Retort collective

Retort is a community of about forty writers, teachers, artists, and activists, all self-styled opponents of capital and empire, which has been based for the past two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Retort is a gathering of antinomians. It is not a typical collective; there is no explicit program. Retort is a motley crew - writers, artists, teachers, artisans, scientists, poets - joined in a web of sustaining friendships, who share an antagonism to the present order of things. Retort has been meeting on a regular basis for the last two decades, for the most part to eat and drink together, but also to discuss politics, history, aesthetics, and the terms and tactics of root-and-branch opposition to capital, empire and the various versions of barbarism currently on offer. There is a deep appreciation of old cafes and city taverns, competing with a tendency to favor the open air - rambles, the back country, tidepool picnics, wild swimming. The gathering has produced broadsides and pamphlets for particular occasions, and from time to time they also organize more public events - readings, conviviums, evenings of film, and so forth. There are collaborations of many kinds within the milieu.

The name "Retort" acknowledges that the project is engaged in a wider conversation whose terms and assumptions they reject, and that Retorters stand on ground, rhetorical and otherwise, not of our own choosing. Some feel forced to spend much of the time - far too much - in rebuttals, demurrers, rejoinders. In a word, retorting. The name gestures to an obscure non-sectarian 1940s journal of that title, which at first, (new) Retort thought seriously about reviving. It was edited and published out of a cabin in Bearsville, a hamlet near . Retort's printing press had belonged to the eloquent Wobbly agitator Carlo Tresca, before he was assassinated on the streets of Manhattan, perhaps by agents of Benito Mussolini. The journal Retort was anti-statist, anti-militarist and published essays on art, politics and culture. Poetry too - the first issue published the Kenneth Rexroth poem that begins:

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