Produced as the programme for the International Poetry Incarnation held in London in the summer of 1965, this “invocation” performed a similar function to the event, which is seen as the first gathering of the tribes which would form the counterculture.

Compiled by 10 of the participants at the London flat of Alexander Trocchi, the mission statement “maps a new emergent countercultural community”, as art historian Andrew Wilson wrote in 2004.

“Virtually every word here signals a magazine, an event or a remembered statement,” added Wilson, who related the use of the word “Cosmonaut” to Trocchi’s declaration at the 1962 Edinburgh Festival that he was a “Cosmonaut of inner space”.

There are also tips of the hat to Better Books, William Blake’s Jerusalem, The Castalia Foundation, Centre 42/The Roundhouse, City Lights Books, Moving Times, New Departures, New Directions, The Olympia Press, Project Sigma and Residu.

Thus, according to Wilson, the invocation and the IPI as a whole “dismissed poetry that had become locked onto the printed page  in favour of a poetry of event, a carnivalesque poetry which would embrace psychedelic drugs or an examination of definitions of madness in its assault on dominant culture”.

This is Peter Whitehead‘s 35-minute distillation of the four-hour event:

Tags: 1962. 1965, Alexander Trocchi, Andrew Wilson, Arnold Wesker, Better Books, Centre 42, City Lights Books, Edinburgh Festival, Moving Times, New Departures, New Directions, Peter Whitehead, Project Sigma, Residu, The Castalia Foundation, the Olympia Press, The Roundhouse