Insurgent Imagination is a literary arts anthology committed to defending the creative impulse. This deluxe, hardbound, illuminated "Robert Branaman Edition" contains artwork on every spread as visual intensifiers to the poems, essays and perspectives of over 40 creators. The featured artist for Annual number 1 is the late Robert Branaman, who was a Beat artist, experimental filmmaker and Los Angeles poet. Branaman was known as a member of the original "Wichita Vortex" group of artists and poets who entered the slipstream of the Beat Generation in the late 1950s and inspired Allen Ginsberg's poem Wichita Vortex Sutra in the 1960s. "'Wichita Vortex' was a phrase Ginsberg heard from his friends Michael McClure, Bruce Conner, Charles Plymell and Robert Branaman, all who migrated to East and/or West Coasts from this strange Kansas center of America," says Marc Olmsted in his essay included in Insurgent Imagination. This desire for individuality and creative freedom is the essence of Insurgent Imagination's credo. "The insurgent imagination stands for the radical freedom of the individual, the meeting ground of materialist and idealist heritages, the intersections of unconscious desire and conscious thought, seeing through the eyes of women, the vital poetic spirit of non-Western thought and ceremonies, and dreaming the social revolution," says Insurgent Imagination Editor x359594. Contributors of this first annual edition include: Wallace Berman, William Blake, Robert Branaman, Anne Buchanan, Walter Chappell, Adam Cornford, Roque Dalton, M.L. de Witt, John Dorsey, Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Christopher Felver, Michael C Ford, S.A. Griffin, Annie Jane-Wilder, Milo Starr Johnson, Jerry Kamstra, liftarm, M.L. Liebler, Luna, Peter Marti, Bernadette McComish, Richard Messenger, Richard Modiano, K.R. Morrison, Marc Olmsted, Suzi Kaplan Olmsted, Frank R. Paul, Vira Sofia Pitkofska, Rob Plath, Charles Plymell, Doren Robbins, Goldberry Samp, Brian Sonia-Wallace, Daniel O. Stolpe, Mike Street, Theo van Doesburg, Laki Vazakas, T. Mike Walker, Scott Wannberg, Hannah Yaryan and Daniel Yaryan.
