Archival Research By Jackson Rock

Focusing On Ed Sanders and Allen Ginsberg

Ed Sanders opened Peace Eye Bookstore in late 1964, which operated as a tunnel to the underground poetry and music scene in New York City. The space functioned as a bookstore and practice space for Sanders’s band, The Fugs. Of course, it was also a party spot. When he wasn’t hanging out with Jimi Hendrix or making a racket with his band, Sanders used a mimeograph machine in his store to print the legendary Fuck You/ a magazine of the arts. 

I traveled to the Emory Rose Library archives with the intention of studying Beat poets' drug culture through archival research, and I did. I thumbed through and scanned many pages of drug-centric documents. Among these documents were multiple issues of Fuck You/ and a document on police corruption compiled and signed by Allen Ginsberg. This broadened the scope of my archival research to focus on some of the US government's antagonism towards countercultural figures and movements in the mid-twentieth century.

​Fuck You/ featured many of the New American Poets’ work, with many references to various drugs associated with the Beat generation. 
The New American Poets’ heavily persecuted, and prosecuted drug culture played a role in helping to create some of the most influential poetry of the twentieth century. Poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Charles Olson used drugs, alcohol, or a combination of the two. The New American Poets heavily involved themselves in political activism - legislation on obscenity and drugs heavily affected them .

Ginsberg, in particular, researched and analyzed the institutions with whom he battled. Not only was Ginsberg's poem Howl censored, but law enforcement also attempted to set him up in a drug sting; this caused him to investigate federal law enforcement. Ginsberg eventually compiled a document of newspaper clippings and anecdotes titled "DOCUMENT ON POLICE BUREAUCRACY'S CONSPIRACY AGAINST HUMAN RIGHTS OF OPIATE ADDICTS & CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS OF MEDICAL PROFESSION CAUSING MASS BREAKDOWN OF URBAN LAW & ORDER," which supported his claims. The next two pages of this website feature scans, which I took, of archived documents at Emory University.

     Ed Sanders, photo by Leni Sinclair, 1968