Alexander PushkinAlexandr Pushkin
d.o.b. 5-26-1799 d. 1-29-1837 shot in stomach.
friends with pre-Decembrists
secret societies, but never trusted with plot-plans.
They never trust poets.
belonged to Green Lamp
which may have been a branch of the Union of Welfare,
freethinking orgiasts and partisans of Liberty.
Pushkin’s cry of "Tremble, o tyrants of the world And you... o fallen slaves, arise!"
(Ode to Freedom, 1817)
may not have been so loudly heard in the casinos of Petrograd but it is said that the revolutionary poems of his youth were so sung in the mind that the soldiers in the barracks knew them by heart—9 of 10, it is said, of the young in Russia then re- ceived their revolutionary input from Pushkin.
His political poems, like the secret Russian tracts of to- day, were passed from hand to hand in manuscript. The fuzz were hip to the trip, and harassed Pushkin.
In 1820, he nearly was bricked into prison, so chose a period of exile in the south. During These years of police surveillance, Pushkin gradually began to soften under the pressure, becoming "more objective"—that is, secreting his revolutionary politics in narrative. 6 years of police harassment, til Sept of 1826, the new Czar, Nicolas I, summoned him to Moscow, and announced that he, the Czar, henceforth would be the poet’s "censor." And although the poet’s formal exile was over, the chief of the Russian Secret Police kept him under the shackles of surveillance. Pushkin had to submit all his writings to the Czar for approval.
In March of 1826, he was to write in a letter, "I do not intend foolishly to oppose the generally accepted order." (As, and probably under similar fearful pressure, William Blake in 1791 had decided not to print The French Revolution.)
Three years Pushkin in Moscow and Petrograd, a dissipated period of surveillance, drinking, gambling, fucking—wrote very little—a right-winger’s vision of paradise for a poet. 1927/8/9 And in the 1830’s Pushkin studied in the Russian State Archives going back to the texts and documents.
Pressure..........force the poets
pressure..........to weaken
pressure..........the force of their beliefs.
Never Again.
At the great religious festivals of antiquity, the poets sang/chanted for prizes— and in the era of the Investigative Poet the Diogenes Troubador Data Squad will chew their way into the gory dressing room of Richard Helms.
But what is the prize?
The prize is for the poets to assume their rightful positions as chroniclers of the Time Track, of the historical moment whether century, aeon, hour or microsecond.
As Olson said: "I would be an historian as Herodotus was, looking for oneself for the evidence of what is said."
But what is the prize?
The prize is for Diogenes Eleutherarchs waving the banner of enforced economic equality to weaken, to lessen, and to bring down into the vale of Ha Ha Hee.
The North American CIA Police State, and for poets never again to internalize grovelness.
[1975]
Ed Sanders: "Investigative Poetry: The Content of History Will Be Poetry" copyright © 1975 by Ed Sanders, in Talking Poetics From Naropa Institute: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics: Volume Two, Anne Waldman and Marilyn Webb, eds., Shambhala Publications, 1978.
