Sam Abrams

Sam Abrams (1935 – 2023) was an American poet, classicist, teacher and activist. A "favorite poet" of fellow poet Thomas E. Weatherly Jr., Abrams was described as writing the:

[P]oems too of a classicist, on familiar terms with Sappho, Archilochus, Horace, Socrates regulars in the audience along with Miles, Billie, Bessie, Woody hard listeners for poems that are bluesy, bopsy, beat. Whitmanesque, funny, generous, passionately committed, intellectually rigorous ... in-your-face poems, that can only... be read aloud.

Sometimes described as "postbeat," Abrams was an original workshop leader at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York City and a Fulbright professor of American literature at the University of Athens, Greece. In addition to authoring several books and serving as both editor and critic, Abrams "regularly published for over 40 years in numerous journals and anthologies, including the Paris Review, the University of Iowa's Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and a chaplet of eight poems for the Backwood Broadsides series."

A Journal of Letters and Life described Abrams as an "unrepentant revolutionary and classics professor." A patriot who believed in both "flag etiquette" and civil disobedience, Abrams also owned an off-the-rack DEA jacket, published a book of poetry about pot, and participated in the 1967 Angry Arts Week alongside 600 New York artists. In 2008, more than 40 years later, poets Ed Sanders, Anne Waldman and Amiri Baraka celebrated him with the book Uncensored Songs: A tribute to Sam Abrams.