With an afterword by Allen Ginsberg
In this limited edition folio of his graphics, songs and poems, Eric Drooker presents ten years of work chronicling the political and cultural upheavals on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Drooker traces the neighborhood's radical history back two centuries in his written introduction and follows with dozens of arresting images, depicting the resistance of the beaten-down, the trod-upon and the forgotten in our brave new economic order. These visual protests debuted on lampposts and walls, but they have long since become part of the ongoing visual and psychic landscape of the Lower East Side, now collected here in Street Posters and Ballads.
ERIC DROOKER was born on East End Avenue in 1958 and has lived in Lower Manhattan his whole life. A third generation New Yorker, his art combines the concrete reality of urban existence with visionary flights of imagination. He is the author of Street Posters and Ballads, and his work has appeared in World War Three Illustrated, the Nation, Spin, the Village Voice, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and many other places, among them the streets of his home city.
ALLEN GINSBERG (1926–1997) overcame censorship with his signal poem Howl, now one of the most widely read poems of the century. Crowned Prague May King in 1965, then expelled by Czech police and simultaneously placed on the FBI's Dangerous Security List, Ginsberg traveled to and taught in the People's Republic of China, the Soviet Union, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe, where he received Yugoslavia's Struga Poetry Festival "Golden Wreath" in 1986. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, the first accredited Buddhist college in the Western world. He was winner of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award given by the University of Chicago in 1991 and in 1993 received France's Chevalier de l'Ordre des Artes et des Lettres. Ginsberg is also the editor for Poems for the Nation. Ginsberg died of liver cancer, April 5, 1997, in his home in New York City.
