History-poesy, or investigative poetry, can thrive in our era because of the implications of a certain poetic insight, that is, in the implications of the line, "Now is the time for prophecy without death as a consequence," from Death to Van Gogh’s Ear, a Ginsberg poem from 1958.
     Investigative poesy is freed from capitalism, churchism, and other totalitarianisms; free from racisms, free from allegiance to napalm-dropping military police states—a poetry adequate to discharge from its verse-grids the undefiled high energy purely-distilled verse-frags, using every bardic skill and meter and method of the last 5 or 6 generations, in order to describe every aspect (no more secret governments!) of the historical present, while aiding the future, even placing bard-babble once again into a role as shaper of the future.
     For this is the era of the description of the A ii; the age wherein a Socrates would have told the judges to take a walk down vomit alley, and could have lived as an active vehement leader of the Diogenes Liberation Squadron of Strolling Troubadors and Muckrakers, till the microbes ‘whelmed him. The era of police-statists punishing citizens for secret proclivities is over. Blackmail, in other words, is going to go bye-bye. One will not in any way have to assure one’s readers (to quote, is it Martial, or Catullus?) that "pagina lasciva, vita proba," but rather it is now most definitely the age of "pagina lasciva, vita lascivior." And we are here speaking of uncompunctious conjugation, not of riches cutting up cattle from silent helicopters, or of bankers whipping each other on yachts.
     Thrills course upward from the typewriter keys as my fingers type the words that say that poets are free from the nets of any particular verse-form or verse-mind. Keats would have grown old in such a freedom. The days of bards chanting dactylic hexameters while strumming the phormingx, or lyre, trying to please some drooly-lipped war-lord are over, o triumphant beatnik spores! It’s over! And the days of bards trying to please some CIA-worshipping cold war tough-liberal professor are done! done! done!
     But the way of Historical Poesy, as I said earlier, is mined with danger, especially to those bards who would seek to drag the corpses of J.P. Morgan’s neo-confederates through the amphetamine piranha tank.
     For let us not forget for one microsecond that the government throughout history has tried to suppress, stomp down, hinder, or buy off dissident or left-wing poets.¹
     One has only to recall that Coleridge and Wordsworth one day were lounging by the sea shore, while nearby sat an English police agent on snitch patrol prepared to rush to headquarters to quill a report about the conversation.²
     Or one can read that remarkable book, William Blake and the Age of Revolution by J. Bronowski, which Harper 8c Row printed in 1965, to see how reactionary English creeps, with their threats of jail, or worse, for accurately depicting the nature of the early parts of the French Revolution—how these reactionary creeps caused, in a significant way, poets like William Blake, who after all was a friend of Thomas Paine, to back away from historical poetry, and to retreat, if that is the word, into a poetry of symbols, where people like King George and William Pitt and others were known by code names such as Palamabron and Rintrah.³
     Nor let us forget that the federal government tried to seize the first printing of Howl and Other Poems (it was printed abroad by City Lights) as it was coming into San Francisco bay.
     Nor shall we forget the repressive corona of puke-vectors that I believe drove Shelley—censored, hounded by police-statists, fearful of arrest—to take upon himself a self-destruction (rest in peace, o d.a. levy) and to set sail into a mad air; nor forget ever the corona of puke-vectors that sent the empty carriages of the rich shuttling along behind the cortege bearing the body of Byron.⁴
     Nor shall we forget the fate of Ovid, who because that calmed-down murderer, Augustus, didn’t like his book and the implications of his book Ars Amatoria, was sent away from the literary scene to die in exile.⁵
     Nor shall we forget that Dostoevsky was standing ready to die in front of the firing squad when the reprieve arrived enabling him later on to "objectify" his stance into that of a jealous rightwing nut.⁶
     Nor shall we forget how the Chilean poet-singer Victor Jara was leading a group of singers while imprisoned in the soccer stadium following the 1973 CIA-coup in Chile, and the killers chopped off his fingers to silence his guitar, and still he lead the singing—til they killed him, another bard butchered because of the U.S. secret police.
     Nor shall we forget how the Czar’s secret police hounded Alexandr Pushkin with a nightmare of surveillance and exile. In fact, a brief look at certain aspects of Pushkin’s life is here appropriate, in order to gauge some of the pressures that can force a poet "to become more objective," or, as the English professor who writes for a CIA-funded magazine might giggle, "to come to terms with the harsh facts of life." Or to escape into the forgetful symbols.

Notes
1.  The Secret Police Sell-out Rule: time after time as we read the biographies of writers, our hearts are broken as we monitor a hideous drift, Passing, say, the 33rd year, to the cautious rig/it. Sometimes I think that the secret police of the world developed a procedure at least 300 years ago to deal with the potential of the brilliant young to create quick change. And the Secret Police Sell-out Rule would go something like this: "If you can stomp them and punish them enough in their youth and middle age, then they’ll calm down, the punks, and silently assent to the Corrupting It." Energy bio-dwindle also adds to the sell-out rule. And, if I go to prison, what will happen to my 15,000 books?
2. Someone should write well the story of Citizen Threlwell. if we all do not have the free chance to enact our own Threl-wellean maneuvers, then we are still slaves. The point is that a visit by Threlwell was enough to cause you (Wordsworth) to lose your house and for the fuzz to slap a surveillance on you.
3. We are not here saying that Blake’s The French Revolution is the world’s greatest poem. And obviously Rintrah is a much more groovy name than Henry Kissinger (one way to deal with baleful names such as Kissinger’s, in poems, would be, as the language gets more "glyphic" again, to conceive of a cacoglyph—a drawing or symbol (cacoglyph being the opposite of the sacred-or-hieroglyph) depicting, say, Kissinger. But we must, on the other hand, be wary of polishing such specks of evil til they become our shiniest art, if you can scan my zone.
John Clarke, certainly one of the finest scholars of Blake, responded to the manuscript of Investigative Poetry with a poem, which speaks right to the essence of the Blake problem:

     Yes. And Blake’s stance is Absolute Integrity, without which Investigative Poetry is immoral gibberish—and his drive toward the hieratic poem-glyph is ever our investigative grail.
     And I have no quarrel with Blake’s vision of a whole system of Self––a Self that paints, designs and sings the limnations of God or Godot or Gododd. What I quarrel with is the withdrawal from the polis—and into the polis thus neglected will march totalitarian apostles: nixon, hitler, stalin, haldeman, helms—abetted by the kings and queens of satan (the lovers of violence).

     And Blake’s techniques in preparing and producing say, The Songs of Innocence and Experience, the. move toward poem-glyph, should ever be an archetype for the Investigative Poet. Print it yrsclf, adorn it yrself, send it out yrself, and make it sacred.
4.   Shelley and government spy-scum: "at last he gave up, sent forward a box filled with his books, which was inspected by the government and reported as seditious, and on April 4 left Ireland (1812). He settled ten days later at Nantgwilt, near Cwm Elan, the seat of his cousins, the Groves, and there remained until June. In this period he appears to have met Peacock, through whom he was probably introduced to his London Publisher, Hookham. In June he again migrated to Lynrnouth in Devon. Here he wrote. his ‘Letter to Lord Ellenborough,’ defending Eaton, who had been sentenced for publishing Paine’s Age of Reason in a periodical. He amused himself by putting copies of the Declaration of Rights, (Shelley’s revolutionary pamphlet from French sources) and a new satirical poem, The Devil’s Walk, in bottles and fire balloons, and setting them adrift by sea and air; but a more mundane attempt to circulate the Declaration of Rights resulted unfortunately for his servant (I guess we have to forgive Shelley for having servants), who had become attached to him and followed him from Ireland, and was punished by a fine of 200 pounds or eight month’s imprisonment for posting it on the walls of Barnstable. Shelley could not pay the fine, but he provided fifteen shillings a week to make the prisoner’s confinement more comfortable. The government now put Shelley under surveillance, and he was watched by Leeson, a spy. . . . and it is known that Shelley was dogged by Leeson, whom he feared long afterwards."

5.   Every time I get out my 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (vol. 20, ODE to PAY), I suffer the frothing anger—electrics reading about the injustices suffered by Ovid, driven to the Black Sea by a punk turkey tyrant snuffer. And it could well happen again—the androids with book-burning lasers to knock at a poet’s door with a computerized printout of the plot of her latest poem.
6. One can understand how Dostoevsky drifted to the right, being a heavy Russian nationalist at heart—but o lord how could he have ever accepted inside himself, first that he deserved a sentence of death, or deserved a commutation that gave him 5 hideous years in the slams, and for what? For conspiring to print copies of Belinsky’s revolutionary letter of response to the late life god-grovels of Gogol.

d.o.b. 5-26-1799
d. 1-29-1837
shot in stomach

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 Squads
                                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]