Sam O’Hana Interview Transcript 16-APRIL-2025

Allen Ginsberg earned $701 in 1956 from Pacific Greyhound Lines, and yet he had plenty of time to dedicate to his true calling, that of poet and cultural activist unlike few poets of the 20th century. Why is that? The cost of living in U.S. America in 1956 had an enormous amount to do with it, according to Sam O’Hana, who is the scholar who dug up Ginsberg’s W-2 form from the Internal Revenue Service. Ginsberg didn’t earn over $200,000 a year until the late 80s. Sam writes that his dissertation addresses, “how resources are allocated to the production of lyric writing as a subset of the liberal arts. A life in writing requires time, money, housing, services rendered by others, and a release from work and care duties. If you are not a member of the elite, then such liberties must be sought out strategically, or you must be born in the right decade, or both.” What does this mean for poets and other artists now? Social housing? Medicare for All? Universal guaranteed basic income? Those are three guesses I would make, but I’m grateful that Sam O’Hana is tracking this via his work at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he writes, researches, and organizes around 20th and 21st century U.S. poetry. He’s worked for the Bowery Poetry Club and Howell Arts, is a former Fulbright fellow, has taught at Hunter College, and presented his research to the American Literature Association and the Northeast Modern Language Association. Sam, what a joy to have you here in the Zoom room.

SO: Hey, Paul, great to see you. Really great to be here. Thank you for having me.

PEN: So, you come from the Lost and Found program, or you’re at CUNY, where the Lost and Found program has a focus on Beat, Black Mountain, and New American Poetry. Is that focus what attracted you to that school?

SO: Yes. My journey began in the UK. I did my undergraduate degree in Canterbury, the southeast of the country, even though I’m from the north, from Manchester. And at that time, it was pretty clear that the most interesting development in English-speaking poetry in the past 100 years happened in the U.S. in the mid-century, in my view anyway. And I’ll get into why that might be.

I started off at the New School as an exchange student doing creative writing, but it wasn’t long before I started to gravitate towards what was left of the downtown cultural arts scene in downtown Manhattan. And after a couple of years, I found myself at the City University of New York, principally because it was known as a place for poetry, both practices and scholarship that was more accommodating to work done outside of elite circles, and also that it had some particular faculty that I wanted to work with. I had already been in touch and had interviewed Ammiel Alcaláy about his knowledge of the life and work of Charles Olson. And so, for that reason, I moved in that direction. I didn’t know necessarily why I was doing a Ph.D., except that I was looking at these kinds of things in my spare time anyway, and I wanted to get back to the intrinsic work of reading, writing, thinking, and speaking with people about this kind of stuff.

PEN: Can you talk to us about what you mean by elite?

SO: Sure. American poetry has a long and very interesting history, even though it’s a shorter history than that of the UK. For most of U.S. history that I’m aware of, poets typically came from backgrounds where they had the resources to work on their writing without needing to earn a living at the same time. So, if you look at someone like Herman Melville, we would largely say now that he came from a patrician background. And if you also look at what happened in the 20th century, take a poet like Robinson Jeffers, a West Coast poet. He has a reputation for being an outdoorsman, a very hardy kind of public persona of creating work that ultimately reached a wide audience, partly through his reputation as being somebody who also made his own home out of stone in California. But the truth of the matter is that Robinson Jeffers was the son of a Presbyterian preacher, and his father had joint appointments both at a university and at a seminary. And so, for that reason, I don’t think he really needed to, for example, work to earn the money he needed to do for a long time. He came from a very academic background and was protected, like his father, by a university for a long time. But if you look at the post-war era, if you look at the end of World War II through about the 1970s, what you see is that there’s a generation of writers and artists who arise not from elite backgrounds, but from working and middle-class backgrounds.

And what this means is that they came from families where the money was not available to support them indefinitely. Simultaneously, the cost of attending college back then was not so great that it would leave these students indebted for the rest of their lives. So low-income background students with high ability and high levels of conscientiousness could become eligible in the post-war era through such programs as the GI Bill to take part in higher education without needing to go into debt, which would cause you in turn to choose a subject that might earn you a great deal of money. And so that particular era opened up an opportunity for young people to take part in poetry in a way that would not burden them for the rest of their lives.

PEN: And for the first time, see something like a working-class intellectual, as Charles Olson has been described.

SO: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. Charles Olson was like the archetypal example of the success of what we call the New American Poetry nowadays. The New American Poetry is a phrase hasn’t made its way into the public mainstream, but I’d say almost everyone in the U.S. knows of Beat Generation. I happened to be at a statistics conference just last week, and nobody knew what the New American Poetry meant when I presented my work. But of course, when you say Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation, about 75% of the audience do go, oh yeah, I heard that in my intro literature college course 20 years ago. I would say probably that Ginsberg was probably the most well-known English-speaking poet of the 20th century period. There are some exceptions perhaps, but I think he’s most popularly known. But going back to Olson, he was the paradigmatic example of a man who came from a working-class family. His father was a mail carrier. His father spent a lot of time battling against his employers in relation to union formation. And I think his father also had a very ambivalent relationship to his son’s ability. Olson was very tall, very able, very smart, very well-read, and very enthusiastically encouraged by his parents to go and take part in higher education. He went first to Wesleyan and then onto a Ph.D. program at Harvard, which he dropped out of, but made a good way through, and then ended up being a resident advisor to the dorms where JFK was staying at one point. But I think he himself and his father both had ambivalence towards the way it was drawing them away from their working-class background. And so there was a kind of tension here that the social aspirations of the New Deal era were towards social mobility. But I think Olson himself felt that it was drawing himself away from working-class roots. And I think this is where you see him leave institutional life. So, he leaves Harvard. He goes to work for the government, ultimately, doing counter-propaganda, anti-fascist propaganda work, but then returns to Gloucester, returns to Massachusetts, not as somebody who presents himself as necessarily a social authority, but just as somebody who wanted to be culturally embedded in an environment that he himself could relate to and speak along with. And so he joins SUNY-Buffalo towards the end of his life, but that didn’t go for very long, I don’t think.

PEN: And Black Mountain. He leaves bureaucracy to go and run Black Mountain. And they let the poets run it at the end, because they know it’s going down the tubes . So they’re like, what do we have to lose? Let the poets run it.

SO: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. And unfortunately, it does run a little bit like this. And I have a theory about why this might be, because Black Mountain is such a fascinating case study of experimental higher education institutions. A lot of people in liberal and creative circles chafe against the administrative restrictions of a typical higher education institution. And fair enough, you know, paperwork expands. This is also something that Hannah Arendt responded to quite thoughtfully when she was a part of the New School, which is another one of those liberal arts colleges that started off with very high ideals, but ended up as a much more bureaucratic institution. So, the New School, Black Mountain College, there was a generation of institutions that were founded at different eras. But there was a moment, I would say, in the 1950s, in the postwar era, where some liberal arts institutions really did offer individuals the chance both to be cultivated and educated, but also free. And I think that the cultivation of a discipline freedom is something that you don’t see so much these days, because the relationship of the student to the university is one of a customer. And so, the provision of a service takes away from the responsibility of the individual to take responsibility for their own learning. But to go to Black Mountain, in particular, part of its financial viability was on GI Bill funds. They would try to recruit veterans who wanted to do art subjects and get funds that way. My understanding is it worked quite well. And Black Mountain College was also an institution that accommodated a lot of those fleeing fascism in Europe. So you got Franz Klein, I believe it is, or Joseph Albers,

PEN: And Annie Albers.

SO: Yes. And I think in those early years, Black Mountain College had a very serious sense of itself as a college in exile for those who took aesthetics seriously, but were displaced by conflict, which is something that I think perhaps may be coming into vogue again in the years to come. But the way in which that institution developed, Black Mountain, was that the desire for individual freedom, I think it started to become influenced by a much more radical free thinking attitude that would become much more present in the 60s. And I think by the time Charles Olsen had gone to go on to become the rector of Black Mountain College, its finances [suffered]… I think that highly creative people with very left-wing politics tend not to have the levels of conscientiousness that are required to cross all the t’s and dot the i’s. And those boring jobs sometimes are necessary. This happens quite often in the tech startup space is that someone who’s highly creative will find a brilliant idea for a business. But once the company reaches a form of maturity, best thing to do is to hand it off to someone who’s quite conservative, because they’re the ones that get up in the morning, show up on time, they’re not hung over, and they can actually make sure that the trains run on time, right? And so that, you know, I think there’s a there’s an interesting debate to be had about what the  ratio should be – the proportions of people who are highly creative versus highly rigorous, because it’s often very hard to find someone’s a combination of those two things. And you can see this in some of the ways that Olson did his own work. I mean, he wrote, Call Me Ishmael, over the course of many years, he ran out of funding. He was working on it while he was in grad school, but then he went to work for the government,  finished it afterwards. And the drafts were driving him crazy. If you read the biography, he’d be working late at night through the night, he was married at the time, his wife should have tolerated quite a lot of antisocial living schedules. And so yeah, I mean, his work was great. His creative work was great. But the  poet’s abilities to run themselves is often very, it’s a much more patchy story.

PEN:  So, with institutions, it’s a fine line between staying in business and being swallowed whole by kind of a neoliberal impulse.

SO: Yeah, I mean, there’s running something well, and there’s running it for profit. It makes me think of one useful story that comes alongside this is, of course, happened to Ed Sanders. He was [of] a younger generation. He was, he was, in a way, the successor or the inheritor to the legacy that, you know, people like Allen Ginsberg started. Ed Sanders’ career began starting a magazine. He was volunteering, I think, with a with a Catholic soup kitchen, and noticed that one of the nuns had a mimeograph machine, if I remember correctly, or a similar kind of printing device, [he] made a couple issues of a magazine called Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. And on the back of that got a reputation that was sufficient enough to had him known as a kind of man of letters. And then subsequently opened a bookstore, and that bookstore ran very well, as far as I can tell, because the rents in New York City and East Village were very low. And so, someone like Ed Sanders, who’s highly creative, but has that organizational knack, did very well. There’s a part of his life where he comes back from being on tour, and because he starts a band, [he] decides to hand over his bookstore, the Peace Eye Bookstore to the community, which is to say to let some local guy run it, see what the local needs are. And basically, it gets turned into a kind of  like a free Airbnb, like a hippie Airbnb. So, the books get thrown out in the trash in the front, and the rooms just full of mattresses, and anybody who wants to come and just like sleep, hang out and smoke weed, you can do that. I think it depends a lot on who you hand it over to. And there are those rare occasions of people who have a creative knack and can also be good organizers. But it really does depend on the person. And you can’t expect that when you hand it from one person to another, that it will be continued, [that] it will continue to run well.

PEN: How does a kid from Manchester begin to learn about people like Charles Olson, Ginsberg, Black Mountain, The Beats?

SO: That’s a great question. So I went to a public high school, a public in the US sense of saying state funded, and I was lucky to have some great English teachers, and they turned me on to William Blake in particular. So, it was one of those moments where, you read a lot as a kid. But you have a teacher who shows you just how much you don’t know about something. And it was in it was in reading Songs of Innocence and Experience that I realized that there was something much more expansive intellectually about literature than mere literacy. And after leaving high school, I spent a year at art school. And it was during that time that I was painting one day and I was going out on the weekend to open mic nights where I was performing my own poetry… I had a friend who said, “William Blake? Well, you know, this poem “Howl” is totally mind expanding, and it’ll change your world.” And it was very interesting.  I remember reading “Howl” and thinking, “this is really strange.” And it runs on a long time. I think it loses momentum, a lot, I think it opens with something that will never be forgotten in the English language. But it was so radically different to whatever was being created, what had ever been created in the UK that I had known about [and] I thought, well, I have to learn more about this. And I think adolescents typically gravitate towards the Beat Generation as a movement in the same way they gravitate towards rock and roll or to similar cultural movements, because it’s about freedom and breaking away and forming a counterculture.  It was a nice model for what I was experiencing in Manchester at the time, there’s a lot of poetry going on in that city, Manchester. It was a bit like Chicago and Detroit, it was not a great place to be in the 90s. But it was also, a very vibrant city, because the cost of living was so low that a lot of cultural work could be done. And so, there’s a lot of nightlife, there’s a lot of literature, of soccer, football, famously, but really, it’s a place that now is doing much better than it used to. And I don’t know if that same culture is really there, I’d have to go back and spend more time.

PEN: Yeah, kind of hard to picture Ted Hughes writing something like “fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists.”

SO: Yeah, I mean, the I think a lot of English poets thought they had a very kind of hard edge on their work. But compared to America, I think that it’s very polite stuff. I suppose in British culture, there’s the there’s the tradition of the rebellious gesture, which is polite, but stings a lot in some way. But, Ginsberg, started the whole idea of American poetry, just being explicit, flat out, in your face. And what always surprises me, of course, is what for them in the 1950s and 60s had been an ongoing siege in favor of free speech has now become a cherished issue by conservatives who think that free speech on their side has been compromised in some way. So, although right now today in America, we worry – rightly so –  that civil liberties are being trampled on, the stories of people like Allen Ginsberg and Ed Sanders, and if you think about it, even someone who comes from a more mainstream background – Leonard Cohen, a Canadian poet and writer – all of their works came up against legal challenges for obscenity. And so, we’re not at a stage right now in the U.S. where sheriffs are going into bookshops, picking out books, tossing them in the trash and arresting the person who owns the bookstore. That happened in the 50s and 60s. It’s very interesting the way that the pendulum has shifted in terms of free speech, because a lot more acrimonious battles are being had on the left, in a way that we are just gearing up for now in the 21st century on the right.

PEN: Right. Right now, the main thing that’s happening is disappearing people like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and other people like him, who don’t get the same kind of publicity. Tell us about how you started this quest to learn how the Beats were able to dedicate so much time to writing.

SO: Sure. Well, I think like most research projects, it took a long time to kind of gestate. And it really started with doing the master’s in creative writing that I did in New York, and ultimately running out of money. I worked, I had a sort of a regular job, doing this and doing that as a teaching assistant for a while. And [I] wasn’t really making any money just spending most of my time doing creative things, starting a magazine, getting involved in readings in general, the money right now needs to get a job, a real job, and I was lucky enough after my master’s to get a job working as an assistant to the guy that founded the Bowery Poetry Club, Bob Holman. I learned a lot, of course. I was doing everything, mundane tasks, but also helping to set up talks and set up readings and be involved in big cultural events. We did a reading during Trump’s first term, that included Ed Sanders and a couple of other figures at the Cooper Union University. And so it was at that time that I was starting to put together the puzzle pieces of what shaped cultural movements in the last, let’s say 80 years. Because what every young person wants to believe is that they – the generation they belong to – made the most significant contribution to the culture. And if you go back to the 1950s, 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s, every generation has attempted to produce something which somehow both was in the spirit of but also replaced in magnitude, the contribution that was at stake. And what I came to notice, which is obvious when you look at it at the first blush, but the details are what really matters. And it’s the cost of writing, the cost of doing something which does not bring you money needs to be accounted for. And if you cannot account for it personally, it needs to be accounted for institutionally. So, I noticed personally, that the money begins to run out for creative writing, if you can’t be supported. I was supported by a scholarship for a while, you can’t be supported by that. You need something else. And then I saw how when I worked at the Bowery Poetry Club, I saw this how this happened in the 80s and 90s. Because the venue for poetry to be created and disseminated and discussed was for them a real venue, like a coffee shop or a bar, or in this case, a dedicated venue. Whereas in the 1950s and 60s, that was also true. But there was an additional venue of people’s apartments because there was more space and the costs were lower.

And after that, I worked at a place called Howl Arts, which was just around the corner. It was in a gallery that was set up, it was Ginsberg inspired – Ginsberg/Kaprow. It was like Howl happening, right? Happenings in the Kaprow sense, Allen Kaprow. That was a gallery that was addressing the situation from a different point of view, it was a historical celebration of the legacy of East Village culture that include everything from drag, to rock and roll and punk, and poetry and painting and everything. But what they were doing was [helping] the artists living in the East Village that hadn’t gotten their break yet. The gallery would give them an exhibition to give them a chance to get their moment in the sun. And what I noticed was most of the artists who are coming through, were surviving because they’d found a way to live in New York on the cheap to maximize their time to do creative work. If they didn’t, many just simply gave up and left and they and they, they didn’t get their exposure, and so part of the story is, for large cities is, the longer you can hold on, the more likely it is that you’ll get a break, but you don’t know when that’s going to be. [I] spent a long time watching this happen without really being aware of what I was watching. And then when I got to this Ph.D. program, I needed a research subject. What I noticed was that there was not much focus being put on craft. The simple notion of craft has been badly spoken about because people talk about craft as if it was a very nostalgic, sentimental approach to building something that is about creating something very flowery and ornate, and you can only do it, in a very bourgeois sense. But the fact of the matter is that poetry, it’s working material is words, is letters. You still need to have a trained facility to deploy that material in a way that gives an effect to an audience.

When you ask the question of why it is that a certain generation has a claim to being more prominent than another, you have to ask, well, what kind of practices did they allow for themselves? I actually don’t know about how significant poetry is after the 1975 to 80 period, because when you look at the long history of what happened, poetry in America retreated into higher education after the mid 1970s. What happened in the 1950s and 60s was that costs were sufficiently low that poetry could be done in a non-institutional capacity. And this meant that you were not being coerced, or not being given a series of directives about how to direct your craft, your time spent developing your craft. If you read the poetry of Amiri Baraka or Frank O’Hara, what you notice is that they’re writing for themselves, by themselves, in a way that is about discovering for themselves the kind of positions they want to take. And if you are affiliated with an institution, it’s difficult to take an independent position because you’re writing on the foundation of being subsidized by an institution that has an agenda. And sometimes research agendas are important. It’s useful to get together other people and say, “Hey, like, what should we focus on?” And that’s what I was thinking for myself when I was at CUNY. But the fact of the matter is that if you can allow yourself to be independent, you can choose your own research agenda. And that matters for writing. I’ll leave it there.

PEN: Well, it was very interesting because we see what Columbia University did in caving to Trump. So, their agenda is now secondary and subservient to the Trump agenda, which is kind of a scary moment. Also, one other thing that comes to mind when you talk about these working class intellectuals, these poets who are working outside the system, these counterculture [poets], however you want to say it, Fred Moten’s concept of the undercommons comes to mind very clearly. So, maybe he was onto something with that.

SO: My limited understanding of the undercommons is that this is also something that’s generated in a higher education context. My concern is that intellectuals survive. I want to ask the question of where intellectuals can survive apart from universities. That’s why this question has come up, but I would need to know more about the undercommons.

PEN: I would research the notion of the “prophetic organization.” I resonated with that having run this nonprofit for over 31 years and thinking we’ve existed outside of institutions. There’s funding from philanthropic institutions and government institutions, but we’ve existed outside of that and have crafted our own agenda. So, that would be a subject for a whole ‘nother discussion. But one thing that I find is fascinating, you’re alluding to the effect on culture that the Beats had and perhaps Beat/Black Mountain ought to be a slash that we continue to use, Beat/Black Mountain literature, because some of those folks like Michael McClure certainly walk in both worlds. But you see the New American poets as exercising leadership. I’d love it if you could elaborate on that.

SO: Great. Thank you. So, this relates to the intellectual basis on which I’m drawing this dissertation, because when you ask about what poetry is really for, one of the famous questions people love to ask about, what is poetry, what is art? Well, many popular discourses have attached their two cents to this about whether it’s a particular kind of effect you want to create, or it’s merely about just status, or perhaps it’s just like a kind of a parlor game that you do when you’re bored in your aristocratic mansion. What’s been lost about a discussion about poetry is this, liberal arts is an educational paradigm that goes back to the classical era and in theory before that. The humanities, by contrast, is a concept that reaches only in fact as far as the Middle Ages, because the humanities refers to humane letters as opposed to divine letters. You study the humanities like Plato and Pericles compared to divine letters like St. Augustine. And so that was a paradigm that was set up in the medieval period, but the liberal arts, artis liberalis, was formed literally in the Roman period, but there are predecessors that go back to the ancient Greece. And the reason why the liberal arts was formed was because the people who ran cities, they identified the need for a curriculum that would train young people to become qualified to solve problems in society. And the criteria by which people in those societies could join the elite, one criteria, was that they actually made a contribution of some kind or another. And a good example would be to be trained in rhetoric in order to defend somebody on trial.

But this also includes being qualified to speak about or to communicate a piece of classic literature, to be trained in Homer, for example. And so, what we’ve forgotten about poetry is that it is one of those practices which underlies elite aspiration. This is a taboo in American society because egalitarianism has been the main social thrust for extremely good reasons. But it is also important to understand that those who aspire to become socially prominent in some way, study the liberal arts, not because it becomes a kind of like a badge of “you’re so special” or “you’re elite” or anything like that. It’s because it’s what you need to learn in order to become qualified to make a contribution. It doesn’t have to be everybody that wants to do this, but those who aspire to be to have that kind of status need to understand that it’s earned and not something you’re born into. This is part of the reason that why wealthy families encourage their children historically to go and do liberal arts degrees. Obviously, this gets abused. But for those people who have a genuine interest, this is where the rubber hits the road. So, what do we mean by solving problems? Well, within the category of poetry, the training is not to produce something that’s very fine and decorative and makes everyone feel nice. The idea is that poetry is that poetry and philosophy, let’s say, is that instance where you get the chance to take part in debate, speaking to audiences and speaking with audiences, reading and writing. And by reading, I mean interpretation. We don’t give enough weight to the fact that the process of interpretation is a process of decision-making. And decision-making underpins a massive, massive… It’s nine-tenths of the liberal arts because decision-making underpins those professions which lead on from those fields. A judge is a perfect example, right? The person that can make a decision that is reasoned, well-informed and fair is the person that deserves that status because otherwise societies fall into disrepair. So, poetry is not just something you do to make other people feel great. It’s a key component of leadership because if you cannot communicate yourself, you cannot articulate a vision. Now, does this apply to the Beat generation?

Well, these guys were not known for being particularly mature in some sense. There was a lot of talk of cock and balls and all that. Let’s all just take acid and have orgies. Well, okay. So, it’s not exactly high culture in the traditional sense, but the New American poets were pushing up against a series of precedents that were constricting the civil liberties of the society they lived in. A good example is, of course, we’ve already talked about censorship. These people were constantly fighting lgal battles to have their work published so they could talk about sex. Well, sex is actually extremely important. It’s not a coincidence, I think, that, for example, a lot of feminist discourse from that time talked about the freedom to not be bound in a domestic space because we know that a lot of marital rape would have happened at this time. So sexual freedom is not something that was just about enjoyment, though naturally it was. It was about having a form of maturity to speak openly about what people really wanted to enjoy and have. And then this can be extended to drug use, for example, because people like Ed Sanders and Allen Ginsberg were the earliest proponents, some of the earliest people to identify the fact that weed, marijuana, is nowhere near as dangerous socially as alcohol. And alcohol, especially in combination, of course, with driving, costs tens of thousands of lives for as long as we’ve had cars and alcohol in the U.S. There is a fair critique to be leveled that there was some degree of immaturity about the kinds of talking points put across by these poets in the 50s and 60s, but also it’s really important to understand that they were fighting for a series of civil liberties that we now take for granted. And this could be just as simple as opening a bookshop that had a book that was about sex, a kind of sex that you might not know about. And I don’t necessarily simply mean sex between gay people, for example, like anal sex, but forms of sexual encounters that are just free and were not bounded by what one person wanted and another had to submit to.

PEN: Wow. I think about the John Adams quote, [paraphrased] our grandfathers were soldiers, so our fathers could be farmers, so we could be artists, which is right in line with what you’re saying. I’m also reminded of Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay, Compulsory Heterosexuality, which speaks to the cultural mores at the time and how the Beats with, yes, some of their less mature work, but, really battling against this kind of marine/crew cut/ businessman/in-a-suit kind of mentality. They were looked at, McClure says in Scratching the Beat Surface in the fifties, as misplaced cannon fodder and not much else. So, they were responding to what it was in the culture, which was pretty straight in more ways than one in the fifties. And speaking of taking stands and leadership, I think this leads to your point about leadership. I think about Michael McClure writing “Poison Wheat” I think it was 1964. So, one of the first instances of critique of the Vietnam war, or should we say the “American War” as the Vietnamese call it. Ginsberg took a stance against, quote, the “government’s ecological corruption and mass murder and karmically undesirable war in Indochina in 1973” in a letter withholding a third of his taxes. And you post this in one of your documents. I’m wondering if you talk about that and was there any blowback to that act?

SO: Yeah, great. Well, I’m glad we’re reaching the nerve of the topic here. I mean, this is another example of the types of leadership deployment that liberal arts makes possible, because you have to be in the know about these kinds of things in order to take a stand against them. And the question of whether this was effective or not, can be put to one side, because at least these protests were legible and made available for future generations to be aware of. And that’s actually something. To know that other people care about this thing in the same way you do means, I think, it means more than people are prepared to admit when the question of efficacy comes along. So, Ginsberg was only one of a few artists and writers against the war. That’s a particular organization, I think, that was formed at the time who withheld a portion of their taxes because of the expenditure of money on military, on arms and weapons in Vietnam. It’s really, in a way, interesting. Perhaps the biggest thing to start thinking about, of course, is what a difference this makes compared to the Second World War. A lot of these poets were somehow in contact with that conflict. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was in a submarine. Frank O’Hara was a radar man. Some of these poets understood that you could take part in a conflict even though it made Lawrence Ferlinghetti – watching one of the major bombings in Japan – a pacifist for life. I think at least to some extent, these poets understood that there was a conflict that might have been worth having, a just war, perhaps. But for American global dominance, to emerge out of that war and metastasize into the Vietnam War, it shows good judgment on the part of these poets. They were historically correct in the sense that this act of aggression, first of all, perhaps most importantly, it wasn’t successful. It didn’t work, you know, like many foreign policy interventions made by foreign powers. And I would include the British Empire in this, of course, as well. You know, they didn’t work. And so it was not only a waste of money and a waste of energy, but also an extremely socially counterproductive way to run a society at that time, I would say. And I think those poets thought the same way. So, he withheld those taxes, because that was, in a way, one of the few mechanisms that was available.

I mean, he also took part in protests, and he also was active on other fronts, marijuana legalization, for example. But it was only the withholding of taxes was only a minor part of my discoveries going through the archives at the time. But it was certainly interesting, because it reminded me that Ginsberg, because he had the free time, he didn’t have to work full time in some other job. He had the time to be active on multiple fronts. He was writing, performing, he was employing people as secretaries, and he was also withholding his taxes. Anybody who’s ever been involved in litigation knows that it takes resources, psychological and emotional resources, as well as financial resources. So, it’s part of the work, it’s part and parcel of the work. And what’s interesting, you quoted his sort of run on commentary on, comically undesirable conflict. Well, you know, does it matter that he wrote to the IRS in such a literary way? Well, I think possibly, and because it helps to articulate the significance of what’s being done. To simply say, “I protest” is one thing, but to understand why and what you’re protesting against, and the basis on which you make that protest is something that takes more effort and time than the typical protester might realize.

PEN: He never did time for doing that.

SO: No, I think the CIA opened a file with him quite early. If you’re a CIA operative employee, let’s say, you want to balance the public backlash against the risks of the benefits of taking these people in. This is, of course, something we’re dealing with right now, again, today. You have to balance containment of dissent with the PR disaster that it might cause. And I think that’s something not everyone necessarily takes into account when it comes to thinking about how to respond to autocracy.

PEN: I think in the UK, when you go through customs, there had been, I don’t think this is current, a section, where someone could be labeled a “harmless eccentric,” as I recall. So maybe Ginsberg would be in the US equivalent of that. Also, when you’re talking about activity in World War II and artists, the West Coast artists, William Everson, Bill Stafford, they were conscientious objectors and ended up doing something equivalent to hard time, forced labor. Well, it wasn’t forced because they were voluntarily opting out of the war. But they all had this particular camp, Camp Angell on the Oregon coast, where they spent the war years working, you know, in these dreary winters. And that was their stance toward the war. So, it’s interesting to see East Coast poets versus West Coast poets. I’d like to show this, to share screen and maybe you can see my notes, but I screen grabbed that. Oh, the end of that letter from Ginsberg. “Om, Ah, Hum, from body, speech and mind of your fellow citizen, Allen Ginsberg, poet, a member of National Institute of Arts and Letters.” And he also puts May King Prague 1965. You know, little parts of his CV there just to show the authorities that he had some clout. What do you think gave him a sense that he could write to “future Buddhas” to encourage them to do the same? Was he wired that way thinking, “I’m not writing this to the IRS, but somebody is going to be reading this in the future. And I’m going to be talking to those people.”

SO: I’m really glad you asked this because this was actually a surprising discovery that I made in the archives that was not part of the main project I was working on. But I was so glad I found it because it’s a nice little token that we can use to discuss the cultural world of the 1960s. Ginsberg writes to the IRS in multiple letters about this protest. In this particular letter, he said he – and this is a later letter he’s writing to begin with, it’s a bit more formal later, as his reputation is taking off, he’s writing to the IRS – this fully typed out two page letter that begins, as you said, “Dear future Buddhas.” And you’ve got to ask yourself, why would he take the time to describe the IRS workers as dear future Buddhas? I’ve spoken to people who said recently, a couple years ago, I was my 20s, the IRS gave me some big tax bills, so I wrote them a poem, you know, I sent them a Lorca poem or something. I’ve included it in my tax return to sort of show them to have some humanity or something like that. So, this kind of gesture is popular, and it’s been done before.

But Ginsberg is doing something very interesting here. He’s actually noticing that there is going to be a cultural shift in the U.S. towards forms of non-mainstream religious devotion. The idea of Buddhism in the U.S. would not have gained traction at this time period. I think it’s even possible that Buddhism as a concept would have not been known to many IRS workers. I think it’s D.T. Suzuki, who only comes to America to spread Zen Buddhism in the war years, or post-war years. It’s as if Ginsberg is trying to introduce American culture to a concept that really hasn’t existed before. For those of us who have grown up in the era of multiculturalism, this is something that is quite hard to grasp. It’s almost like understanding that in the 1950s, the idea of a poetry reading barely existed. The Six Gallery poetry reading in San Francisco was one of the first of its kind. And before that, if you said to someone “poetry reading,” they would not have really understand what you really meant. But to go back to the Buddhism point, Ginsberg’s been to India. He’s understood about what Buddhism really entails, which is meditation, mindfulness, do no harm, and the world is suffering, these kinds of things. In my view, he’s adopted Buddhism as a way of trying to resolve the kinds of conflicts and tensions that are going on in the U.S. right now. To point out to the IRS, “you will be a future Buddha” to one day is to say, “you will recognize that we are causing unjust suffering, it’s going to kick back on us. And you should be mindful about this.” Now, of course, the typical IRS worker is not going to care; is just going to tick the box and move on.

But what really struck me about this is, to the extent that Ginsberg was trying to prophesy that that Buddhism would make its way into the cultural mainstream in the US was absolutely correct. In the fall, I looked at the IRS’s HR website, and in that section, they have a couple of paragraphs encouraging their IRS employees to take part in mindfulness exercises as part of their wellness routines. So, to the extent that he saw that coming and wanted to point out that it was on its way, he was absolutely correct. It’s an example of how also the best writers see their plans in terms of decades, not years. He may not have known exactly what was going to happen. And I don’t think he really did. But one of the useful things that literary studies and liberal arts makes you sensitive to is not only what’s not included in a culture, but by virtue of being aware of that, what might be coming next. Because if you think about the kinds… if you go to a museum, [and] speak to an elderly relative who understood what it was like to have a conversation about Vietnam. At that time, you’ll know. Maybe you’ll know better than I did that there were people who saw Vietnam was just like a righteous crusade that would have to happen, not unlike Iraq, right? And so, the way in which these conflicts were deployed, the discourse around them needed to be challenged. And it was challenged in a way that involved importing cultural material from somewhere essentially far away. I would say more about that. But I think that’s probably the best way to end it.

PEN: And another example of Ginsberg’s leadership, and the leadership of the Beat Black Mountain, to see what was coming and to demonstrate by action. And his lifelong study of Buddhism is an example of that, I think. A key conclusion you make from your research is, what’s good for the well-being  of the general population is good for aspiring poets. Yes.

SO: Do you want to elaborate on that?

PEN: Absolutely, I would. I mean, if it’s good for poets in a culture, then things must be going good. And right now, it’s very difficult. In my own workshops, poets who are so pissed off, they’re writing screeds, they’re writing rhetoric, they’re angry as fuck. And it’s very hard to say, “let’s take a step back” when every day, there’s 10, 20, 30 more revelations of just the inanity of what’s going on, the hypocrisy of what’s going on, the incompetence, you think of the word kakistocracy. And I think that’s very accurate for what we have. I know that Pound and Olson use pejorocracy, but I think it’s, it’s worse than that now. So yes, the question, what’s good for the well-being of the general population is good for aspiring poets. We need Medicare for All is what you’re saying. Coming from England, you might say that. Hello, how do I get health care here?!?

SO: There’s different roads to Rome. And I think that anybody with sense understands that a well-run government funded healthcare program is by far the most efficient because the majority of healthcare don’t need to be profit-oriented. It’s a waste of paperwork. It’s a waste of resources. And that kind of competition is best served for goods and services that are supplementary and not necessary to life. I will say this. It is possible to think about what might be good for society beyond large government programs. And I say this because I think that it doesn’t necessarily matter where the prosperity comes from, because the free market operations have generated sufficient wealth and material plenty for some, it demonstrates that some forms of commerce are necessary, but I’ll get more specific by what I mean here. When I said that what’s good for general society is also good for poets, I’m talking about a series of cultural opportunities where a much wider stretch of people are allowed to take the opportunity to become writers. I came back from a conference last week where I presented some research on the demographic aspects of the New American poets. The poets that were born and came to maturity in the early to mid-20th century were beneficiaries of broad national scale longevity gains. This [includes] things like pushbacks against tuberculosis, against polio, against poor nutrition and infant mortality. These are gains that were made by the medical and scientific institutions, but also by general prosperity, by making more food available to more people and making that food shelf stable for longer. So, when you talk about what might make it possible for poor people to do more creative work, you could start by saying well we should just give people more money, but the fact of the matter is that plenty of people already have the wealth they need, they just don’t actually have any time. So, if you look at the 1950s and 60s, what helped these people generate their work was not that they were particularly wealthy and could live in great comfort, although it helped that they had for things like central heating for the first time. What mattered is not that they had more hours in their day either, but more years in their life. So, when the work of the New American poets didn’t only happen in the 50s and 60s, it was made possible by those who lived in that era but carried on later.

Hettie Jones, who was Amiri Baraka’s wife, she helped Amiri get his career on track. She typed his manuscripts, they worked on the magazine Yugen together, and she also raised their kids. Well, that meant that she didn’t get the chance to be a writer of her own until she was in her 50s, but Hettie lived to be 90 years old and she died just last year, so the fact that she was able to live for those many more decades afterwards allowed her the opportunity to have her own career as well as a family and a husband for however long they were together. So, putting aside the economics just for one second, though I do believe it’s perhaps the most important aspect, one underappreciated aspect of where it is that large cultural movements come from is social situations where people live longer, healthier lives, which gives them more time to do creative work. The problem is that longer, healthier lives have typically been put in service of more work, for more money, and now we’re reaching the point where – I’ll bring in now the economic aspect – the cost of living has risen so much faster post-1975 that you have to use those extra years and hours of your life to work to simply keep up with what’s normal, and that in my view is the major change between the 50s and post-1975 era.

PEN: Another key conclusion you make is the opportunity to adopt a lifelong liberal arts practice such as poetry to develop a craft and make literary and dwelling space for oneself by the work of one’s own hands should be offered to as many people as possible in order, and here’s the key phrase, in order to maintain the cultural contiguity of society. Elaborate on that, please.

SO: The presumption about cultural movements is that you would get the best outcome if you simply distributed large amounts of money to people, prizes, fellowships and awards, but what you’re doing there is, first of all, you have to set up a series of institutions that will do that. Those institutions pick the winners, but they also pick the losers, and it is not, in my view, the responsibility of institutions to pick winners. It’s the responsibility of institutions to lay the groundwork for winners to emerge on a self-identified basis. So, to the extent that we can have a society where poets can emerge from any sector of the country is a much more… well, first it’s much fairer, and second of all, it will result in much more interesting work, because in the pre-war era, as I said, most of the poets that were known came from much more stable backgrounds, and this is also true of those who came after 1975. If you look at, for example, the confessionalist poets, they were all based in Harvard, poets like W.G. Snodgrass, people like Mark Strand, people like… the names just go on and on. American poetry became a massive field in the late 20th century, but the kind of work that was being created, you cannot argue that it was in a way more culturally remarkable than what happened in the 50s and 60s, because a lot of it was very similar. Now, a lot of that has to do with MFA programs, but to get back to the point that you’re making about cultural contiguity, for a nation to have a coherent sense of itself as a cultural entity, you want to be able to have representatives from all aspects of that society, and that’s part of what happened in the 50s and 60s as well. You know, Olson came from Massachusetts, Ginsburg came from New Jersey, but you also had people like Ed Dorn, I think, was from the Midwest, and so there were poets from all over the country who for themselves were a first in their family, they were the first to consider themselves eligible to take part in that kind of work, and I don’t know if that exists quite as much anymore.

I will say one exception, of course, is that the inherent racial segregation of the New American poets does limit it in that respect. Today, we have many American poets who do come from minority backgrounds, people of color, and that’s obviously a great thing. We just want to make sure that it’s offered on a basis that individuals can self-select rather than being picked for having a particular kind of aesthetic that’s favored by an institution, because that is a form of conditional giving from philanthropy, and philanthropists are not the ones that should really call the shots. Funny, it’s actually Frank Zappa who made this point in the 1970s. There’s a famous sort of clip where he’s sitting, being interviewed about the music industry, and he says, we were better off in the 60s with a series of corporate managers who said, well, I don’t know, just sign up a bunch of bands and see which one of them turned out to be really good, compared to later decades where some successful music executive has come from that world, become the manager of a record label, and then start saying what they want to see on a scene, because trying to force the market in that sense is not going to work. It just reveals the preferences of the person in charge of the industry, not in charge of offering those opportunities to lots of people.

PEN: Ended up with a lot of bands sounding like Toto, and I was at a jazz station, and they were so excited about this research they were doing on jazz, and it created basically a formula that certain record labels, jazz record labels 20, 25 years ago, were then going into the studio to try and emulate, which to me is the antithesis of jazz and the antithesis of art. So, what you’re saying is this explosion of MFA programs and Poets Laureate all over the country hasn’t really had much of an effect on the quality of poetry, at least as seen from a kind of prophetic or leadership or a long-lasting influence kind of angle.

SO: I think it depends on what you’re looking for. To some extent poetry has been tamed in the U.S., but so have many things. America’s become a much more, I hesitate to say this, but America has become a more settled society, and so to the extent that cities are becoming more developed, rural areas are becoming less. I think about some of the impoverishment that we know about in rural areas. I guess I would step back from that and just say that American literature in the 50s and 60s was a unique period because people were choosing to do work on their own terms without feeling the need to be directed by social forces driven by institutions. Today, by contrast, the rise of MFA programs, even though the idea of going to art school is supposed to cultivate inside the student a sense of aesthetic independence, the social pressure that arises from literature, I think in particular for some reason, often encourages students simply to produce what they know is already legible aesthetically, and that is a problem because it does not, means the student’s not doing enough to distinguish themselves from what has already come, and the idea simply that you can say something that you think feels right in the moment fails to take into account that the best writers are spent a long time learning. Allen Ginsberg got his degree from Columbia, Ed Sanders got his degree in Ancient Egyptian from NYU, Frank O’Hara went to Harvard. Poetry is not simply saying how you feel at any particular moment. It is a highly learned activity, and it’s not bad to admit that. What we need to do, what I think needs to be done in the higher education scene in general, is that those who want to become writers need to need to spend a lot more time reading classic historical texts, because what’s available immediately, you were talking about headlines and news, what’s available immediately is available to everybody, and so if that’s going to be your material, then you’re producing something that doesn’t have a great deal of, it hasn’t stepped outside of the mainstream, and that’s largely what the new American poets were doing.

PEN: Or to quote on the situation right now in the United States, to quote Frank Zappa again, “all we got here is American made, it’s a little bit cheesy, but it’s nicely displayed.” Sam, it’s been a joy to engage you and your fascinating work. Is there a website or somewhere we can refer people for more information?

SO: I’ve yet to publish most of my work. I mean, if you look me up, samohana.com, I have a website where I list what I’ve been up to recently, but I think rather than looking me up, I would just say, try to do your own thing, and do your own writing, do your own practice, and set up for yourself a network of people who you trust and like, maybe even sometimes disagree with, and then it’s the hyper-connectedness of today’s world can be very intimidating for writers, and I would say it’s okay to be local, it’s okay to have a local network, and not to worry about what someone on the internet is doing elsewhere, because it’s important that we allow for everybody to get a chance to jump up and have a try.

PEN: Good time to cultivate a small field. Yes, that’s right. Thank you.

For The Undercommons, see: https://paulenelson.com/2019/09/30/notes-on-the-undercommons/

Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence: https://paulenelson.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/AdrienneRichCompulsoryHeterosexuality.pdf