Allen Cohen
1940-2004

By Dennis McNally

San Francisco Oracle founder and editor Allen Cohen, who succumbed to cancer April 29, was one of his generation's model contributors to the San Francisco visionary poetic tradition. He was a pilgrim who came here seeking cultural freedom and found it. Spiritually, he was a hero. He had his dream, he made it come to life, and he honored it all his days. He is survived by his wife, Ann, and son, River.

Born in Brooklyn, he encountered the Beat generation in the pages of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. He graduated from college in 1962 and headed straight for North Beach to plug into the boho-outlaw-anarchist streak that started with the gold rush and flourished in the iconoclastic bohemian literary tradition of Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce, the radical union politics of Harry Bridges in the 1930s, the anarchism of Kenneth Rexroth in the 1940s, and the Beat scene in the 1950s. Not long after, he moved to the Haight-Ashbury, where in the mid '60s a new chapter was gestating, and in 1966 he went to work for the Psychedelic Shop, one of the first overt manifestations of the emerging community.

While working there, Cohen dreamed of a "rainbow-colored newspaper," the perfect metaphor for the colorful scene then blossoming along Haight Street. With funding from the shop's co-owner Ron Thelin, pot dealers, the Grateful Dead, and the Jefferson Airplane, he went to work with commercial artist Gabriel Katz and various friends to create what would become the Oracle, the first hippie newspaper.

"What he did will be felt in San Francisco and in publishing for a long time," original Oracle staff member Stephen Levine recalled. "He allowed people to go beyond what was even readable, for what the heart might decipher in the curves and the twists and the turns of the person's language as well as the graphic on the page. It was very far-out. We never knew what it was going to look like."

As the year waned, Cohen, along with artist Michael Bowen and many others, concluded that the Haight needed a giant coming-out party that would link the people of the evolving rock ethos with their elder brothers, the Beat poets. The result was the Human Be-In in late January 1967 – and, ultimately, national media attention, overpopulation, and the end of the Haight as a viable community. But the seeds had been sown.

And through communal life in the country and working at the Schlock Shop back in North Beach and as a teacher in Oakland, Cohen kept his idealism and his faith in what had transpired in the Haight. In Wavy Gravy's phrase, he was "tie-dyed to the bone." Now the hippies' very best qualities – openheartedness, faith, sweetness – made them the easiest target for mockery since ... fill in the blank. But Cohen was no sap. His poems reveal a wisdom that is sweet but not naive: in "The Inner Child Is Free" he writes, "And what we need to awaken / Is lying there in the manger / Yet in grave danger / As true innocence always is ... the cynicism of the world / The errant pride of empire / The power of wealth / All will bow before that child."

Let us hope. As creepy as our times are, San Francisco remains, on the good days – like when our mayor decided you only have to be human to get married – as Cohen saw it: a sanctuary, a place of possibilities.

A hundred old friends and younger followers gathered May 2 on Haight Street in front of the old Oracle office and walked to Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park. Inevitably, someone handed out flowers, and it mournfully occurred to me that even hippies now give out flowers at funerals. Cohen was much more complex than that. In "An Afternoon on the Eel River" he found himself "Sitting as always between / The past and future / Between birth and death / A breath added to the wind."

A sweet breath, a nurturing breath. Breathe his example deep. In the words of Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, "May the four winds blow him safely home."

P.S. For recent Allen Cohen poems, go to www.sfbg.com/38/32/poems.html. For Cohen history produced by his Summer of Love compatriot Chet Helms and the Family Dog, go to www.familydog.com/benefit.html. And for a website dedicated to Allen Cohen created by his friend Nicole Savage and hosting many of his poems, tributes and memories including Susan Birkeland's beautiful poem for Allen that she first read at his memorial on Hippie Hill, go to www.sfheart.com/cohen.html.

Dennis McNally has written biographies of Jack Kerouac and the Grateful
Dead (A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead). He
lives in the Mission District of San Francisco.

Updated December 27, 2006