help me identify a quote (poetry)

[ejp626]

Years ago I recall reading a long (2-3 page) poem, where the ending went like this:

JESUS SAVES

JESUS SAVES

JESUS SAVES GREEN STAMPS

Then there might have been a coda like, Yes he does.

The rest of the poem was kind of rambling, I think it had urban overtones. Almost certainly written in the 1960s or early 1970s.

The two most likely candidates are early Amiri Baraka (back when he was still LeRoi Jones) or Paul Blackburn. But I have gone through my collections of their works and can't find it (doesn't mean that I didn't just miss it). Baraka does have a pretty interesting poem featuring the Green Hornet, but that's not what I am thinking of. It's probably not Frank O'Hara, whose poems generally weren't so overtly political.

I have done a variety of google searches, but haven't turned up a true hit so far. Let me know if this sounds familiar. Thanks for any leads.

By the way, I think both O'Hara's and Blackburn's poetry is worth checking out. Paul Blackburn can be sampled a couple of ways, in a Selected Poems or in The Cities. He was an observer of cities and writes rambling poems about what he sees in 1960s and 1970s Manhattan. He has a whole series of quite interesting subway poems.

I actually selected a few for an anthology of subway poems I was working on. I finished this and sent it around, got some interest from a small publisher, then finally decided that getting (and paying for) the permissions would sink the project.

Eric

[maren]

Pedro Pietri?