Allen Katzman

Poet, co-founding editor of The East Village Other who left the East Village to become a resident of Westbeth in the 1970’s.

“From 1965 to 1972, The East Village Other revolutionized “The Good News” and shook the foundations of the existing print and visual media. After seven years, it went just as it came—in a hail of livingness. In true American phantasmagoria, it was a legend in its own time.

Initiated by poets, painters, artists, seers, perverts and prophets, the Other shared its pages with the likes of Buckminster Fuller, Timothy Leary, Robert Crumb, Ishmael Reed, Allen Ginsberg, Lenny Bruce, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Baba Ram Das, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman—the conspiracy of the 1960s.

The East Village Other had a consciousness which was created. The News needing a shoe-up to come alive was new to an unconscious civilization. It was more than Print, it was Imprint. An indelible biologue, The East Village Other made even The New York Times seem to come alive. Headlines, columns, advertisements, propaganda and proselytizing made the “form of the newspaper an adjunct of reality . . .””

As quoted by The New York Times in a 2012 announcement of a panel “The East Village Other, the Rise of Underground Comix and the Alternative Press, 1965-72,” featuring Ed Sanders, Steven Heller, Claudia Dreifus and others.