Editor’s note: This essay, written by Eliot Katz, author of The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg, is a response to this article published in Beatdom last week by Kirby Olsen.
Years ago, I read and enjoyed parts of Kirby Olson’s book on Gregory Corso’s poetry, and we had some friendly email conversations about it. But for Kirby now to assert that Allen Ginsberg had ever abandoned his leftist, or progressive, political views is unfair and wrong, as is Kirby’s assertion that Allen abandoned his belief in coalition-building for the arena of politics. One of the problems here is that Kirby offers a false dichotomy between exploitative capitalism and authoritarian forms of communism—both of which Allen understandably criticized—and does not recognize the existence of other, more democratic leftist ideas, including democratic socialism, even as groups in the U.S., like Democratic Socialists of America, have been growing larger than ever, partly a result of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns. What Kirby sees as a rejection of left politics is rather a principled opposition to the exploitative or repressive aspects of both the actually existing East and the West. Kirby also ignores Allen’s lifelong belief in progressive solidarity—initially and most powerfully illustrated in the “I’m with you in Rockland” section of “Howl.”
Furthermore, Kirby’s piece seems based on the mistaken assumption that one cannot see oneself on the political left if one is willing to criticize some excesses and mistakes of the left. One of the most famous examples of a well-known pioneer of leftist ideas who was willing to criticize mistakes of the left was the early 20th century democratic socialist theorist and activist, Rosa Luxemburg, who was, in her later years, imprisoned and then killed (in 1919) for her democratic-socialist and anti-war views. Luxemburg wrote an incredibly insightful and prophetic small book on the Russian Revolution, in which she praised the Bolsheviks, under Lenin, for overthrowing the dictatorship of the czar, but then also heavily criticized Lenin and the Bolsheviks for getting rid of the Parliament, for creating a one-party state, and for suppressing freedom of expression. For Luxemburg, the idea of socialism was to create both more political democracy and more economic justice—for Luxemburg, one could not be built without the other—, and socialism therefore required multi-party elections and freedom of expression, and could not simply be declared by undemocratic bureaucrats sitting behind their desks. Furthermore, for Luxemburg, the meaning of freedom importantly included freedom for individuals who think differently.
I wrote an entire book on Allen Ginsberg’s poetry and politics, published in 2016 by Beatdom Books, which anyone can read who would want to see my fuller arguments. But basically, my argument regarding Allen would be similar to what I’ve just said above about Luxemburg: that Allen was willing to be critical of mistakes, including acts of violence by small segments of the late 1960s U.S. student movement; and by the Soviet Union, which, for most of its existence, most extremely under the murderous Stalin, Allen would not have even considered it to be any part of any real left because of its deeply authoritarian governing style, a belief of Allen’s with which I would certainly agree. But just because Allen criticized Soviet-style, anti-democratic, and repressive communism in a poem like “Capitol Air” (quoted by Olson), and just because he was occasionally in poems self-reflective enough (and sometimes with a sense of humor that Olson ignores) to ask questions about whether he may have ever contributed to the violence from small parts of the U.S. student left—which I would argue he did not—does not mean at all, as Olson claims, that Allen was criticizing and abandoning the entire idea of a democratic left, or of his being part of a democratic left. Indeed, in one of his journals, he wrote clearly about himself: “Left wing but suspicious of communism.” Like Luxemburg, Allen also always believed in individual freedoms (which Olson correctly points out), but he saw those beliefs as being consistent with, not in contradiction with, placing himself within a larger democratic left.
In my book, what I wrote, and would still argue, is that Allen’s leftist or progressive politics were more practical than ideological. I called his political philosophy “ideologically flexible,” staying always within the wide arena of the democratic left, as a poet influenced by previous progressive poets like Whitman and Blake. Allen’s politics never veered rightward—although it sometimes, in various poems, moved within wider left traditions like anarchism, trade unionism, or democratic socialism (which is where I place myself)—, but always remaining committed to progressive and democratic ideas like a world with much less poverty and war; with far cleaner air and water and health care; and with a deeper commitment to civil liberties, civic participation, gay rights, interpersonal cooperation, and democratically accountable social institutions. By embracing different ideas within the wider democratic left, I would argue that Allen was in one way trying to avoid the kind of divisive arguments about specific ideological positions that he had seen between his communist mother and Debsian socialist father, and that his idea of embracing inclusiveness within the democratic left would prefigure the kind of inclusiveness seen in the early years of the New Left (like early SDS) and that was markedly different from the argumentative sectarianism of large segments of the Old Left.
I should be clear here that I would contend, as I do in more detail in my book, that Allen’s political beliefs and his spiritual beliefs—in Buddhism—should not be considered to be in the same sphere—that political spheres and spiritual spheres are different, sometimes separated by semi-permeable membranes, sometimes overlapping or pushing against each other, and sometimes remaining separate and apart, as issues of love and death, for two examples, will remain highly important for humans whether in any decent or indecent political system. Along these lines, I would contend that Allen’s trust in Trungpa (which Olson focuses parts of his piece on) as a leader for Naropa’s tradition of Buddhism does not explain in any way Allen’s commitment to democratic forms of national or political leadership.
One can see Allen’s progressive politics in poems throughout his full career, from his great, early and well-known poems like “Howl” and “America”; to his powerful anti-Vietnam War era poems like “Wichita Vortex Sutra” and “Anti-Viet Nam War Peace Mobilization“; to his great anti-nuke poem, “Plutonian Ode” (soon after which he was arrested as part of a group, which also included the terrific poet, Anne Waldman, for sitting on railroad tracks in Colorado to attempt to block the shipment of plutonium); to memorable mid-career poems like “September on Jessore Road” and “Verses Written for Student Anti-Draft Registration Rally”; and to his anti-1991-Iraq War and anti-NSA poems like “NSA Dope Calypso” and “Hum Bomb!” Another powerful late poem (1993), offering a clear and wide range of democratic and progressive solutions to social problems, was “New Democracy Wish List.” A number of Allen’s poems criticized the right-wing, so-called “Moral Majority” of his time—and those poems could easily be read today as a critique of the right-wing religious fundamentalism that has taken over the majority of today’s U.S. Supreme Court, including recent rulings against abortion rights and against the power of the EPA to regulate fossil fuel emissions. And Allen ended his poem, “Why I Meditate” (1981) with “I sit for world revolution,” a line which would clearly not fit into any analysis of a post-political Allen. This does not mean that Allen only wrote political poetry or that he focused solely on politics in his daily work, but that yes, he continued always to be a political poet and a political activist and supporter of many political activist projects.
Besides his poems, one can also see Allen’s progressive politics in the groups and causes he supported for many years—including the War Resisters League, The PEN Freedom to Write Committee, and the progressive media watchdog group, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), whose advisory board Allen served on. Of course, in earlier years, he had played a large and influential role in the anti-Vietnam War movement, both through his widely published antiwar poems and by participating in many protests. The first organized protest that he attended was a protest against the Vietnam War. He was a high-profile participant in the antiwar protests outside the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago 1968—at which he both protested the Vietnam War and also tried to help create a more peaceful scenario through chanting—and he was a key witness during the ensuing Chicago 8 trial. He was also a participant and chanter at the well-known 1967 Pentagon “levitation” protest.
I can also say from personal experience that Allen was always responsive and supportive to progressive activist causes for which I asked for his help: from supporting a Central New Jersey anti-apartheid campaign in the mid-1980s; to reading at a 1991 anti-Iraq war poetry event that I had helped put together at The Nuyorican Poets Café; to reading at an early-1990s NYC benefit, which I had helped organize with Johanna Lawrenson and the Abbie Hoffman Activist Foundation, for a Vermont congressional campaign by the well-known democratic-socialist, Bernie Sanders; to reading at, and helping to draw students to, a national student activist convention with 700-plus attendees at Rutgers University in February 1988; to serving on the Advisory Board (along with such well-known national leftists as Noam Chomsky, Adrienne Rich, Cornel West, Frances Fox Piven, Dave Dellinger, Manning Marable, Barbara Ehrenreich, Howard Zinn, Abbie Hoffman and more) of a national student activist group that I had helped organize, as a follow-up to our Rutgers convention, called Student Action Union. I’m fairly sure there are many more next-generation activists who could also cite Allen’s support for their projects.
Although some Nordic countries with strong social safety nets like Finland and Denmark continue to lead surveys on the UN’s World Happiness Index, none of us can yet point to any country that has fully achieved utopian progressive goals—thus, the use of surrealism in poetry, including in Allen’s poetry, which uses imagery that does not yet exist in the actual world and thereby, for leftist poets—carrying on the tradition of Breton, Mayakovsky, and others—implies the possibility of creating a better world in the future. But the fact that Allen offered continued and consistent support to the kinds of progressive group projects listed above proves that he did not ever abandon his long-held belief in the importance of political solidarity for creating progressive change. Although Kirby Olson quotes some briefly expressed moments of self-doubt in the terrific biography of Allen written by my friend and Allen’s longtime bibliographer, Bill Morgan, a few briefly expressed self-doubts are normal for any honest, decent person, but they don’t in any way show an abandonment by Allen of leftist poetry or politics. And Bill Morgan’s book does describe many of the progressive political projects that Allen worked on throughout his adult life. I would also recommend the excellent book by Allen’s longtime assistant, Bob Rosenthal (also published by Beatdom), in which Bob writes about spending much time helping Allen with progressive political advocacy work throughout Bob’s 20-plus years of working with Allen in his office.
In the poetry world, Allen also spent parts of his last 18 months collecting progressive political poems from poets whose work he admired, poems that were in some direct or indirect ways protesting either the rising movement of the American right then led by Newt Gingrich and his “contract with America” that many of us were calling a “contract on America,” as well as Bill Clinton’s attempt to shift the Democratic Party further to the center and away from its more liberal FDR-type traditions. These poems were initially being collected to be published in The Nation magazine, but were eventually published in 2000 by Seven Stories Press as a small anthology, Poems for the Nation, with Andy Clausen and I assisting as co-editors, at Bob Rosenthal’s request, by helping to solidify some of the final selections that Allen had been considering but didn’t have time to make final decisions before his passing. We also added a few prose and poetry pieces that had been read at a tribute attended by over 2,500 people, a tribute partly focused on Allen’s activism, that took place at St. John the Divine Cathedral in NYC in the year after Allen’s death. Lastly, let me say that, until Allen’s last few months, when his health became more of a struggle, I had had many post-reading political conversations with him over dinner at Lower East Side restaurants, like The Kiev. Allen used to enjoy asking me about the left-oriented books that I was reading, whether about left political theorists like Rosa Luxemburg, or left aesthetic issues like the Brecht-Bloch-Lukacs debates about realism and surrealism. I know from those many conversations that Allen certainly always considered himself on the left. Throughout the years that I knew Allen, his social-activist commitment never wavered—neither in terms of his own activism, nor with his support and encouragement to younger activists like myself—although I’m admittedly no longer young at 65. As he aged, Allen only grew better able to explain his thoughtful, progressive beliefs in clear, lively language that was usually difficult for open-minded people to dismiss. Along Shelleyan lines, as I have written before, I think it would be fair to say that Allen Ginsberg was an important democratic conscience of Cold War America. Allen’s poems have continued to influence poets, songwriters, painters, and activists for more than six decades. And Allen’s suggestions for more peaceful and theatrical progressive protests, with music, puppets, and creative signs (suggestions made originally in a 1965 anti-war article, “How to Make a March/Spectacle”) have continued to influence the way progressive rallies and marches are shaped in the U.S., and around the world, to this day. Both in his poems and in his biography, there is much to prove that Allen continued throughout his life to write progressive poems and to engage in and to support progressive activism and causes.
It isn’t clear to me exactly how Eliot engages with the material quoted by Tom Clark in Clark’s book The Great Naropa Poetry Wars. These insights were the most crucial in my article. At least at times, Ginsberg was willing to push democracy out and usher in monarchy. He did this not only in terms of the theological monarchy that the Buddhists brought with them in the form of Trungpa, but also in terms of Ginsberg’s tacit acceptance of Castro and Mao. Both of these Marxist leaders dismissed democracy in their respective countries and created top-down one-party states.
Here are some of the more relevant passages from my article:
“This resulted in a terrible collision with the poet W.S. Merwin that is documented in Tom Clark’s history of the period, The Great Naropa Poetry Wars. Clark writes, as a summation:
The poets have chosen metaphysics, magic, and the mumbo-jumbo of a spiritual kingdom ruled over by a witty Oriental whose unashamed contempt for democratic institutions is starting to invade their poetics.
(GNPW 43)
Earlier in the volume, Clark wrote that the event in which Merwin and his girlfriend were forced to strip in order to show that they could yield their egos to the guru’s was interpreted by Allen Ginsberg as an “experiment in monarchy” (cited in Clark, 32). Clark quotes Ginsberg telling students, “…democracy was anyway a failed experiment, the atom bomb proved that” (32).
…
The monarchical lineage that Ginsberg adopted had many issues. The W.S. Merwin incident sent ripples of distrust throughout the poetry community. Poets such as Robert Bly and Ed Sanders, who had been long-term allies of Ginsberg’s, balked. Even Snyder himself balked, but did not criticize Allen publicly. When Trungpa died, he left Ösel Tendzin in charge of his lineage. Tenzin had AIDS, but slept with students without informing them, and several were infected. Although he had tolerated Trungpa’s excesses, Ginsberg was critical of Tenzin and left the Vajradhatu organization for another, called Jewel Heart Sangha.”
Ginsberg apparently objected to this experiment in monarchy under Tenzin. We tend to forget how awfully the upper class treated the lower classes in the old days of the aristocracies, but Tom Clark pointed out in his short book how the Buddhist upper class was at least as bad. Cinderella was unlikely to be anything but used and dumped and usually without consent in the aristocratic period. Similar things happened in the Soviet Union under Lavrentij Berea, who was said to be a mass rapist but there is little or no evidence as he usually buried the victims of his affections after a night of bliss.
Katz does suggest that an earlier figure such as Rosa Luxembourg may have been a forerunner whose thought would permit what he calls “democratic socialism.” I am less enamored of those who died before their monstrous ideas could assume a concrete form. Many claim that Leon Trotsky would have been better than Stalin. The ten thousand sailors killed at Cronstadt would probably beg to differ.
However, like Eliot Katz, I am for democracy and the consent of the governed. I find it hard to find within the traditional left, which is why I think almost everyone has either turned against it, or fled its rampages in every country in which it has been tried. Too often, the left demonizes its opposition, which means that when they get the police and army under their control, they murder their opponents. Theocracies have often done the same thing. Ginsberg also mocks Islamic countries at times for not being exactly democratic or open-minded with regard to other religions. What I find in the Collected Poems is less and less certainty over time and more and more willingness to be open. I see this as an improvement. Most of the ideas of the nineteen-sixties were non-functional from sexual freedom to illicit drug use to communism. Bob Rosenthal criticizes Ginsberg’s rejection of traditional marriage in his amazing book Straight Around Allen. He also criticizes his last poems that endorse NAMBLA-esque viewpoints. Most Americans still believe in consent, and that consent can only begin at 18 when the immature person can understand the power differential at least to a degree. Communism remains a draw, but only for those willing to experiment with monarchy.
Bill Morgan writes that Ginsberg wished to be sodomized by his father in pre-pubescent years. This seems to be an unusual wish to be dominated. We see it again with Ginsberg’s interest in Trungpa. And we see it over and over in his tacit acceptance of father-driven communist states such as Castro’s Cuba. Occasionally, this sense of wanting to be overpowered by a father-figure of some kind is always lurking. One suspects that Moloch is a very rich, strange symbol for this sort of gathering evil.
Ginsberg pushes back at times, but often sees it in the wrong places, too. America wasn’t Moloch. It never was. Many insist that it is and love Ginsberg’s Howl because it seems to describe an America that is horrible. Others hearken back to an older time in which America was considered the light of the world. Like Eliot, I see democracy as a good thing. I wouldn’t find it, however, in Rosa Luxembourg or in Leon Trotsky, or even in Finland or Norway. I see it right here in America. I see it in the writings of Jefferson, Madison, and John Adams. I see it in Lincoln. I see it in George Washington and Calvin Coolidge and in Ronald Reagan. Most of the Beats, with the exception of Kerouac, rejected America. Like Whitman, Ginsberg increasingly came to accept to accept all Americans. He could see this beauty in the midwest, in the south, and everywhere else. He seems to say that the beauty of the individual is often circumscribed by government. It is how he opened a conversation with America. His remarkable openness was first championed by Walt Whitman. In some poems, he appears to argue that the individual must find their own way to beauty in spite of government.
“On the Conduct of the World Seeking Beauty Against Government,” (CP 947), appears to suggest that. In the opening of “Cosmopolitan Greetings,” the first phrase is the injunction, “Stand up against governments” (CP 954). This seems like a healthy individual but he also writes, “Stay irresponsible.” It may be possible for us to find anything we wish in Ginsberg. I tend to see his openness toward individual beauty, and his reaching back through the classical avant-garde as a guard rail. One can only hope that he would turn against the authoritarian left and its genocidal horrors. Marx wrote, “it is not important to understand the world. It is important to change it.”
That seems irresponsible. To make any positive changes, we must first understand a situation. Ginsberg laments that he did not entirely understand situations that he changed for the worse. We can do better by listening to him.
Thanks for writing a cogent and complex letter. Thanks also to many others who wrote to me at my email address. Best wishes to all.
Thanks for your reply, Kirby.
I would disagree here, personally:
Too often, the left demonizes its opposition, which means that when they get the police and army under their control, they murder their opponents.
Yes, the left is very guilty of demonising its opposition. That is actually my main problem (as a liberal) with present-day liberalism. Yet is that unique to the left? No. The right is just as bad. Meanwhile, you said that left murders its opponents… I suspect you are thinking of the left in terms of Mao and Stalin, etc, from a later comment you made about left-wing genocide. I think that’s an extreme example. I despise communism, having lived and travelled in communist nations, but I hardly think they are left-wing in almost any regard. To be honest, they’ve co-opted the ideology of the old, old left and infused it with a form of tyranny that could be decribe as neither right nor left. Hardly any liberal alive today wants a dictatorship with zero free speech and forced labor camps etc etc. They might want some elements of socialism or even communism, but that’s entirely different. It’s like saying all conservatives want to live in a new version of the Third Reich. Such a claim is unfair and untrue.
You also say you “wouldn’t find [democracy] in Finland or Norway” but according to the 2021 democracy index, Norway was #1 in the whole world and Finland #3. The US, meanwhile, was #26. No country is perfect, but their systems are pretty damned good. The US has much to be proud of (which many now overlook or forget) but the Scandanavian nations have done some things very well.
But this gets us away from Ginsberg. He was a complex individual and I admire him for being able to reflect on his past mistakes. We should all be able to look at our old views and learn from our errors. But I don’t think he disavowed left-wing notions. He certainly refined them, but that’s just personal growth.
Although I think I answered all of Kirby Olson’s basic questions in my original piece, since he asks for more clarification here, and offers a few new questions, I’m going to respond one more time with some more details—and then, if Kirby wants to write more, I’m going to let him have the last word, and people can read more about my own thoughts in my Beatdom book on Allen Ginsberg’s poetry and politics.
In his new piece, Kirby says Allen supported Castro and Mao. First, I may have missed it, but I’ve never seen Allen support Mao anywhere in his writings or talks or in our personal conversations, and I did see Allen challenge at least one well-known poet in public, at Naropa, who did have sympathy for Mao. Re Castro, Allen may have initially been hopeful about Cuba’s potential after the people’s initial overthrow of Cuba’s previous Batista dictatorship, but Allen was kicked out of Cuba when he visited, and so he quickly realized that Castro was not going to be the kind of democratic (with a small “d”) leader that Allen could support.
Kirby also quotes Allen in a moment of discouragement with U.S. democracy, the kind of self-reflection that I noted in my earlier piece would be normal for any decent, honest, deep-thinking person. For Allen, his occasional discouragement with American democracy likely resulted from a wide range of regrettable U.S. policies, including: increasing hunger and homelessness in violation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights to which the U.S. is a signatory; the building of more, and more destructive, nuclear weapons; systemic racism, sexism, and homophobia; the immoral Vietnam War that Robert McNamara, one of the war’s architects estimated, after visiting, killed about 3.6 million Vietnamese; environmental destruction (including furthering climate change, which many don’t realize had originally been warned about by a Swedish scientist, Svante Arrhenius, way back in 1896); mass shootings by individuals with military-style, semi-automatic weapons; the ability of billionaires (like the Koch brothers or Trump) to have undue influence on American elections; Republican Party attempts in many states to impose voter suppression laws; the CIA’s support for death-squad governments in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras during the Reagan era that murdered tens of thousands of dissidents, labor organizers, and alternative journalists; and the CIA’s involvement in the overthrow of democratically elected progressive leaders in Iran and Guatemala in the early 1950s and in Allende’s Chile (which Allen in a poem called a “red democracy”) in 1973. Since Kirby Olson seemingly asks in his new piece why I didn’t mention nearly everything possible, related to Allen and politics, in my own short piece, I would ask why Kirby Olson doesn’t mention any of these nationally and globally important issues that I just listed—including homelessness, wars, nukes, CIA-aided coups, voter suppression, the climate change that has the potential to destroy the human species–in any of his two pieces on Allen and politics?
In his pieces on Ginsberg, Kirby Olson did not identify his own political leanings—I stated my own democratic-left politics in my previous piece. Years ago, the editor of a NYC literary journal emailed me that Kirby Olson comes from the political right, and I was not really sure if that editor was correct, which I am now assuming he was, since in Kirby’s new piece, he mentions his admiration for Ronald Reagan. So I assume Kirby is still somewhere on the political right, although the shape of the American political right has somewhat changed as a result of the terrible Trump years—and it is curious that Kirby does not mention anything about Trump. But I am assuming that our different views on Allen’s politics are, at least partly, coming from our own different ideological perspectives. And in my personal view, which is admittedly mostly a guess, Kirby is probably looking for a way to continue admiring and teaching Allen Ginsberg’s poetry, even though Allen was a poet of the left.
In my piece, I note that, despite occasional moments of expressed discouragement in relation to American democracy, Allen never gave up on the possibility of creating a democratic left. One can see this in the list of political poems that I cited in my earlier piece, including his late poem, “New Democracy Wish List” (1993)—and more poems that I discuss in my book and many that I didn’t have room to discuss in my book—and also in the progressive causes and groups that he continued to support. One example that I gave in my earlier piece was his support for, and Advisory Board membership in, our national student activist group, Student Action Union, which lasted from the late 1980s until the mid-1990s, which was modeled on the early years of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and which included an internal democratic decision-making structure for the group, and outward demands for a more democratic society both in the U.S. and across the globe.
In his new response, Kirby notes that he can’t see democracy in Finland or Norway, and I don’t even know how to answer that, except to suggest that he may want to start reading a wider variety of news sources. As I mentioned in my earlier piece, Finland, Denmark, and Norway consistently top the UN’s World Happiness Index (with the U.S., post-Trump, having moved up 3 spots from #19 to #16 in the 2022 list released recently), both because of their strong economic safety nets and because of their deep commitments to political democracy. Kirby also says that he can’t find democracy in the “monstrous ideas” of Rosa Luxemburg, which makes me wonder whether he’s ever read her writings. Kirby also brings up Leon Trotsky in association with Luxemburg, as if I’d also mentioned Trotsky which I hadn’t—as can be seen in my own writings, including a number of books of poems, I’m a democratic socialist or democratic leftist, not a Trotskyist.
Kirby also asks why I didn’t spend more time discussing his criticisms of Trungpa. As I mentioned in my piece and discussed even more in my book, in the tradition of Enlightenment philosophers like Kant and Hegel, I consider political and spiritual spheres to be separate spheres, sometimes overlapping or affecting each other and sometimes not. The left literary scholar, Terry Eagleton, sometimes describes these different spheres of life as different spheres that are separated by dotted lines. Although I’ve read a few books on Buddhism, I have never been a Buddhist, nor have I ever pretended to be an expert on Buddhism. So I personally can’t praise Trungpa’s strengths, and I have no reason at all to defend any of Trungpa’s faults or mistakes, and I will leave discussions about Allen and Buddhism to folks who know more about this subject than I do, except to say that I am arguing that, whatever Allen’s Buddhist beliefs were, they did not affect his political beliefs in democracy. Indeed, following Walt Whitman’s well-known admission of some self-contradictions (“I am large, I contain multitudes”), Allen wrote about himself in one of his journals, a line quoted in my book, “Democrat but following guru leader.”
As I claimed in my response to Kirby’s original piece, and as I wrote more thoroughly in my Beatdom book, which also includes close readings of many of Allen’s poems throughout his career and a closer look at Allen’s overall politics and activism, my own strong belief is that Allen was a lifelong progressive, moving in his poems and in his activism within the wide arena of the democratic left (very different from authoritarian countries like the old Soviet Union that claimed to be on the left), but never veering rightward—this is also true of his conversations and I am guessing that I probably had a lot more conversations about politics through the years with Allen than Kirby did (in the years that I knew Allen between 1980 and 1997, after having studied with Allen at Naropa in 1980, where I read online that Kirby also studied with Allen, perhaps a year or two before I did). As I mentioned up front, this will be my last comment on this thread. If readers of this debate are interested in more of my thoughts on these questions, I do hope some people will check out my Beatdom Book, The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg.
I was never for Marxism, and it’s probably the only affiliation that has never been more than a zero for me. Freedom to speak, freedom of religion, and freedom to own a gun are all banned in Marxist states. It is possible to go further “left,” into the anarchist critique of Marxist thought.
What I liked about anarchist Max Stirner is that he said the government is not a blind or neutral participant, but a monstrous over-sized ego which arrogates all power to itself like Cyclops. Stirner wrote, “Communism rightly revolts against the pressure that I experience from individual proprietors; but still more horrible is the might that it puts into the hands of the collectivity” (Ego and Its Own, 257).
Ginsberg’s poetry slowly evolves on Marxist countries. In 1966, he wrote in “Hiway Poesy,” “It’ll be a relief when the Chinese take over Texas” (CP 398). In the poem “Eclogue,” written in Fall 1970, Ginsberg writes, “In a thousand years, if there’s History/America’ll be remembered as a nasty little Country/ full of pricks” but he contrasts this negativity with a vote for Mao, “’Chairman Mao’ for all his politics/ head of a billion folk, important old & huge” CP 550). America itself is the enemy in his poem, “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” written in 1966. Throughout the poem he contrasts the wonder of communism with the horror of capitalism. Ginsberg is angry that America, “sustains the aging tyranny of Chiang in silent Taipei City” (CP 411).
The capitalist murder of 500,000 in Suharto’s Indonesia (they wiped out their communist faction in 1965) is contrasted with the slightly larger “Hadda murder in Indochina 2,000,000” (CP 644) in “Hadda Be Playing on the JukeBox) written in 1975. As far as I can tell, he never contrasts South with North Korea. Had he done so, he would have been forced to conclude that capitalism works far better than communism. The average Taiwanese is six times richer than the average person in Red China. South Korea is forty times richer than North Korea. In terms of human rights, it is obvious that capitalism delivers a far better experience. As for Vietnam, we no longer have a north and a south, so it is hard to find a comparison. Many of the countries around Vietnam have far more wealth. Hong Kong, Macau, and other areas that were once dominated by western traditions had more freedom. Contrast Singapore, for instance, or Japan, or Japan, with the relative extinction of the free market and freedom of inquiry under Ho Chi Minh.
For this reason, among others, I am for America over Red China, and for capitalism over communism. It little matters what my own politics might be, except insofar as they help to situate my reading of AG. In North Korea, insofar as I know, there aren’t any poets. There is no platform for independent investigation. Communism proffers a leader for life, and silences all opposition. Voting itself disappears or is farcical. When a communist government arrogates to itself all power, as Marx’s blueprint specified, no one else can so much as speak. We saw this in Mao’s Cultural Revolution, in which he said, “Let a hundred flowers bloom.” All those that believed this were mowed down by the Red Guards. But Ginsberg was capable of learning. By June 1984, in the poem “Empire Air,” he is more favorable to America, even though it is Ronald Reagan at the helm. “Insult the president you insult yourself” (CP 893), and instead of endlessly insulting Christianity, he writes in “I Love Old Whitman So,” (the year was 1984) that the gray bard was an “old Christ poet journeyman” (CP 900).
While Ginsberg does not tend to weigh in on the great anti-communist writers such as Whittaker Chambers and his amazing volume Witness, or even on George Orwell, or the many administrative personnel who penned accounts of the communist menace inside of the American government (William Rushel’s boring book Special Counsel is an account of how Alger Hiss and others worked to subvert the American government and to help Mao’s Red China triumph over Chiang Kai-Shek’s attempt to form American-style democratic institutions including the free thought issuing from their many universities today).
Unlike in Sweden or Finland, we have only two parties in America. The choice is stark. You can vote for the Democrats and their crypto-communist support of the likes of Maduro and Xi or you can support the Republicans and their love of America. Until recently, it has been the attempt of our education system to study the western tradition since the ancient Greeks. Our culture war is a fight between two alternatives. Eliot Katz and others are still following the earlier Ginsberg into the breach and fighting for socialism or some variety of globalist Marxism. I left the Democratic party slowly after my forties and am now a member of the Republican Party. What I appreciated in reading through Ginsberg was the slow evolution and that he had at least seen some of the things that I had seen, too. He never arrived at changing his party to Republican. He never saw the continuity of Donald Trump with Whitman’s beloved president Abraham Lincoln. Or maybe he was just in so deep to the radical left that he never could change platforms (at present, the platform for Republican poets is mostly non-existent). Still, he did have qualms. His poetry is no longer so fraught with false dichotomies toward the end. This was at least the beginning of a healthy if not exactly spotless mind.
Thank you to Eliot Katz and the editor of the journal, David Wills, for providing a platform for discussion.
Anarchist Max Stirner wrote, “Communism rightly revolts against the pressure that I experience from individual proprietors; but still more horrible is the might that it puts into the hands of the collectivity” (Ego and Its Own, 257).
Katz asked me to recount where AG supports the horrors of Maoism. In 1966, the year that the Cultural Revolution began, Ginsberg wrote in “Hiway Poesy,” “It’ll be a relief when the Chinese take over Texas” (CP 398).
In the poem “Eclogue,” written in Fall 1970 (middle of the Cultural Revolution), Ginsberg writes, “In a thousand years, if there’s History/America’ll be remembered as a nasty little Country/ full of pricks” but he contrasts this negativity with a vote for Mao, “’Chairman Mao’ for all his politics/ head of a billion folk, important old & huge” CP 550). America itself is the enemy in his poem, “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” written in 1966. In it, Ginsberg is angry that America, “sustains the aging tyranny of Chiang in silent Taipei City” (CP 411).
We have only two parties in America. Eliot Katz and others are still following the earlier Ginsberg into the breach and fighting for what I see as the last gasp of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. I see myself as aligned with a later Ginsberg that is searching for a religious or political alternative much as later Kerouac did with his rediscovery of Catholicism and the Republican Party.
Thank you to Eliot Katz and the editor of the journal, David Wills, for providing a platform for this discussion. I have to read Eliot’s book to critique further, and that might take a while, but I have ordered it, and I encourage everyone else to order it, too. I also encourage everyone to read or reread Afternoon Seattle. The poem has a bit of fatigue in it already, but I sense that the fatigue came to a head later on as Ginsberg floundered just as the left has floundered since then. It is “afternoon” in Seattle for a reason.
Just a brief note here to say that I do not say that Allen criticized traditional marriages in my book nor do I criticize Ginsberg’s late poetry for boy love, I however do mention that I did not find them appealing but that is personal. Allen certainly did believe in an adjustable age for consent dependent on maturity yet he was not a sexual bully in fact his late years where about affection more than sex. Politically I do not agree that Allen shifted to a rightest point of view. He criticized East and West equally but I can see it might seem a confusing jumble. such is life!