Mike Klonsky's tribute to Franklin Rosemont

SmallTalk: Franklin Rosemont

That Celtic connection...

Franklin and Penelope Rosemont opened the door to the marvellous for so many of us. They propped it open with comix, feathers, poetry and love, and whooshed us all through.

Franklin invented the internet of mad creativity and kept all of us in touch and tuned to the Looney Tunes of life.

Letters decorated with wild imaginings flew out to the country

Franklin Rosemont with Irene Plazewska and Wayne Heimbach at the Heartland Cafe

corner where I lived in Wexford and like the fans of a thousand peacocks shimmered in that quiet place, and ignited my imagination.

Franklin and Penelope kept us connected. They nurtured each other and poetry was ever at their fingertips radiating out, beaming to Australia, Sweden,France, Japan, Italy, Portugal, Cuba, Spain, Ireland and a million other places where surrealists dare to dance in the face of mediocrity.

Franklin will live on on the tips of carrots and tongues, in rabbit burrows and low dives, on the Redlines and green tree frogs, on the wings of bluejays and the smoke of smoky quartz. He is there on the picket lines and the porcupines.

Like Joe Hill,Franklin Rosemont will be there wherever poets of mad love gather or roam and where doodlers of the absurd doodle do.

Irene Plazewska

Franklin Rosemont (1943-2009)

Franklin Rosemont met André Breton in 1966 and this became a turning point in his life. He became celebrated, poet, artist, historian, editor street speaker and surrealist activist. He died on Sunday April 12, 2009, at age 65. With his partner and comrade of more than four decades, Penelope Rosemont, he cofounded in 1966 an enduring and adventuresome Chicago Surrealist Group, making the city a center in the worldwide re-emergence of that movement of artistic and political revolt.

He had been editing a series on Surrealism for the University of Texas series on surrealism. Most recent in that series is Morning Star by French intellectual Michael Löwy.

Franklin Rosemont (centre) with Penelope Rosemont and Paul Buhle at the Heartland Cafe in Chicago

Rosemont was born in Chicago on October 2, 1943 to two of the area's more significant rank-and-file labor activists, the printer Henry Rosemont and the jazz musician Sally Rosemont. Dropping out of Maywood schools, he managed nonetheless to enter Roosevelt University in 1962. There he, already radicalized through family traditions, experiences with miseries inflicted by the educational system and reading of momentous political works and comics, entered the stormy left culture of Roosevelt.

The mentorship of the African American scholar St. Clair Drake and his relationship with Penelope led him to much wider worlds. He "hitchhiked 20,000 miles" even as he discovered surrealist texts and art. Soon, with Penelope, he found the surrealist thinker André Breton in Paris. Close study and passionate activity characterized the Rosemonts embrace of surrealism as well as their practice in art and organizing.

Active in the 1960s with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Rebel Worker group and Students for a Democratic Society, Rosemont helped to lead an IWW strike of blueberry pickers in Michigan in 1964 and began a long and fruitful association with Paul Buhle in publishing a special surrealist issue of Radical America in 1970.

Lavish, funny and barbed issues of Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion and special issues of Cultural Correspondence were to follow.

The smashing success of the 1968 world surrealist exhibition at Gallery Bugs Bunny in Chicago announced an ability of the Chicago surrealists to have huge cultural impact without ceasing to be critics of the frozen mainstreams of art and politics. The Rosemonts soon became leading figures in the reorganization of the nation's oldest radical publisher, the Charles H. Kerr Company. In that role, and in providing coordination for the surrealist Black Swan Press, Rosemont helped to make Chicago a center of nonsectarian revolutionary creativity. In Chicago in 1976 he and Robert Green organized the largest ever surrealist exhibition entitled Marvelous Freedom — World Surrealist Exhibition.

A friend and valued colleague of such figures as Studs Terkel, Mary Low, the poets Philip Lamantia, Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Dennis Brutus, the painter Lenora Carrington and the historians Paul Buhle and John Bracey, Rosemont's own artistic and creative work was almost impossibly varied in inspirations and results. Without ever holding a university post, he wrote or edited more than score of books while acting as a great resource for a host of other writers. He and Robin D.G. Kelley have a forthcoming book, Black Brown & Beige, Surrealist Writings from Africa and its Diaspora to be published by University of Texas Press.

He became perhaps the most productive scholar of labor and the left in the United States. His spectacular study of Joe Hill began as a slim projected volume of that revolutionary martyr's rediscovered cartoons and grew to giant volume providing our best guide to what the early twentieth century radical movement was like and what radical history might do. Rosemont's book Joe Hill, the IWW & the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture has recently been translated into French and published in Paris. His coedited volume Haymarket Scrapbook stands as the most beautifully illustrated labor history publication of the recent past. In none of this did Rosemont separate scholarship from art, or art from revolt. His books of poetry include Lamps Hurled at the Stunning Algebra of Ants, The Apple of the Automatic Zebra's Eye and Penelope. His marvelous fierce, whimsical and funny art work graced countless surrealist publications and exhibitions.

His activity with the Wobblies at Solidarity Bookshop were illustrated in cartoon format in a book by Harvey Pekar edited by Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman. His and Penelope's SDS activity were illustrated in another cartoon format book by Pekar and Paul Buhle, Students for a Democratic Society, A Graphic History.