A Non-Registrant | Paul Goodman | The New York Review of Books

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How many years of history it needed
and stupid choices by how many men
to manufacture this grotesque machine
the sovereign State that yesterday decided
to hurt a simple student who has wanted
little but good in this world and has shown
much good sense although young, my only son
Mathew gentle with animals.
Demented
are they, and because we live with them
they drive us mad too, in this beautiful
country they have turned into a slum
with dirty waters and no place where people
are let be, nay they sail across the seas
ten thousand miles to slaughter Vietnamese.

Paul Goodman

Paul Goodman (1911–1972) was an American social critic, psychologist, poet, novelist, and anarchist. His writings appeared in Politics, Partisan Review, The New Republic, Commentary, The New Leader, Dissent, and The New York Review of Books. He published several well-regarded books in a variety of fields—including city planning, Gestalt therapy, literary criticism, and politics—before Growing Up Absurd, cancelled by its original publisher and turned down by a number of other presses, was brought out by Random House in 1960.

This Issue

April 20, 1967