Emily Post-Avant: On the Probable CIA Bump That Made the Beats Iconic, Plus Some Related Comments on the Poetry Foundation and the Hypocritical Righteous Indignation of Its “Foundation Fellows”
Dear Emily Post-Avant,
My hubby and I live in Mallacoota, New South Wales, Australia. You might have read about our area last fire season. Our own house burned to cinders, in a sudden rush of wind-fire, and we lost so much, including our 2000+ collection of signed poetry books and paraphernalia (not least sixty-two autographed things related to the Bay Area scene — Duncan, Blaser, di Prima, Snyder, even Spicer), so important to us, and also our eighteen Kohaku and Showa koi, all personally named and dear. We thought they would be OK in the pond, but no. Half a kilometer of homes of our subdivision incinerated, too. My husband and I are still living in a cheap motel, presently (à la Schitt’s Creek), waiting for the contractors to finish up a little cinder block outside of town, on a dead-parched lot. Two days ago we entered our motel room, back from the grocery, and there was a fat eastern brown coiled up on our sheets. The thing reared its head and just looked at us for about five minutes, flicking its tongue. Exasperated, my husband blew its head off with his Glock. It has been a hard slog. We are both of us poets and fans of your column, Emily. By the way, we are good friends with the wonderful poet Margie Cronin and her family. Do you know of Margie? Margie and her family run a chili pepper farm further north of us. Margie is a fan of yours, too. We are also close to the extraordinary poet and translator Peter Boyle. We visit whenever we go to Sydney.
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Koi. Woodblock reproduction. Ukiyo.
OK, forgive the presumptuous introduction. Now to get to my main reason for writing: I have a theory, purely speculative, but I'd be interested to know what you think. It’s this:
I suspect Ginsberg, Kerouac, and the Beats in general were, for a spell in the late 1950s and into the 60s, deliberately hyped and promoted by the CIA, as Cold War U.S. imperialism needed some prominent examples of "freedom" to offset the disastrous PR caused by the murder of Emmett Till (among many others) and the chronic atrocious failures of justice against widespread racial violence and murder... Not to forget legal apartheid in half the country. Something that would encourage people in Europe and elsewhere to think, “Well, hey, the U.S. isn't so bad after all — it tolerates dissent, it produces and tolerates an Allen Ginsberg.”
What I imagine is the CIA stealthily encouraging and funding places like Time and the TV networks to give publicity to Ginsberg and company. He seems to be hyped in the media at exactly the same time as the much better known State-propaganda push for Abstract Expressionism. Of course, this isn't a question of the CIA funding Ginsberg personally, or those who published his work, like City Lights, but simply some sophisticated behind-the-arras moves to turn him into an international celebrity.
What do you think? My husband and I would be thrilled if you decided to answer this in your column!
Well, keep giving them the one-two-three, Emily!
—Poet Way Down Under in Burned Mallacoota
Fred W. McDarrah, Allen Ginsberg on Central Park Bandstand, 5th Avenue Peace Demonstration to Stop The War in Vietnam, 1966. Photograph. The Allen Ginsberg Project.
Dear Poet Way Down Under in Burned Mallacoota,
I set out now on a lengthy, heartfelt response.
I am so sorry to hear of the loss of your home, dear. And I keep a sizable aquarium, so I understand how you feel about the poor koi. Even water-realm beings have their own personalities, as those of us who keep them fully know. For example, have you seen the Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher? It will make you cry, with simultaneous sadness and joy.
I wish the best to you and your hubby. The world is going up in flames, isn’t it, and it’s become more and more clear that humanity actually wants it. A Death Wish for the Venus effect. It’s basically over. Happy-smug Liberals here think the Biden win might actually save us. They have a serious Death Wish, too. But at least he likes trains. Trains are one of my favorite things. “Trains” slant-rhymes with “Trans.” I was a freight-car mechanic on the Milwaukee Road long before my changes. I was there when the place was going bankrupt, and the Davies Yard supervisors were telling us to put out unsafe cars to save money. To this day, I feel shame about complying. Granted, the Socialist Workers Party ordered me to not complain so I could keep doing organizing and recruitment through the union. But still…
My Octopus Teacher. NPR.
Let me tell you one thing for damn straight sure: The train guys I worked with would not have allowed present-day me into the Milwaukee Carmen’s Union 352 hall, back in the late 1970s, no sir, Betsy. They were tough and patriotic Dem guys galore, but, weirdly, tolerated me as a “Red,” even with the anti-CP loyalty oath still extant then (maybe because I was quite good at Euchre, those days, which we played on lunch break). But they wouldn’t have put up with a trans-girl, that’s for certain. Things have changed with the climate, as it were, for the worse and for the better. Unfortunately, the worse changes will bring extinction to trains, men, women, children, octopuses, straights, gays, koi, poems, and trans.
OK, deep breath… And now to your point, my dear, an excellent one!
Absolutely on the Beats. There’s no question. And don’t forget Life and Look magazines, both of which did big spreads on the Beats, too. Their pliant editors were massaged from Langley, as everyone in the know knows. Some of their editors were even on the payroll of Langley! All of that against the well-documented literary machinations of the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom, which engineered a pacification program of prizes, fellowships, appointments, and residencies, using dozens of prominent lit mags and organizations, here and abroad, as propaganda fronts — Encounter [UK], Mundo Nuevo [Latin America], Paris Review [US], Hiwar [Lebanon], Jiyu [Japan], Quadrant [Australia], Preuves [France], Partisan Review [US], the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and so on.
Beatniks in Life Magazine, 1959. Imgur.
Ginsberg proved to be a better Soft-Power symbol than Pollock, in many ways. He was the “King of May” in Prague, after all, beloved by tens of thousands in the streets, who carried him on their queer or straight shoulders against the Stalinist wheel — a U.S. poet at the symbolic heart of a mass revolt. Which is not to say he shouldn’t have been. The anti-Moscow revolt in Czechoslovakia was one of the heroic popular uprisings of the 20th century, along with the Hungarian revolution before it. But that doesn’t mean the CIA didn’t have its own designs.
As the CIA did in Mexico, deep inside the horrific, Machiavellian Echevarría regime, after the Tlatelolco massacre, and then through the 1970s and beyond — scheming to buy off and recuperate a whole generation of prospective rebel writers, artists, academics, and every other kind of cultural worker, with a bottomless program of fellowships, grant monies, hyped awards, State patronage, and official positions of various kinds… The U.S. Intelligence agencies learned from their success with this program in Mexico (and in other countries!) and didn’t forget it.
That’s why the idea was put in motion here, if more selectively and sophisticatedly, in recent years, through the Poetry Foundation and some of its associates in the “Poetry Coalition” — a couple dozen+ lit institutions flush with State and corporate gifts and big-pocketed bourgeois folks on their Boards (one of them, Poets House, has just closed shop in an effort to squash a unionizing drive). Gifts which these orgs give out to their bien pensants applicants/supplicants, helping keep them mostly polite and content, all protocoled and compliant, channeling their “dissent” into sanctioned networks of institutional liberalism. As a passage in the Poetry Coalition’s “About Us” declaration reads, “[M]embers present programming across the country on a theme of social importance, which has included poetry & migration, poetry & the body, poetry & democracy, and poetry & protest.”
Protest away, Poets! You’ll continue to get funded and praised so long as you stay on our leash! (And you have to love that richly cherry-picked Audre Lorde epigraph at the “poetry & protest” link — I mean doesn’t that say it all? Does it not seem like something chosen as a sneering bit of shade by someone in, well, Langley? “I am deliberate / and afraid / of nothing”)
Yes, credit where due to the more “deliberate” elements of capitalist State power over the last 140 years, or so, from the early Third Republic of France, to the Obama-Illusion Administration. They’ve grasped how to corral and tame most of the otherwise unruly Po-ponies. No, it doesn’t take much, and in the wake of Occupy and the Black Lives Matter uprisings, which scared the crap out of the ruling class and its servants (both the McConnell and Pelosi wings), the Corporate/State cooptation strategy in American culture has been working at warp-branding speed.
I know I confuse my metaphors. I can’t help myself, I guess. I just wrote about ponies in a corral, but I’d also been speaking of Biden’s love of the railway: And so to go back to Amtrak: Retaining “protesting” professional poets on the payroll in Prizes and Titles from corporate/government-endowed institutions will always keep them inside the Train, clicking away on the tracks of protocoled conduct, in the first-class Club Car. Yes, it’s a juicy, heuristic subject for poetry critics of the precarious future: The probable penetration, I mean, by the U.S. intelligence agencies into the Poetry Foundation in a blitzkrieg PSYOP maneuver, rapidly transforming the institution, by ca. 2007, into a Big Tent Liberal Sugar-Daddy that nearly every “liberal-progressive” poet, Caucasian and POC, was just a few months back (before the Poetry Fellows’ embarrassingly opportunist Open Letter) lining up to lap-dance on…
But the major question, actually, isn’t so much that the Poetry Foundation conducted what smacks of a literary COINTELPRO operation in the field over the last dozen years (that the PoFo’s two first Presidents had direct ties to the spy agencies and overlapping ruling circles is creepily reminiscent enough of the Matthiessen and Plimpton Paris Review tenures to justify Reasonable Suspicion, at least, for now). No, the major question to be answered is why so many poets, excellent to middling, were such willing, obsequious schmucks, slavishly collaborating with an outfit whose Board was 95% lily-white and haut bourgeois, with openly declared links to various Wall Street and State entities, including a mega-contracting company that played a key role in the making of the Hiroshima bomb. That one of the leading Board members had, and for years, a conspicuous, proud, even obscenely jokey, boast on the Poetry Foundation site about the part his family’s firm played in the proto-omnicide crime of Hiroshima, apparently bothered none of the Fellows, as they happily pocketed the institution’s cash.
Henri Rousseau, The Representatives of Foreign Powers Coming to Greet the Republic as a Sign of Peace, 1907. Oil on canvas. Wikipedia.
Opening scene of Alan Resnais’s 1959 film, Hiroshima mon amour. The Cinema Archives.
Nor, to be sure, did it bother these righteous Fellows that the first Board President of the PoFo had published a book written entirely in the most mortifying Blackface lingo (with glowing blurbs from Mary Oliver and Billy Collins, to boot), something that was revealed here, years before their “Open Letter”.
It would seem that the epic, nakedly racist drivel of former PoFo President John Barr, Wall Street Morgan Stanley financier, founder of Enron-scandal entangled Natural Gas Clearinghouse/Dynegy, and head-faucet of golden showers rained down upon “progressive” poets, got a shushed pass of convenience.
But now, don’t you know, the Poetry Foundation as a whole is claiming to be all totally Woke and Reeducated, after their dozens and dozens of POC and Caucasian liberal “Fellows” wrote a terribly offended, shocked (shocked!) letter about a poem that dared indirectly expose the racism of the poet’s grandmother (the poet being one of the moderately talented Dickman twins of New Yorker favor and fame, can’t recall which one, Matthew or Michael).
His crime? To quote his dead grandmother speaking the word “Negro” in the poem! For this, the outraged Poetry Foundation Fellows, all of them recently star legatees of Prizes and Grants funded by Big-Pharma opioid profits, got hundreds of other peeps to sign on to their letter of outraged protest too, even though not a single one of them mumbled a sound when the PoFo tried to send a group of spunky young poets to the slammer for distributing a leaflet during a Raúl Zurita reading in 2011. The leaflet calling, heaven forbid, on the Foundation to spend just a bit more of its hundreds of millions on poetry programs in the POC neighborhoods of Chicago. With the exception of a few “malcontents,” U.S. poets pretended nothing ever happened. Zurita praised the young protestors to the skies.
The “Poetry Foundation Fellows” letter, suggestively, avoids mentioning that first, courageous action. Astoundingly, the Foundation Fellows’ letter also avoids mentioning the petition that preceded theirs by just a few weeks, organized by the obscure speCt Books collective and which declared its direct solidarity to the Zurita-PoFo reading action. The petition received 2,700 signatures. Not a single word of direct recognition did those Fellows extend to the speCt poet-militants.
Which just goes to show you what opportunist, self-serving assholes careerist poets can be, even when they seem to be “protesting.”
There’s some helpful overview stuff in Dubois’s Telegram, by Juliana Spahr, from Harvard UP (an institution, ironically enough, up to its ears in U.S. Intel collaboration) that’s pertinent to the longstanding, unspoken complicities of American poets with the State and its allied cultural institutions. But it barely scratches the surface of what’s happened in the past two decades and what is very much yet ongoing. There is some indignant discussion there of the Poetry Foundation’s chumminess with military-industrial giants like Boeing and John Barr’s obscenely racist epic. But that Spahr and her “far-left” colleagues in the Bay Area Commune group have generously written for the PoFo and, one presumes, pinched a few sweet bonuses in the bargain, might suggest how effective the appeasement strategy has been.
As Silvia Plath once put it, “It’s all a barnyard.” And American poets are eating the hay they’re fed by the owners of the State-Corporate Farm. It all just tastes like honey.
I should stop now before it’s too late, Poet in Mallacoota, and I get totally cancelled on social media, even though I don’t have any social-media accounts.
I hope you can dig a fresh pond behind your new house and that it will be full of beautiful koi, once again.
Long live autonomous-zone, urban/rural insurgent poetry.
—Emily Post-Avant
Raúl Zurita’s Ni Pena Ni Miedo (Without Shame or Fear) bulldozed into the Atacama Desert in Chile, 1993. Universes.
