Masthead Logo The Iowa Review

Volume 8
Article 32
Issue 2 Spring

1977

Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theater

Barry Goldensohn

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Goldensohn, Barry. "Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theater." The Iowa Review 8.2 (1977): 71-82. Web.
Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0021-065X.2206

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 With disgust and contempt,
Knowing the blood which the poet said
Flowed with the earthly rhythm of desire
Was a river of disease ...
really

And the moon could no longer

Discover itself in the white flesh
Because the body had gone
Black in the crotch,
And the mind itself a mere shadow of idea ...
He opened the book again and again,
Contemptuous, wanting to tear out
The pages, wanting to hold the print,
His voice, to the ugly mirror,
Until the lyric and the rot
Became indistinguishable,
And the singing and the dying
Became the same breath, under which
He wished the poet the same fate,
The same miserable fate.

CRITICISM / BARRY GOLDENSOHN

Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theater

The Bread and Puppet Theater was deeply involved with the civil rights
and anti-war protest movements and is marked by their political moralism
in two important respects: its concern with domestic issues, the home
front, and its primitivism of technique and morality. This primitivism is
clear in one of their earliest The You are seated
very pieces, King Story.
a which is on either side. A
before large red cloth supported by poles
small, roughly modeled head with a crown rises from behind and
puppet
announces that he is the King of a country threatened a He
by Dragon.
does not know what to do. A White in a horned helmet, and with
Knight
an enormous fist and sword offers to kill the Dragon. The King asks his
Advisers and People and they all counsel against using the Knight. The

71

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King decides to, in spite of them, and in a slow dream-like sequence the
Knight kills the Dragon, and then the King, Advisers, and People in order.
As the Knight stands alone, seemingly triumphant, Death emerges from
behind the screen in a mask that is half skull, half helmet, with a body of
rags. He wrestles in a slow dance and
the Knight finally kills him. In this
drastically simple moral and political context, Uncle Sam is transformed
into Uncle Fatso, an enormous puppet with a bloated face and a single fist
that carries a cigar like a bomb, the emblem of greed and ruthless power.

Underlying these moral and political concerns is a religious vision that

chooses as its main symbols resurrection and redemption. These are made

impersonal and not emblems of salvation. The Dead Man

public, personal
Rises is an a a
early example of this theme. In darkened loft, small, dim spot
of light appears before a gray painted fabric screen. An attendant, barely
visible in black robes, kneels at the side. A tall white puppet, the Woman,
slowly circles the stage and enters the light. The attendant whispers
a and a bell to the
through megaphone, rings distinguish "speakers."

WHERE ARE YOU GOING? (Bell)

IAM GOING TO THE RIVER. (Bell)
WHY ARE YOU GOING? (Bell )
THE RIVER IS COLD. (Bell)
WHERE ISTHE RIVER? (Bell)
THE RIVER IS FAR AWAY.

The attendant breathes heavily into the megaphone while the woman walks
around the circle of light.
in
With these few beginning words and actions, stylized and abstracted
manner, we have been carried into a world of profound inwardness. The

power and the suddenness of the artifice?disconnected speakers engaging

in an interior dialogue, oversized puppets, the absence of color, and the
of the puppet figures?place the action in a dream
physical helplessness
realm that has many features of the inner lives of children, another aspect
of primitivism, and one that is a clue to the dramatic force of the Bread
and Puppet. The primitive morality, the resurrection of the dead man as a
is in the technique.
reward for the devotion of the woman, keeping with
the inwardness, the Woman of this play is not individualized, and
Despite
the emphasis the work is still on the public nature of the re
throughout
for public morality.
ligious issues, the implications
The use of Bread is a part of the public ritual of communion and an in
are at an Easter
tegral part of the theater. You sitting Play, you have been
a witness to the Passion and the puppets which grew enormous for the
event lie collapsed in a heap before the Cross. The puppeteers have
great
72
 crawled out, shrunken after the event to their normal size. They pass
through the audience handing out chunks of bread. It is not the usual
mush but a dark, heavy bread, made of hand not flour, and it
ground rye,
strong teeth. You sit there in a communal ritual at it
requires tearing
Is there only one
murderously. myth and ritual? The puppeteer who hands
me the bread is a friend. I what is a nice
whisper: "Mayra, Jewish girl like
you doing here?"
"What are you doing here?"
From what am I
defending myself with bad tasting jokes? This event is
quite different from the audience role at Riverside Church, to the
listening
B Minor Mass, or vespers at the Camaldoli we are
hearing Hermitage:
a chaw of the seasonal In this theater the bread is a direct
sharing god.
assault on aesthetic distance.
In the setting of the Easter Play, bread is offered as an echo of the
Eucharist and one is thrust into the role of the surprised communicant, but
in other pieces its function is more modest. The bread is an os
offering,
so, and it therefore has an unavoidable ceremonial flavor.
tentatiously
is shared, and the audience is
Something jarred out of passivity by the act
of eating together. Schumann intends the bread to be a reminder that you
come to the theater not just for entertainment, which is for the skin, but
also for vital sustenance, which is for the stomach. That he should assign
this meaning reveals the habits of mind of a confirmed allegorist, since it
is, after all, gratuitous. Since he leaves out sustenance for the head and
heart, it also suggests that he is a primitive and an anti-sentimentalist.
The puppets are all created like almost else in
by Schumann, everything
the theater. He makes them of celastic over clay molds, and they vary in
size from six inches to over 20 feet. The torso and limbs are cloth, and the
expressiveness of the puppets is in the molded heads and hands. Schumann
is an extension are
says that "Puppet theater of sculpture," and his masks
the means. They use the past boldly, and suggest African, pre-Columbian
and Asiatic masks, Easter Island Heads, Chinese Temple sculpture, Lehm
bruck, Grosz; the dragons are mostly Oriental, but the most wonderful set
of monsters, large yellow heads with small monsters in their mouths, seem

right out of Bosch.

The puppets create the first and most striking impression of this theater,
the miraculous sense of the static mask in motion, where the few words
come with the inwardness of a
through possession by great force?through
the face of the sleeper into the inner movement of the dream. But Schu
are
mann's puppets quite unlike the masks of Attic drama. The voice that
is not individual: are. One
rings through them only the masks responds to
the puppet, not to a person revealed through words, since the words are
seldom spoken by the puppets, but by a narrator off to the side.

73
 The puppets move with a dream-like Tightness that is adapted to their
size. The ones move the pace with
large slowly, occasionally breaking
and often suddenness. We are not with pompous
startling terrifying dealing
but with a sense of motion that the subconscious
solemnity, recognizes.
Visually it is similar to film, which can condense time and action, alternate
scenes, and shift focus with the subjective freedom of the dream.1
(Think
of how chase scenes let us the scramble
experience simultaneously desperate
of flight and implacable pursuit. ) Likewise, the puppets move with a sense
not of
unreality but of those distortions proper to an inward sense of reality,
for their size and motion have the air of dream. Thus this theater can deal
utterly unselfconsciously with the fabulous:

THERE ISA DEAD MAN LYING IN THE RIVER. (Bell)

WHAT WILL WE DO WITH THE DEAD MAN? (Bell)
IWILL TIE THE MAN TO THE BACK OF THE RIVER
AND TAKE HIM TO MY HOUSE. (Bell)
(From The Dead Man Rises)

In this context seems more natural than the resurrection that fol
nothing
lows. In Ordet, Carl Dreyer tries to force a resurrection out of the fabulous
and into the casual world of plots and motives where we explain magic
away as a violation of confidence, a
sleight of hand, and whatever power it
has in Ordet depends entirely on its outrageousness, whereas the power of
The Dead Man Rises depends on our initial of the moony
acceptance
world where resurrection is normal. The normalcy of the miraculous indi
cates that we are with a primitive system of conventions similar to
dealing
those of folk tales, and the thought processes of childhood, of
preconceptual
our earliest
attempts to understand the world.
The basic elements of the medium of allegorical puppet theater corre
to
spond closely Piaget's description of the patterns of thought in childhood.
For example, allegorical causation is like the post hoc nature of
syncretic
thought. Psychomachia for its on the early sense of
depends persuasiveness
imminent justice. Schumann's use of sounds (twitter
primitive expressive
ing, moaning, etc.) has the emotive
weight of pre-verbal struggles for ar
ticulation and, similarly, the dissociation of speaker and figure seems in
itself to be an emblem of the separation of the child from the verbal world
of adults. The very enterprise of with puppets is rooted in ani
allegorizing
mism and both of which are basic modes of
concretizing, thought of child
hood.
This is not to say that it is a theater for children, but rather that the
medium has its roots in the inner lives we carry with us from childhood:

74
 the structure of primitive com
cognitive styles; explosive psychic material
posed of fantasies of power and helplessness, of incomprehensible forces,
of magical fulfillment of wishes; of human animals and animal humans; of
sense of
giants and dolls; and above all the disparity between the puppet
and its human role. One is seized by one's childhood. This is apparent in
the way Schumann alternates simple moral absolutism with perceptual
uses satiric ingenues with a child's vision of moral issues, and
ambiguity,
characterizes stylized and exaggerated gestures, and in general by the free
dom with which the mysterious and enter this world. The first time
playful
I saw the Bread and in New York in the mid-sixties, I felt that I
Puppet
was in the presence of remarkable artistic power, and it has taken me years
to an
begin to understand this kind of fascination. I found myself resisting
of the use of the materials of childhood for two reasons:
understanding
first, it seems to minimize the seriousness of the theater, which is vulner
able to any association with childhood because the use of puppets
merely
suggests that it is entertainment for children; and second, the process of
maturity seems to put one out of touch with childhood.
acutely
The theatrical means that Schumann uses to deal with this material of
childhood is It is a theater of pageants, tableaux, and proces
pre-dramatic.
sions where or dances. The art of drama
sculpture walks, parades, begins
with texts, whereas Schumann a some
"pushes for place where language
is
achieved ... we find from what we want."2 He works with
language really
stylized expressive gestures from which language is very remote but which,
unlike mime, never seek to substitute themselves for languages. As he works,
words are "achieved" with great difficulty, and are usually of great simplic
ity. As pieces evolve, the company struggles through its bafflement to pre
sent the actions that Schumann out. After sessions with
lays late-night
friends, full of questions, criticism, exhortation, home brew, and strong cof
fee, a few hand-painted signs
or words may appear in the next rehearsal as
the work takes shape. Language seems to enter to
organize and clarify work
that is initially conceived visually.
There are a few unusual works that begin with texts. The Birdcatcher in
Hell is adapted from a Kyogin in the Noh
cycle, with additions Nixon
by
and Homer. What Schumann refers to as the "religious sarcasm" of the

Kyogin (which deals with a pardon for the Birdcatcher by the King of Hell
for his very un-Buddhist is here to Nixon's treatment
occupation) applied
of Calley. Jephte provides a for the biblical text and music of Caris
setting
simi's Oratorio, and Gray Lady Cantata #5 does the same for Tallis' Lam
entations of Jeremiah and Bach's Jesu Meine Freude. They present pag
eants that derive from the texts and are translated into
characteristically
Schumann's Christian Humanism,3 with its pantheon of White Knights
(who slay dragons deftly, on stilts, for love of us), Mother-Christs
sadly,
75
 (who suffer and sacrifice for us), or the comic-irreverant-sarcastic figure of
the Gentleman Angel (out of the world of sentimental melodramas like
Camille ). In Schumann's words, these pieces attempt to
provide "a context
and a setting for musical works taken out of their historical setting." (Con
versation, November 1974 ).
and dance are the means of providing these and
Sculpture settings,
words are The for movements in re
only marginal. phrases describing
hearsal ( I was a in Cantata #5 at Goddard in the win
Gray Lady College
ter of 1974) are "that makes a beautiful or "that
consistently sculpture"
makes a beautiful dance."4 I never once, in six years of friendly association
with the group, heard the phrase "that is very dramatic," as the
though
word can mean or this theater is.full of "dramatic"
engrossing expressive,
gestures and movements. ( Some of the "what does it mean" puzzlement of
naive viewers stems from the fact that we ask that about the
question
verbal arts in a very different way than about music or dance, and it seems
that no matter how few words there are, people insist on "reading" theater. )
In the summer of 1974, when Schumann decided to leave Goddard and
free himself of the burden of a communal company, he set up a weekend
called the Domestic Resurrection Fair and Circus as both a retrospective
and as the occasion for the creation of a massive work, the Circus itself.
old pieces were shown in the afternoons: The Dead Man Rises,
Many
A Man Says Goodbye to His Mother,
Hallelujah, Mississippi, King Story,
Theater of Uncle Fatso, Life and Death of Prisonman. The Circus itself
contained parts of earlier circuses, notably the central parricide of Uranus,
here appropriately enough the keynote of domestic insurrection?a comic
version of the archaic revolution. This insurrection is resurrection, a
primal
validation of life by Love, the conquest of death, the circus, the big show.
Where the structure of The Dead Man Rises (and other short pieces) is
based on concentration and exclusion, the Circus is expansive and inclu
sive: as Schumann says (in conversation, November 1974), "The circus
doesn't make sense. It is the and it makes its own
opposite?show-offy,
rules. It is more amateurish, a collection." This is not to say that the work
is without structure, but rather that it is episodic, its frame is enormous,
the range of movements and type of puppets is broad. The
large puppets
move among masked and robed puppeteers, small puppets, costumed
clowns, and tumblers.
The title has been used for two previous pieces. The first was an evan
circus in the summer of 1970 when the group first moved to God
gelical
dard. It involved the first and only use of audience participation by the
theater. At the conclusion of the Circus an ark was formed around the audi
ence, and they walked around the meadow chanting "The storm is here,"
between the ropes and banners. In retrospect this gesture seems dated, and

76
 in fact seemed so at the time. I moved into the ark to a blind friend,
guide
but the words stuck in my throat painfully. I could not chant and merely
felt awkward in another at the
refuge of the self-elect and burned willing
ness of so.
my friends to be
A street theater piece done inWashington on was called The
April 24,1971,
Domestic Resurrection of King Richard the Last. A section of this piece was
called "Domestic Insurrection," and the verbal echo suggests the basic re
ligious role of protest in Schumann's work, where the Passion and resurrec
tion are the culmination of a determined and loving insurrection. The resur
rection is domestic because its moral urgency is se If-transforming and aimed
at internal and social reform. To direct it at others would be ag
political
gression, political aggression. It is domestic also because the chief images
of evil authority are drawn from the family: Uncle Fatso, and Uranus the
Father. The images of peace and salvation are the sorrowing mother and
the sacrifice of the son. The basic "political" process suggested throughout
is transformation in the name of love.
The general pattern of the 1974 Domestic Resurrection Circus is that of a
dance of life. It begins with birth, the birth of "the people" and of the
Circus Director, which is followed by a circus with life on show, and con
cluded by the triumph over death. The beginning is solemn, with the en
trance of the God mask from the Easter Show, an enormous face supported
on
poles, that is sorrowful and transcendental and vaguely Asian. "The peo
are born out from under a tarp
ple" by being hauled by the Devil and his
Helpers. They emerge with signs that read War and Peace, Law and Order,
Rags and Riches, Guns and Butter, Day and Night, Sun and Rain. The po
larities are all ridiculed with slapstick as each set emerges. The playing is
so broad that it crowds attention away from the Devil's and the
Helpers
on the sidelines who are intended to a framework of
Gray Lady provide
and but who remain a kind of
suffering regeneration, passive iconography
alongside the fun.
This sequence is followed a dance of giant puppets, Uranus and
by
Mother Earth. They are about 20 feet high, grotesquely ugly, and seem a
of drunken parents careening out of control. Mother Earth com
nightmare
plains of feeling ill after a short waltz, and a doctor drives up, climbs a
ladder to treat her and delivers her of Zeus-the-Circus-Director, who moves
the ladder over to his father, knocks off his head, and the skip
completes
rope version of the Theogony. The cheerful parricide then proceeds to
conduct the circus acts that follow. Daddy is dead and we can all have
fun, so we have jugglers who drop everything, tumblers who fall, weight
lifters who die trying (Hubert Heaver), magic acts, dancing bears (Ethyl
and Butane), with a group of Two Penny Circus clowns who egg on the
audience with a polished style that is in sharp contrast to the ineptitude of

77
 the parody circus acts that are all show and bluster. In this
primal revolu
tion, life simply bursts forth and the new Daddy remains a child.
After the Circus proper retreats, the finale begins, a convoluted alle
dance of life where the a series of stations that
gorical figures go through
initiation, on the values of civilization, death, and
suggest growth, taking
some kind of resurrection. Each puppeteer, in the role of "the en
people"
ters through a door set up in the middle of the field, and goes through a
series of stations that signify the process of a complete life. Each is given a
face mask, climbs a ladder to look at a star (which dangles from the end
of a works at an to a little house
telescope), ironing board, pays homage
with a family of tiny puppets by placing a stone on it (a funeral gesture?),
visits the Gentleman Angel who shows him his face in a mirror, gets his
Dance of Death costume, and disappears through the door he entered. The
death dance is none of the
with of
peaceful, expressionistic exaggeration
the medieval form that celebrates the triumph of death. When the last pup
peteer is through Death's door they all knock it down, and carry off, stand
on the door, a a robe the words "All People."
ing figure wearing bearing
This is done to a wildly rollicking tune called Charlotte's Wag ( see Appen
dix II ) that is the appropriate music for this easy triumph over Death. The
order born from such transcendental mayhem is clearly some notion of a
human community, and not a The Circus is an elaborate
pious mystagogy.
celebration of life with a nod to death and the evil, a divine low comedy
that displays, in Kafka's "a great careless
phrase, prodigality."

Bread Alone or The Economic Base of the Theater

If one begins with some notion of the artist working out of the resources
of the self, then collaborative art, having to work with and around the needs
of others, having to review boards, and most
please politicians, decency
the mass audience, involves unthinkable loss of con
tyrannically paying
trol of the artistic product. But Peter Schumann comes to theater via
sculp
ture and his Bread and Puppet Theater is now beginning the fourth phase
of his attempt to control the economic necessities that shape his art. For

eight years, from the beginning in 1961 to late 1969 (with a summer of com
munal in Maine in 1968), the theater ran with
living temporary volunteer
for Schumann says, "In N.Y. I had a scattered crew who
help performances.
came to rehearsals and then disbanded I worked solo with
again. Basically,
For a short from the winter of 1969 to the summer of 1970
help."5 period,
there was a group of 11 salaried puppeteers (at $35 per week), which,
the ludicrousness of the wage, a severe financial demand.
despite posed
In the summer of 1970 Schumann moved to Cate Farm at Goddard Col
and a of the company opened a free theater in Island. The
lege, part Coney
Island group ran for about a year on the money from a
Coney European
78
 tour in 1969, and for another year on a on
grant from the New York Council
the Arts, with some help from Nathan's Famous, Inc. Schumann has
always
tried to operate without grant money for two reasons: he rejects the ab
surdity of receiving grant money for protest, and he never shows
budgets
beforehand. He makes some money and then builds a show with what is
available?he insists it leaves him freer to (A member of the
experiment.
company applied for the Coney Island grant and Schumann says he must
have signed the application himself but he doesn't remember it. It was sure
an aberration.)
ly
For its first year Schumann kept control of the Coney Island venture:
shows would be developed at Cate Farm and moved down to the
city.
this control shifted to the New York group itself, which folded
Gradually
at the end of the second year. In Vermont, Goddard a
provided large house,
a barn for a theater and and took care of the and
workshop, remodelling
utilities. Schumann refused any further financial support from Goddard: he
did not want to increase his responsibilities to the college
by joining the

faculty. He simply worked with the few committed students who made the
Bread and Puppet the major part of their curriculum.
In the middle of the European tour in the winter of 1973 Schumann an
nounced that he would disband the company the following summer, be
cause the communal company, too, had begun to impose its financial neces
sities and was shoving him into the pattern of the professional theater
world which he was to avoid.
trying

I don't like the general situation of theater that one gets oneself into
when one becomes a theater . . . and then re
professional recognised
. . . that ask for that
sponds to the channels which respond to that type
of theater. In other words, when we go to perform both in this country
and in Europe, we would very much like to perform for people cheaply,
in our in the halls of fame of theater . . . but we
places rather than
end up playing in a lot of professional ... for bored
places high-ticket
people. A lot of things happen that we don't agree with, but we do it
because this is our contact. One gets involved in this and loses control
of the creation of that place where one performs. Theater production as
we understand it, is that one creates that oneself. You don't as
place
sume that because one pays $3 what see is theater. You want to be
they
able to create a surrounding that you create for them . . . not one that
is "just there." And that is not possible when you are part of an organi
zation travelling and performing wherever you are invited.6

The search for a model of a poor theater goes on as success in the previous
forms has brought its deprivations. In the case of the Bread and
Puppet,
79
 the model of the poor theater is one that allows uncompromising control by
Schumann of the conditions, in fact the entire ambience, of his art. Al
a communal have created the conditions for a
though living style might
profound collaboration, it has in fact created the reverse, the conditions
for a solitary artist to shape a company that performed his work for a while
with the fewest possible concessions to financial need, that is, to
popular
success and the tastes of the theater circuit.
Stefan Brecht succeeded in upsetting the members of the company with
a program credit on The of the Meat that he for
Cry People for composed
his TDR article, not because it was untrue but because it violated the gen
eral decorum of modesty and anonymity. The credit reads:

Conceived, produced, directed and narrated by Peter Schumann

performed by his Bread and Puppet Theater.
Masks, costumes, lighting and music by Peter Schumann,
with much help and a little
inspiration from the company.

This, in fact, allocates the credits with precision. It is his Bread and Puppet
Theater. This is worthy of mention because Schumann is a modest man and
does not appear for bows at the end of performances. His name
rarely ap
pears on program credits, which seldom do more than give the name of the
company.
I do not wish to overstate this issue. Schumann controls as most directors
do?a will a a certain or introduce a varia
puppeteer perform gesture way
tion and Schumann will accept or reject it. It is, of course, within the frame
work of his scenarios and very detailed instructions.
There are other aspects of this theater that both keep down expenses and
allow his control. The decor and music are distinctively homemade, and the
of are Schumann's
masks, course, sculpture. That he has described theater
as an extension of sculpture to which
suggests the degree the model of the
autonomous and individual artist still motivates him. And this is a basic
denial of the form of the theater as
given. The Bread and Puppet is without
actors and their expensive and There are instead
demanding personalities.
puppeteers without or bodies and voices that are trained
glamor, virtuosity,
to impersonate. In their masks can
they personify. Anyone "play" the King
of Hell.
After the company broke up in the summer of 1974, the Schumann family
moved to a farm in Glover, Vermont. It now seems like a time of retrench
ment. Future are still vague. Between the summer of 1974 and 1976
plans
Schumann has toured Europe with small companies and has conducted
at a variety of universities The one
workshops and colleges. piece that I
have seen since 1974, the Circus in the summer of 1976, seems more static

80
 than in the past. There is a lot of repetition, and the retreat (with the
times) from moral and political protest has left it a little churchy. Allegory
petrifies fast. Political protest has always been at the center of Schumann's
even
religious vision, and pieces from the sixties and
early seventies had
their didactic and propagandistic elements subsumed into a vision of suf
fering and compassion that was never simply partisan. The image of the
Christ as a revolutionary was not the convenient
young Marx
sloganeering
ist, but the man of The on of was revolution
suffering. taking suffering
enough. It is difficult to tell where Schumann will go from this point.
While he is hardly in retirement in Glover, it is unclear to me where he will
engage next.

NOTES

1 It is interesting to note,
the way, that on film, where
by distortion is the visual
norm, the power of the Bread
and Puppet Theater that depends on of size
exaggeration
and subjective of time is neutralized. Because of the visual
irregularity entirely plasticity
of film we are too detached from the perspective of the viewer fixed in a human scale
to experience the necessary the innovative filmmaker, Chris Marker,
disparity. Recently
has done some work with Bread and and it will be to see how he
Puppet, interesting
deals with this The PBS film was a washout.
problem.
2 Peter Schumann in an interview with Margarita Barab, Country Journal, Plainfield,
Vermont, July 18, 1974, p.6.
3 Stefan
Brecht, TDR, Vol. 14, No. # (T47), discusses Schumanns theological direc
tions in his essay on Sacral Theatre.
4 Schumann to his own use of the word "beautiful" and wishes to make it
objects
clear that he is not striving for the decorative.
5 Barab interview.
6 Barab interview.

Appendix I
The Famous Bread Recipe

with fresh
rye, ground in a hand instead of milled. Mix 6
Begin grinder
of grain with lukewarm water to consistency. Let sit for
pounds pudding
two with starter dough or three or four without it, in a warm
spot.
days days
Add water as needed. When it smells strong enough, add another 6 pounds

81
of fresh ground rye, knead for about 20 minutes with more water and 3
small handfuls of salt. Flour hands and board and shape loaves. This should
make 6 loaves of 4-5 pounds. Bake at about 275? for one to one-and-a-half
hours.

Appendix II

CHARLOTTE'SWAG

? Sid Blum

CRITICISM / JAMES BRESLIN

Allen Ginsberg: The Origins of "Howl" and "Kaddish"

first become aware of Allen Ginsberg

Most literary people have probably
the media, in his self-elected and controversial role as public figure
through
and prophet of a new age. Ginsberg's has changed over
public personality
the years?from the defiant and histrionic man of the fifties to
angry young
the bearded and benign patriarch and political activist of the sixties and
seventies?but the personality has remained one that most
literary people
find hard to take seriously. Compare Ginsberg's reception with that of

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