments. He did as much as anyone of his generation to bring life to the words, "Don't waste any time mourning, Organize!"
--Tim Finnigan
|
