Philip Whalen says and I believe him...

“…I know now that imagining myself to be a responsible intellectual and a revolutionary was nonsense. Today, it is very clear to me that the Palatine Anthology and the poems of Frank O’Hara are greater revolutionary documents than the entire literary production of N. Lenin or Chairman Mao.

The necessity for compete political revolution is very clear to me. The economic system of finance capitalism and international monopoly is manifestly evil. It is killing us all with wars and machines and is swiftly burying the surface of the world in  slag and garbage and poison. The governments whose job it is to protect us from depredations of these monopolies have simply become instruments of the industries they were supposed to control. So of course the big government big monopoly combine must be dismantled very soon. It will be necessary to hang an “out to lunch” sign over Washington DC and sit down together and figure out a different way of managing our affairs. The answer certainly does not involve the manufacture of oatmeal poetry, unless perhaps, one were to take the quality of the poetry for a symptom of the truly desperate change I’ve been talking about.

I have a hunch that if I write a really good poem today about the weather, about a flower or any other apparently “irrelevant” (I suppose the proper word, now is “nonrelevant,” if we are to be understood) subject, that the revolution will be hastened considerably more than if I composed a pamphlet attacking the government and the capitalist system. If you think about it a moment, the reason becomes obvious.”

Philip Whalen, Preface from Decompressions