Phil Ochs: Comprehensible Picture of Revolt

Even though you can't expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make that attempt. That's morality, that's religion. That's art. That's life.
-Phil Ochs


To make the idea of Revolution into a comprehensible image, or at least comprehensible to cynics for the sake of fluently engaging the issue, the use of poetry must burst through the dried-cementation of pure academic and philosophical conversation. Poetics have been, since the beginning of language, the means by which ideas take on shape outside of collective approval or rejection, which is to say, escape the confines of operating within a social institution. Poetics is the seemingly pointless, psychotherepudical, commonly written off mode of language, on account of its tendency to be idealistic or detached from what is "real." However, the stories of such poets as Phil Ochs may be worth citing in order to dissuade quick judgments about the validity of poetic language, as they just might be a way for making today's talk of Revolution comprehensible to the cynic.

Phil Ochs was a journalist. He wrote in order to convey information to a public that needed to know what was going on. Non-fiction was his initial area of expertise, but his passion for folk songs fused with his passion for political discourse, allowing him to become a powerhouse of political folk music creation during the 1960s. He was admired by many for being able to portray the real via the fantastic.

Towards the end of his career as a singer/songwriter, Ochs began increasingly paranoid that the FBI was tracking him. Ochs' friends and family expressed their concern for him, encouraging him to take time off, but after he was strangled while travelling in Africa, Ochs was certain that people were out to get him. His increasing paranoia led to his suicide, after which it was learned that an FBI report had accumulated all along, just as Ochs had feared.



In a building of gold, with riches untold,
lived the families on which the country was founded.
And the merchants of style, with their vain velvet smiles,
were there, for they also were hounded.
And the soft middle class crowded in to the last,
for the building was fully surrounded.
And the noise outside was the ringing of revolution.
-Phil Ochs, "The Ringing of Revolution"

Oh I am just a student, sir, and only want to learn;
But it's hard to read through the risin' smoke of the books that you like to burn,
So I'd like to make a promise and I'd like to make a vow,
That when I've got something to say, sir, I'm gonna say it now.
-Phil Ochs, "I'm Going to Say It Now"

This idea that poetics aestheticizes serious ideas is nothing new, but stories like Ochs' need to be remembered. Poets, by confronting ideas that may be controversial, generate the aesthetic and accessible, making culture the megaphone for the communication between classes that eventually become so far apart that they are alien to one another. Phil Ochs' story should be remembered if free speech is to survive what Karl Marx says is the inevitable Revolution that occurs within societies that put their rich obscenely high above their poor.