Allen Ginsberg Interview with Matthew Rothschild

 

Allen Ginsberg, ca. 1979. Photograph by Michiel Hendryckx

Allen Ginsberg with Matthew Rothschild (interview date August 1994)

SOURCE: "Allen Ginsberg: 'I'm Banned from the Main Marketplace of Ideas in My Own Country.'," in The Progressive, Vol. 58, No. 8, August, 1994, pp. 34-39.

[In the following interview, Ginsberg discusses censorship of his works, politics, and his reaction to fame.]

I arrived at Allen Ginsberg's apartment on the lower east side of Manhattan at noon on April 15, two months before his sixty-eighth birthday. The Beat poet, icon of the 1960s counterculture, gay pioneer, had just published a new book of poetry, Cosmopolitan Greetings, almost forty years since he shattered the poetry scene with "Howl." I wanted to talk to him about his latest work and his current political views.

The narrow passageway leading into Ginsberg's small living room was clogged with equipment from a WGBH/BBC crew that was there to interview Ginsberg for a film on the history of rock-'n'-roll. I'd been told ahead of time that he'd be doing other interviews that afternoon, so I sat on a small squishy futon under the sole window and looked around. A framed and illustrated copy of Blake's "The Tyger" was at the entranceway. A large bookshelf stood against one wall, with an oversized volume about Lenin lurking on top. Poetry filled the top two shelves, and then nonfiction, including Citizen Cohn, and J. Edgar Hoover, and Edward Herman's and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. Tapes of Bob Dylan and CDs of John Trudell, along with videos (The Panama Deception) gathered on another bookshelf.

After about half an hour, Ginsberg came out of his tiny bedroom. He was dressed in a deep blue shirt, gray slacks, black slip-on shoes, and a red-and-black tie. He introduced himself to me, and then engaged the film makers. They wanted his recollections of meeting Bob Dylan and John Lennon, so he dutifully performed in his kitchen through numerous takes as the film crew fidgeted with the sound and the light—a process that took about two hours. A framed, if slipping, portrait of Walt Whitman hung on one wall, along with a print of St. Francis in Ecstasy. On the refrigerator, next to low-fat food lists and Buddhist chants, was a leaflet: TEENAGERS! TIRED OF BEING HARASSED BY YOUR STUPID PARENTS? ACT NOW. MOVE OUT, GET A JOB, PAY YOUR OWN BILLS … WHILE YOU STILL KNOW EVERYTHING.

As the film crew was cleaning up, Ginsberg and I retreated to his bedroom for the interview, Buddhist shrine next to the bed, writing table nearby, and bookshelf of poetry at the front. Ginsberg was alternately impassioned and professional, even occasionally disputatious as he resisted being labeled a political poet. There was one magical moment when he took down an old hardback copy of Whitman and started to read passages he had marked up. Halfway through the interview, Ginsberg broke to go upstairs in his building to Philip Glass's apartment to work with the composer on a memorial for a mutual friend who had died of AIDS. When Ginsberg returned, we talked for two more hours, and I left exhausted at 6:30 in the evening.

[Rothschild]: In Cosmopolitan Greetings, you have a phrase, "radioactive anticommunism." What do you mean by that?

[Ginsberg]: Well, the bomb was built up beyond the Japanese war as a bulwark against communism. The extremist anticommunism went in for mass murder in El Salvador and assassination in the Congo, when we killed Lumumba and put in Mobutu. The military extremism was not much help in overthrowing communism, except maybe in bankrupting both sides, but that only left the communist countries helpless when they switched over to the free market.

But beyond that I think as much was done to subvert Marxist authoritarian rule by Edgar Allan Poe, blue jeans, rock-'n'-roll, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, modern American poetry, and Kerouac's On the Road—that was more effective in subverting the dictatorship and the brainwash there than all the military hoopla that cost us the nation, actually.

Why did these works undermine communism?

The authoritarian mind—Maoist, Hitler, Stalinist, monotheist, Ayatollahist, fundamentalist—shares a fear and hatred of sexual libertarianism, fear of free-association spontaneity, rigid control over thought forms and propaganda, fear of avant-garde and experimental art. The Stalinist word for this kind of avant-garde is "elitist individualism" or "subjectivism"; the Nazi word was "degenerate art"; the Maoist word was "spiritual corruption"; the fundamentalist word is "spiritual corruption and degenerate art"; the Jesse Helms argument is why should the average American taxpayer have to pay for this "elitist individualistic filth"? It's exactly what Stalin used to say: "Why should the Russian people have to pay for the avant-garde to display their egocentric individualism and immorality and not follow the Communist Party line?"

The whole authoritarian set of mind depends on suppression of individual thought, suppression of eccentric thought, suppression of inerrancy in the interpretation of the Bible, or of Marx, or Mein Kampf, or Mao's Little Red Book in favor of mass thought, mass buzz words, party lines. They all want to eliminate or get rid of the alien, or the stranger, or the Jews, or the gays, or the Gypsies, or the artists, or whoever are their infidels. And they're all willing to commit murder for it, whether Hitler or Stalin or Mao or the Ayatollah, and I have no doubt that if Rush Limbaugh or Pat Robertson or Ollie North ever got real power, there would be concentration camps and mass death. There already are in the police-state aspect of the "war on drugs."

In one of your new poems, you mention your frustration that Jesse Helms and the FCC have banned your works from the airwaves except during the wee hours of the morning. How did that happen?

As part of the totalitarian political-correctness mind-control movement on the fundamentalist Right, the makers of beer, Coors, funded the Heritage Foundation, which presented a position paper and the legal technical language for Jesse Helms, who is subsidized by the tobacco interests, to direct the FCC to forbid all so-called indecent language from the air twenty-four hours a day. It passed in October 1988 when the Senate was empty, and was signed by Reagan. I found out about it because there was a column in The Village Voice by Nat Hentoff in which the head of the Pacifica stations said they used to play my poetry quite a lot but now it was controversial—not that they didn't like it, not that it wasn't popular, but they were afraid it would be too expensive to defend in court. They couldn't afford an argument for free speech. So I helped organize a consortium of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, Harvey Silverglate, the then-head of the ACLU in Massachusetts, the Rabinowitz and Boudin law firm, and William Burroughs, myself, and the PEN club as friends of the court, and we helped bust the law.

You won?

Well, we won once. The FCC was directed to hold hearings as to whether or not it was legitimate to reduce the entire population of America to the level of minors, because the law was supposedly to protect the ears of minors. They agreed to define minors as eighteen, eliminating youth, teenyboppers—everybody'sa minor now. The FCC came up with a homemade prejudiced thing, saying, "OK, the ban's not for twenty-four hours, it's only from 6:00 A.M. to midnight. And you can have sort of open passage, midnight to 6:00 A.M., when nobody is listening, for your art, your poetry, and your filthy books."

Then I participated in a roundtable discussion at an FCC lawyers' convention with James Quello, the oldest member on the FCC, and Quello pulled out a copy of "Howl," and said, "This is a perfectly good poem you could broadcast on the air—all you have to do is eliminate a couple paragraphs." That was his idea of art! It was like a Soviet bureaucrat's statement. There's no difference between that Stalinist bureaucratic mentality and what's going on with these fundamentalist bureaucrats.

So we took it to court again. And the court said there was not sufficient proper scientific sociological investigation of when the kids were listening, but that it might be legitimate to protect their ears. So the FCC made it from 6:00 A.M. to 8:00 P.M. And that's being fought in court still on constitutional grounds.

How does this censorship affect you?

I'm a poet who specializes in oral recitation and performance. I am pleased that my work is good on the page—it should be solid on the page—but there is a dimension of sound, which Ezra Pound emphasized. I'm a specialist in that, I'm very good at vocalization, I'm famous for that around the world, and yet I'm banned from the "main marketplace of ideas" in my own country—radio, television, and God knows what they can do when the FCC gets a hold of the information highway. That means the entire brainwash is all under the control of the FCC so that "who got fucked in the ass by handsome sailors and screamed with joy" will be banned from electronic media. People don't read as much these decades but they hear. Like John Lennon heard my poetry on radio before he read it and was moved by it. That means that a main avenue that I would have for articulation of my own thinking, my own ideas, whether social or political or aesthetic, is closed off.

Do you see the Far Right gaining power in the United States?

They have power. They've got control of television now; they've censored television and radio. They already have power. You've already accomplished your censorship of the media, and intimidated them as well as legally censoring them. You got it. You have this organized gang of listeners who will write in at the drop of a hat—you know, they'll say, "Write in and denounce this or that politician, or this or that abortion, or this or that poem," then bam, you've got it. They mobilize all these relatively innocent people to be writing in denouncing art. It's demagoguery, and the media caved in to it.

One of my favorite poems in Cosmopolitan Greetings is "After the Big Parade"—about the American public's reactions to Bush's Iraq war. Were you actually at one of those parades here?

I was down in the parade with a tiny group of people protesting it in front of City Hall. There was a group of maybe ten people amid the millions that were out there under the confetti, and the bunting, and the bands, and the police.

How did the crowd respond to you?

They ignored us, or they threatened us. So I saw it first hand, the mob hysteria, as in the old Roman mob. And then within two days the entire enthusiasm had evaporated, and within a few months, people realized more and more that the Iraq war was one of the most successful instances of brainwashing ever turned out by Madison Avenue and Government—by control of the airwaves and mass-media censorship.

In hindsight, people realize that they were taken in, that alternative views weren't presented, and that in order to present this war as heroic, you had to ignore some very obvious things—like the fact that we were building up Saddam Hussein until the very day that we bombed him, and that we had played one gang against another in the Iran-Iraq war. In a way, we were responsible for the whole Middle East situation. We had overthrown Mossadegh, as I've got in my poem, "Just Say Yes Calypso." Norman Schwarzkopf's father was directly involved in the overthrow of Mossadegh and the training of the Savak. People weren't aware of that. People thought Schwarzkopf was some sort of country bumpkin from the Midwest who got to be general rather than a sophisticated Persian-speaking son of a man who trained the Shah's secret police.

So it was some kind of American karma we were bombing, and people weren't really aware of the historical relevance of the land they were bombing, that this was the Garden of Eden we were bombing, the land of Ur and Abraham. And they didn't realize in a way that it was child molestation, because the average age of Iraqis at the time was only sixteen. The people being bombed were kids!

Trying to concentrate all that information into rhymed stanzas takes ingenuity, and interest, and curiosity. I think it's a really good poem because it's totally understated and it's a fact. "Have they forgotten the corridors of death?"—which was the boastful phrase that was used when we bombed the Iraqis. And "Will another hundred thousand desert deaths across the world be cause for the next rejoicing?" is a strangely sardonic compassionate touch—I don't know where I got that tone. It's not Pound; it might be Herman Melville's poetry. Melville has some thing like this in his poem, "On the Slain Collegians," who rushed into the battle and perished, "enlightened by the volleyed glare."

The specter of AIDS is in many of the poems in your latest work. How has the AIDS plague affected you?

There's this decimation of genius, particularly in theater and film and music and poetry. One of the greatest modern poems is called "Ward 7," written by Jim Dlugos, who was dying of AIDS. It's one of the most humane, heartfelt, sincere poems I've ever read. It's one of the great poems of this part of the century. So there's been a lot of loss.

My taste tends to be for young men and straight young men, so in a way in the early days of AIDS that sort of kept me a little bit safe. Now I'm very careful. It hasn't affected me all that much in terms of my love life, though lately I must say I'm getting older, I'm less successful in bedding young men and young straight men. And I like to be screwed, or screw, but I can't get it up anymore anyway (because of diabetes and other things that I mention in this book) unless there's a great deal of stimulation and rapport and real interest, so I'm not inclined to screw anybody because it's hard and I'd be a little scared to be screwed—though with people that I know real well and I know their situation and their history and have been tested, I wouldn't mind. But I don't know anyone that I like that well or that likes me enough to get it up.

Even in these days of AIDS, you're like the last apostle of desire. You still celebrate sex.

Safe sex is just as good as unsafe sex. And with safe sex you get something which I always liked anyway—you have these long pillow talks about what you're going to do with each other, how you're going to make love to each other, what you should do, and what you want to do, and who's going to be on top, and who's going to be on the bottom. You have a chance to talk it over if you're verbal at all, and that's fun because it's like opening up your secret recesses of desire to each other.

You seem to suggest that there's something not only human but liberating about sex.

I think it is. I always remember Kerouac saying, "Woe to those who deny the unbelievable joy of sexual love." The joy, the exquisite joy. I've found sexual communication to be one of the most thrilling and exquisite experiences in my life. With people I love, all shame is gone, everybody is naked, as Hart Crane said, "confessions between coverlet and pillow." And I think the best teaching is done in bed also, by the way, as did Socrates. It is an old tradition: transmission in bed, transmission of information, of virtue. I think Whitman thought so, Whitman pointed out that "adhesiveness" between the citizens was the necessary glue that kept democracy from degenerating into rivalry, competition, backbiting, dog-eat-dog. I think that's true. One of the problems of the Reagan-Bush era was the lack of cohesiveness, the competition, the rivalry, the Darwinian dog-eat-dog, which fed egocentricity, exploitation, and cruelty and indifference and left three million people out on the streets homeless.

Are you hopeful about the lesbian and gay rights movement in the United States?

Oh, sure. Everybody's gay in one way or another. "Everybody's got a big dong." Everybody's sexualized, and everybody's sex is somewhat repressed, and no one can really do any fingerpointing anymore. Everybody's a freak, so to speak, and I think people understand that. Certainly the younger generation does. I mean how long can you keep it secret that Cardinal Spellman was a flaming queen? How long can you keep it secret that J. Edgar Hoover was a transvestite blackmailed by the Mafia? How long can you keep it secret that Jesse Helms is overobsessed with homosexuality and is politically addicted to alcohol and tobacco interests? Even the press is sooner or later going to catch up with the hype.

What is the hype? The hype is hypocrisy, double standard, people coming on in public less intelligent than they are in private—say on something like marijuana. Everybody knows that marijuana is more or less harmless, but they won't say it in public. Everybody except maybe some crazed fundamentalists has smoked some grass or knows someone who's smoked some grass.

There's a schizophrenia between private knowledge and public knowledge. On sex, there's a schizophrenia between what people do in private and the way they talk in public. There's a schizophrenia about stimulants. A schizophrenia about politics: The contradictions are so big that it's a kind of public schizophrenia that people aren't in on what, say, the CIA in-group knows. The public never knows what the consequences of the hidden deals are. No one knows the ecological consequences or the political cause or consequences of an H-bomb, a Lumumba assassination, a Panama invasion—and the Government is supposed to be a democracy. That's schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is no way to run a government or a society. You can't have a schizophrenic society without the results we're seeing: pollution of the air, pollution caused by conspicuous consumption, the very schizophrenia of thinking that we can continue to consume the vast amounts of raw material that we do disproportionate to our population, and saying everyone should aspire to be like us. If everybody were like us, the Earth would burn out overnight.

What's your assessment of President Clinton so far?

Bush was pretty much a sourpuss, a depressed and depressing person. I think Clinton is much more cheerful; I think that's always a help. I don't know that he can climb out of a pit that Reagan and Bush have dug in terms of national debt and exhaustion of national resources. But I like his attitude and I like his attempt to do something—I like his trying to do something about health, trying to do something about gays in the military. So I think he's a better person in terms of being more honest and inquisitive. At least he had the amusement to put a stick of grass between his lips. He's dealt with some real problems—like health, smoking, and ecology—which were being avoided or even subverted by Reagan and Bush.

In the book, you have a couple of criticisms of 1960s activists. New Leftists—"peace protesters angrier than war's cannonball noises," and you talk about "the scandal of the '60s"—people carrying pictures of Mao and Che and Castro.

It seems to me that the extreme one-dimensional politics of the New Left—which had no spiritual or adhesive element or direction but relied on "rising up angry" rage, which was considered by some to be the necessary gasoline or fuel for political action—was a great psychological mistake. Any gesture made in anger is going to create more anger. Any gesture coming from rage and resentment creates more rage and resentment. Any gesture taken in equanimity will create more equanimity. The 1968 Chicago police riot was, after all, to some extent provoked by the attitude, behavior, and propaganda of some of the members of the New Left, who had promised a Festival of Light but delivered an angry protest. The original Yippie idea, as announced, was to have a festival that would be cheerful, affirmative, ecologically sound, and generous emotionally sound, and generous emotionally so that it would outshadow the "Death Convention" of Johnson's war.

Before the Chicago thing, Jerry Rubin came over to my house, and I wanted reassurance that he didn't have any intention of starting a riot. I didn't want any blood. He swore, "not at this time." I should have suspected it then and there, but actually I do think unconsciously or consciously some wanted to precipitate an "exemplary" riot.

The result of the riot was to knock out Humphrey. And then many Leftists out of their hatred of Humphrey and their parents and their liberal middle-class background refused to vote and dropped out and so Nixon squeaked in by half a million votes. Millions of people didn't vote on the Left, angry at Johnson and his war, angry at Humphrey for going along (although everybody knew that Humphrey wanted to end the war, but it was just this totalitarian insistence on having it your way, the way you wanted to end the war, the method you wanted to end the war, rather than let the war decline in a way that was politically possible). In 1968, the Gallup Poll reported that 52 percent of the American people thought the war was a mistake. The question is, how come the Left could not lead America out of the war when the middle class was already disillusioned? I think it was because they were threatening the middle class with anger, because one motto was KILL YOUR PARENTS or BRING THE WAR HOME. They weren't leading the middle class, they weren't providing space for the middle class to change, they were threatening the middle class.

The Left, by not voting, let Nixon in. The Left, by discrediting the Democrats, let Nixon in. And once Nixon got in, the war got much worse—the bombing was escalated beyond the imagination of Johnson and Kennedy, the bankruptcy of the Treasury and the moral bankruptcy was escalated way beyond anyone's imagination.

It doesn't mean that the Left was wrong. The antiwar stance was correct. It's just that the method, which involved aggression and anger, was an unskillful means. The blood of the Vietnamese from 1968 on rests primarily on the right-wing conservatives and the Nixonites, but there is some blood on the Left for their ineptness in politics. That's what I meant by speeches "angrier than war's cannonball noises." It was the mistake of waving a Viet Cong flag—and half the people who did it were FBI agents anyway. In New York City, I remember parades being taken over by extremists, who later turned out to be FBI provocateurs. People don't realize the enormity of the infiltration of the Left by the FBI in the form of extremist provocation, which the neurotics of the Left went along with thinking it was more macho, holier than thou, "more revolutionary than thou."

To what extent does your Buddhism contribute to this attitude of yours about the need for equanimity?

The original Beat idea was a spiritual change, an attitudinal change, a change of consciousness. Then, once having achieved some reform of one's own, begin with yourself and work outward. Not quite Buddhist, but Eastern thought and "Beatnik" thought is pacifistic.

Do you consider yourself a pacifist?

Well. I haven't found a war I liked yet.

You write in one of your new poems about being offended as a Jew at violent Zionists. What was your reaction to the Hebron massacre?

The extremism among the Jews refusing land for peace and insisting upon that piece of dirt being theirs—you know, fighting over a piece of ground—seems to me to be some kind of awful chauvinism, creating a karma that may never end, like the Irish-English fight. Who knows where it will end now? They've started a circle of violence that may never finish until Armageddon.

You say in one of the new poems that "all the spiritual groups scandal the shrine room."

That's true, especially the monotheist religions. By their very nature, the Jews, the Christians, and the Islamic people claim that they're talking for God. As a Buddhist I don't even believe in God, much less talking for Him if there were one. But all these guys have the chutzpah or the brass or the egocentric anthropomorphic totalitarian idea that they are the mouthpiece of God. The Ayatollah could tell Salman Rushdie to get killed, or the reactionary Israelis can say the Arabs are inferior, the Christians can create a holocaust. That's why I wrote "Stand up against governments, against God"—the monotheist domination of consciousness that insists on its own party line.

What is your assessment of the state of poetry, or political poetry, right now?

I myself don't believe in so-called political poetry. I think what a poet does is he "writes his mind." And like everybody else, his mind is concerned with sex, dope, and everyday living, politics included, whatever his experience is, so the personal experience of the poet will differ from the media representation of reality. As far as I'm concerned, my interest in poetry is in representing my actual mind as distinct from the official party line of the media, which is to say, The New York Times, The Washington Post, even The Nation, and from the official party line of the White House and the Establishment.

So, private experience is different from the way it's recorded in the newspapers and on television. We have our own real worlds, and then there's the pseudo-event of newspapers. As Pound says, "Poetry is news that stays news," which is our actual emotions, our feelings, thoughts—Kerouac said "the unspeakable visions of the individual."

The subject matter is the nature of my consciousness, and the texture of my consciousness, and what passes through my mind spontaneously, not what immediate effect can I have on PR or public politics or day-to-day polemics.

Yet more than almost any poet in the mid-century and the late-century, you've written in your poems about America.

It's not that I'm specializing in America. I've also written a lot about my sex life, I've also written about my family, and I've also written about food, and I've also written about meditation, and Buddhism—because those are the participating elements of my life, so I write about what I'm involved with. Which is not much different from anybody else. Maybe the Buddhism is a little more specialized and maybe the homosexual content is a little more specialized but everyone has their own sex lives.

There is a strain of contemporary poetry that is shorn of politics, that is hyper-private.

Who? Who? Mine is hyper-private, is what I'm saying. I'm just writing about what I think about privately. I'm amazed that more people don't write about what they actually think about privately, day after day.

I'm not trying to pigeonhole you into this little box called political poetry, which you don't want to be shoved into.

No. I don't mind that, but there's a distinction I'd like to make. I grew up in the '30s and '40s during the controversy between the socialists and the communists and the Trotskyites about political poetry. Now the theory that they laid down, both Stalin and the Maoists, and Hitler for that matter, is that poetry should serve the nation. And Jesse Helms and Pat Robertson also believe this; it's all the same, the dictatorial monotheists from Pat Robertson to Stalin. They all believe that poetry should be moral, defined in their own terms whether serving Christ, or the People, or the Central Committee of the Communist Party—that poetry is the vanguard of the revolution and since the will of the revolution and of the people is represented by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, therefore the poet should take his politics from what the Central Committee says is the proper party line, or what Pat Robertson says the Bible says.

You've got to remember the inheritors of that political Left tradition, the Students for a Democratic Society up to the Weathermen, the New Left, also first disapproved of psychedelics, also disapproved of rock-'n'-roll poetry, also disapproved of individual cock-sucking poetry—you know, and thought that "no, this was not advancing the cause."

The primitive notion of a one-dimensional political poetry, up through Abbie Hoffman, even, maintained dominance over the notion of political poetry, especially reinforced by the poetry of the anti-Vietnam war. So I think it's important to make a distinction between poetry which is (and should be, as far as I'm concerned) Ivory Tower, the politics of which come as a secondary reflection or concomitant potential but not as the central purpose, and the distinction between that and deliberate, intentional …

Polemical poetry?

Yeah, but what you're nice enough to call polemical was the basic idea of political poetry all along. "Why aren't you taking responsibility for writing about blah, blah, gays, the blacks, or women?" Still, political correctness, party line. "Is your poem politically correct, Mister Mayakovsky?" That's where that notion, that phrase, political correctness comes from originally, from old Stalinists and Maoists. That still has a minor voice in poetics now, both from the Right and the Left.

If you want to go to the root of things and move people's consciousness, you can't do it in that vulgar or blunderbuss way of the Stalinists of the Left and the Right.

I'm more in the lineage of Poe. Why is Poe interesting? He gives you this sense of paranoia, modern Twentieth Century world paranoia, world nausea, "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Telltale Heart," "The Descent Into the Maelstrom." He's the first, you could say, psychedelic poet.

Now who was Poe? He was the most Ivory Tower, art for art's sake, beauty for the sake of beauty, isolated, unpolitical poet in the world, yet he penetrates everybody's consciousness all over the world and is the first maybe adult poet prose writer people read from Russia to China to England to America. He has more influence on people's consciousness, and individuating them, and making them conscious of their individuality and their isolation than any other writer, and yet he's the least political.

Dig? I'm addressing myself directly to your question. It turns out that the one who went for the jugular of pure aesthetic beauty is the most politically influential in certain ways in terms of individuating people, empowering people, and making them conscious of themselves as individuals as distinct from members of a mass under hypnotic mass control—whether television or Hitler or American co-optation.

So there is no real distinction between political and unpolitical poetry, and I would advise a poet to avoid politics and get to what is his or her most deeply felt perception or impulse—that's way more politically effective than writing sonnets about the Republicans.

In a way, you seem to claim yourself as Whitman's heir.

I don't claim myself as Whitman's heir. I'm inspired by Whitman, but I wouldn't be so presumptuous. I don't think I'm as good as Whitman at all. He's much more ample. In my last book the Whitman influence is not the famous Whitman of "Song of Myself," but his Old Age Echoes, the little gay poems, and the poems talking about "my aches and pains" and all that. Whitman wrote geriatric poems that were quite interesting. There's a poem from Sands at Seventy: "As I sit writing here sick and grown old, / Not my least burden is that, dullness of the years, querilities, / Ungracious glooms, aches, lethargy, constipation, whimpering ennui / May filter in my daily songs."

Whitman is a very good model for the glooms and the delights of growing old and being energetic, aware, and vigorous and going on toward death, looking back and looking forward.

"Garrulous to the very last," do you know that phrase? "After the supper and talk—after the day is done, / As a friend from friends his final withdrawal prolonging. / Goodbye and goodbye with emotional lips repeating. / (So hard for his hand to release those hands—no more will they meet. / No more for communion of sorrow and joy, of old and young, / A far-stretching journey awaits him, to return no more,) / Shunning, postponing severance—seeking to ward off the last word ever so little, / E'en at the exit door turning—charges superfluous calling back—e'en as he descends the steps, / Something to eke out a minute additional, shadows of nightfall deepening, / Farewells, messages lessening—dimmer the forthgoer's visage and form, / Soon to be lost for aye in the darkness—loth, O so loth to depart! / Garrulous to the very last." It's the last poem of Sands at Seventy. Isn't it charming?

In some passages in the latest book, you write that you're bored with fame. Do you ever get tired of being Allen Ginsberg?

No, there's no Allen Ginsberg. It's just a collection of empty atoms.

But in several of your latest poems, you seem to be wrestling with immortality.

No, I'm not wrestling. I'm saying, "Immortality comes later," by definition. It's a joke.

Well, in one poem, you say, "I missed my chance."

For salvation. Artistically I've got it made, but in terms of spiritual salvation, who knows? I certainly haven't taken advantage of all the good teachings I've been given, I must say. Otherwise, I wouldn't see anybody these days, and be on a three-year meditation retreat.

I can understand the need to feel that your life's work was worthwhile, but to feel the need that people will be reading you when you're gone I don't understand. You're not going to be around to enjoy it, anyhow. What's the big deal about immortality?

There's no total immortality. "The sun's not eternal, that's why there's the blues," as I wrote in a previous book. Even the sun goes out. There's "immortal as immortal is," which is temporary. However, it is important if you have the impulse of transmitting dharma or whatever wisdom you've got, writing "so that in black ink my love might still shine bright"—Shakespeare.

There is a Buddhist reason for fame and for immortality, which is that it gives you the opportunity to turn the wheel of dharma while you're alive to a larger mass of sentient beings and after you're dead that your poetry radio continues broadcasting dharmic understanding so that people pick up on it and the benefits of it after you're dead.

In a previous book, I wrote: "While I'm here I'll do the work. And what's the work? To ease the pain of living." You can ease the pain of living for people after you're dead through your art-work by creating a thing of beauty, like Poe, by creating a thing of political understanding, by creating a thing of psychological self-recognition like Walt Whitman, by making the ground safe for gays like Gore Vidal, Burroughs, and Jean Genet, by making the ground safe for straight people like Henry Miller and D. H. Lawrence.

Those works continue raying out wisdom even after the author's gone, and to the extent that your ambition is to relieve the mass of human sufferings, that can be accomplished with art, whether or not the planet survives. Even if it is in extremis, at the edge of death, as an individual or as a planet, there still is the consolation of insight and wisdom that you might get from a work of art that will ease the pain of passing from this life to whatever emptiness comes, and alchemize that sorrow into blissful recognition.

Allen Ginsberg with Gary Pacernick (interview date 10 February 1996)
SOURCE: "Allen Ginsberg: An Interview by Gary Pacernick," in The American Poetry Review, Vol. 4, July/August, 1997, pp. 23-27.

[In the following interview, Ginsberg discusses inspiration and his role in American poetry.]

[Pacernick]: The tape is on now; this is the beginning.

[Ginsberg]: "This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks, bearded with / moss …"

Allen, what have you found the hardest thing about being a poet?

Nothing particular. I mean—nothing particular. No hard part.

Okay.

Making a living at it. Making a living.

Well, what about inspiration? Has it always been easy?

Inspiration comes from the word spiritus. Spiritus means breathing. Inspiration means taking in breath. Expiration means letting breath go out. So inspiration is just a feeling of heightened breath or slightly exalted breath, when the body feels like a hollow reed in the wind of breath. Physical breath comes easily and thoughts come with it. Now that's a state of physical and mental heightening, but it's not absolutely necessary for great poetry. Though you find it's a kind of inspiration, a kind of breathing in Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" or "Adonais" or Hart Crane's "Atlantis," or perhaps the Moloch section of "Howl." But for subject matter, which is what you mean, for ideas, ordinary mind and thoughts that occur every day are sufficient. It's a question of the quality of your attention to your own mind and your own thoughts.

Where does this breath come from that you find in the second part of "Howl," for example?

Well, it's a more excited breathing, longer breath, that you find in the examples that I cited which build sequentially as a series of breaths until finally there's a kind of conclusive utterance. "Moloch whose name is the Mind."

You talk in the Paris Review interview and other places about being inspired by Blake reciting "Sunflower."

An auditory hallucination, hearing it, but that's a different kind of breath, completely. That's a quieter breath from the heart area. Like my voice now rather than the stentorian breath of "Atlantis" or "Howl."

So you're not talking about what we usually talk about in terms of prophesy, in terms of some divine voice.

Now wait a minute. You're switching your words now. We were using the word inspiration and voice. Now what are you talking about? What's your question, really?

What is a breath unit?

A breath unit as a measure of the verse line? Why, a breath unit as a measure of the verse line is one breath, and then continuing with the sentence is another breath. Or saying "or" is another breath, and then you take another breath and continue. So you arrange the verse line on the page according to where you have your breath stop, and the number of words within one breath, whether it's long or short, as this long breath has just become.

Okay now, you're talking about great poetry—.

No, no, I'm talking about how you arrange the verse lines on the page by the breath.

No, I understand, but when we were talking about inspiration you used the word breath again.

Because the word inspiration comes from the Latin word spiritus, which means breathing. So I was trying to nail down what the word inspiration means rather than have a vague term that we didn't know what we were talking about.

But to me, and obviously I could be totally off, it sounds like you're talking about poetry as a kind of series of breathing exercises.

Well it is, in a way, or the vocal part, the oral part, is related to the breath, yes.

What inspires the breath?

The breath is inspiration itself. Breath is itself, breath is breath: Where there is life, there is breath, remember? Breath is spirit, spiritus.

So every once in awhile this spirit breath visits you and other poets?

No, you're breathing all the time, it's just that you become aware of your breath. Every once in awhile you become aware that you're alive. Every once in awhile you become aware of your breathing. Or of the whole process of being alive, breathing in the universe, being awake, and so you could say that that's the inspiration or the key, that you become aware of what's already going on.

You probably didn't know this when you were sixteen, eighteen, twenty years old and first writing poetry.

Oh, well, pretty soon. A sort of latent understanding, yeah. That notion of awareness, conscious awareness.

Did Williams or Pound influence this?

Pound and Williams specialized in this. They broke the ground for this kind of thinking. Williams trying to write in vernacular speech and dividing it up into pieces, and dividing the verse line into pieces of vernacular speech, sometimes by counting syllables, sometimes by the breath stop, sometimes by running counter to the breath stop. Do you know what I mean by the breath stop?

You were in Dayton years ago and I was there with my wife and child, and I said to you, "What is a breath unit?" and you were sort of showing me with your hand as I spoke. Charles Olson talks about it. But Pound and Williams don't talk about breath, do they?

Well, it's implicit in what they were doing, because they were talking about actual talk.

I understand.

And measuring the measure—what Williams talks about was an American measure, a measure of actual speech.

Right.

And his disciples like Olson and Creeley drew from that the notion of projective verse or verse by breath or measuring the verse line by where the breath stops.

But we both know that your breaths in "Kaddish" and "Howl" and your other inspired poems are—

Different from somebody else?

Not only different, but so long.

Everybody's is different. Everybody's breath is different. Everybody, like Creeley's is short and minimal, in a way.

Well, it's beyond short and minimal. It's like one one-hundredth of what yours is in some of your longer lines.

Well, sometimes. But on the other hand the poems that are like those, too, like Williams or Pound.

Does that mean, since your line is the longest, that you're the most inspired?

Well, the deepest inspiration, probably, yes, the deepest breath.

So you are, you're literally equating poetic inspiration with breath.

That aspect of it. There's two kinds I said. There is the deep breath, but there is also, in the more common use of the word inspiration, i.e., where do you get your ideas, is also just ordinary mind and ordinary breath, and short breath, too. Ordinary mind means what passes through your mind while you're sitting on the toilet.

But in your poem "Kaddish" you're doing more than that.

But I'm saying there are different kinds of poetry. In "Kaddish" what I'm doing is a longer breath, yes. Then in other poems like in White Shroud the poem to William Carlos Williams, "Written in My Dream by W. C. Williams," it's a short breath.

Let's switch it a little bit, then maybe we can come back to that. In "Howl" you affirm the beat lifestyle.

You know, one thing is, you're fixated on poems of thirty, forty years ago. I don't mind talking about them, but in context of a whole curve of poetry up to the present. But go on.

Okay, fine. You affirm the beat lifestyle that often leads to madness and/or death.

I didn't use the word "lifestyle." That's a later sort of media term and I don't like you to use it. I think it's bullshit.

You said "Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!" A lot of the people, most of the people have died.

Not so. Just the opposite, sir. Just the opposite. You've got it all wrong, inside out. Burroughs is alive at the age of eighty-three and just had a birthday. Huncke just had his birthday in February also, and he's eighty-one. Gary Snyder is in very good health in California and is a world-renowned influence in poetry. Philip Whalen is a Zen master now. I'm doing quite well at Naropa and Brooklyn College and writing poems: Michael McClure is touring with Ray Manzarek. So Kerouac died, Neal Cassady died, and Lou Welsh died. But on the other hand Gregory Corso is living across town. We're all in touch with each other. Ann Waldman has founded the Kerouac School of Poetics at Naropa and John Ashbery and everybody go there, and I go there between terms. So we have a better actuarial span than most insurance people. But you've got the stereotype I'm trying to get away from.

Let's go to "Howl" itself.

As I keep saying, you're fixated on images of that. Anyway, go on.

Well, those people are very unhappy, the people you portray in the poem.

Yes. They were young.

Okay. Let's just say you have survived.

And so have most of my friends.

Where do you draw your strength?

Oh, inspiration. I keep breathing. Also I never drank.

You never drank?

No. I never drank. And I was very moderate in my use of drugs. I was more interested in the politics than the drugs themselves.

But you have all those poems that are titled after drugs.

If you'll notice, it's about one percent of my poetry.

Okay. I'll go back and take a look.

You'll find a poem called "Nitrous Oxide" and another called "Ether" and another called "LSD," another called "Marijuana Notation," another called "Mescaline". And that's about it. And your have Peyote for the central section of "Howl"—

The religious visions.

And a couple other things, then you have some stuff from the "Yage" and that's it. Out of about eight hundred pages, you've got about fifty pages of drugs.

All right, that takes care of that.

You have the media stereotypes you're dealing with.

Well, I don't know you.

Well, you don't have to. Just look at the texts. I've named all the texts that are on drugs.

In "Kaddish" were you responding to the Hebrew prayer in any particular way, or were you responding in a more general way to your grief over Naomi's death?

Both. You know, I had never heard the formal rhythms of the Kaddish before, pronounced aloud, or never consciously heard them. They sounded familiar. But all of a sudden I realized it was some kind of interesting, moving, powerful cadence.

You must have been to a service.

Yes. But I have never noticed or heard or consciously heard it, as I said.

But you have said it, though.

No. I've never said it. I don't read Hebrew. I wasn't Bar Mitzvahed. And I was kicked out of Hebrew school for asking questions. I don't know.

Were you being sentimental when you named it "Kaddish"?

No, 'cause I used the basic rhythm of the Kaddish and I quoted the Kaddish.

But you said you didn't know it.

I heard it that morning. Someone read it to me that morning.

The morning you wrote the poem?

Yeah, when I started writing it, or that evening. About 3 A.M. And I was impressed by the cadence and the rhythm and the depth of the sound, as it says in the very opening line, "rending the Kaddish aloud … the rhythm the rhythm—and your memory in my head three years after." It says exactly what it was. Mixed with "Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph." With a similar rhythm, by the way. "I got a woman, yes indeed."

So—

A sort of repeated cadence that was right, like Ray Charles or the Kaddish.

So you're inspired by that prayer, you're inspired by music, by the rhythm of the music. What about the image, though?

What's the image? Which one?

Williams and the emphasis on—

Minute particular details. Now the phrase that I am thinking of is "minute particulars." Do you know that phrase? Do you know where that's from?

"Minute particulars."

Yes. "Labor well the minute particulars. Take care of the little ones." That's from William Blake's "Jerusalem." Little ones, the little details. And Kerouac says, "Details are the life of prose." And Pound says, "The natural object is the adequate symbol." And Trungpa says, "Things are symbols of themselves."

Well let me ask you this—

So the image comes from, or the image is related to the following idea. If you want to give a mirror of your consciousness and you become aware of your consciousness, conscious awareness manifests itself sacramentally in the quality of the attention to clear-seeing focus on chance, minute, particular details that present themselves with charismatic vividness to author and to reader.

You do both that and hear music also? Simultaneously?

No. You have a picture in your mind, as Pound points out, in "Chinese Written Language as a Medium for Poetry," published by City Lights now. The Chinese is interesting as a poetic language because it consists in little pictographs. So you can't be vague and talk about beauty. You have to talk about something concrete and process. At the same time, the language has got a sonorous aspect or sound or vocal sound, so you hear it in your head sometimes. Sometimes you make the language up out of the picture. Sometimes the language itself has its own melodic part that comes up by itself. Like the other day I got up off the toilet, and I said, "That was good, that was great, that was important!" And stood up to pull the chain. And I heard myself saying that, and I noticed I had said that, and I said, that's fairly interesting, that's like a haiku. How many syllables was that? "That was good, that was great, that was important!" That's eleven syllables.

Maybe twelve.

Ending on the twelfth. "That was good, that was great, that was important!" No, that's eleven. "Standing up to pull the chain" adds another six, so that's seventeen all together. So, okay, I noticed the situation, that there was the visual element, standing to pull the chain, the picture there, and there was what ran in my mind, so the picture gave the context for the interior utterance.

Okay, so the picture can sometimes inspire the music.

Not inspire! No, no, no! I hear you using that word over and over again, abusing it, using it out of its meaning. You're making it into oatmeal.

How would you say it? The picture induces?

The picture originates the poem or the origin or the flash. You flash on a picture, and you write it down. Or you flash on something you say to yourself, and you write it down.

And sometimes that can have music.

You can hear a tune. But the words "That was good, that was great, that was important!" have a rhythm. (Demonstration of rhythm.) That has its own cadence, you know what it's saying and the rhythm of the sounds are both the same.

It's not metrical obviously.

It is metrical. (Demonstration of rhythm.) That's a meter. That's an old classic Greek meter.

Anapest? Short, short long?

It's an anapest. Ta ta ta ta-ta. One, two, three, four, five. There's a Greek rhythm that is a four beat rhythm or a four syllable rhythm. I don't know what its called, maybe dithyrambic or something.

Do you know Greek?

No, but I know some of the Greek rhythms.

You're the prototype, I guess it's a stereotype, of the free verse poet, but you're saying you hear meters.

Yes, sure I hear meters. My father was a poet, it's a family business, and I grew up with a facility for rhyme and stanza from when I was very young, without even trying. I know yards and yards of poetry, like Edgar Allen Poe's "Bells" or Vachel Lindsay's "Congo," poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elinor Wylie.

But didn't you, I mean you've said many times you had to go beyond that in order to write "Howl" and "Kaddish."

Well, naturally, you know, but the point is those forms are appropriate, they're called lyric poetry or the shorter forms which have short stanzas, they're called lyric poetry. Now, what is the root of the word lyric?

Song, isn't it?

No, no. Think. What is the root, literally, of the word lyric? What instrument?

Lyre.

Right, right! And what was a lyre? It was a stringed instrument played by Homer or Sappho or the early poets, the Muse's lyre. So it's just like Bob Dylan or something, a stringed instrument, where you sing to stanza with rhyme and you have a melody that revolves around itself and has a recurrence, right? So because the melody has a recurrence, you therefore have a recurrence, a cadence for the stanza, and you use rhyme. When you stop using the stringed instrument and just write the form without the music, then it begins to degenerate and lose its muscularity and its variety and its syncopation. So when I came in in 1950, people were trying to write those lyric stanzas, but without music. And that was the complaint that Pound and Williams had. And so historically—and also Whitman—so they moved away from a fake lyric, that is to say a half-assed lyric that did not have the musical accompaniment, but just spoken language, but arranged as if it were a song. They moved away to the use of living language rather than a dead form and began rewriting the idea of rhythm and measure. And so Williams had the idea of an American measure rather than the old English lyric, which was being imitated in the twenties by Edwin Arlington Robinson and Elinor Wylie and Sara Teasdale and Edna St. Vincent Millay and all the minor poets of that time. He moved out into trying to isolate the rhythms of actual speaking and that led to my own generation of projective verse, writing in the living speech rather than in an imitation of an older English cadence. It didn't mean that there wasn't rhythm, it meant that the rhythms were the rhythms that you heard in speech, like "da dada da da dada dada." It didn't mean that there wasn't rhythm. That's a rhythm.

Frost supposedly hears a meter. There's meter in Frost as well as the rhythm. "Something there is that doesn't love a wall."

Okay, that's a metronomic meter, where it's recurrent. But you know, the classic meters of Greece were much more varied than the four or five, four usually, used in English. We have iamb, trochee, dactyl, and anapest.

Spondee.

And that's usually the range. Spondees are used less, but they come in. So now there are the two syllable and three syllable meters. We have mostly the iamb and the trochee, but then there's also molossos, the three syllable meters. "Oh, good God!" Da da da. Or there is the bacchius meter, "Is God love? Believe me." Dada da, dada da. Then there are four syllable meters, like, oh, insistently. Dadadada dadadada dadadada dadadada. Insistently, insistently, insistently. Or the ionic A minor, which is "in the twilight" dadadada dadadada dadadada. Or delightfully, delightfully, delightfully. That's the second ionic. Or the epitritus primus, "your sweet blue eyes," "I hate your guts." So then there's the epitritus secundus. "Bite the big nut," dadadada, or "Give her a dime" dadadada. And then there are the five syllable ones. "I bit off his nose," da da da dada. Or the dulcimaic, which Hart Crane used, "Lo, lord, thou ridest!" Bom bom dadada. "Fall fruits and flowers." That's Ben Jonson. Dom dom dadada. Those were the ones we used as the climax of Greek plays, with the revelation of the moment. Bom bom dadada.

So there's a lot more, you're saying, than the simple two syllable foot.

So, and they could use these different feet like a Lego set and could build very various musicality, complex musical things, like Sappho? You know the Sapphic stanza?

No, I don't know much about it.

You know the the rhythm of it.

No.

Trochee, trochee, dactyl, trochee, trochee. Trochee, trochee, dactyl, trochee, trochee. Trochee, trochee, dactyl, trochee, trochee. Dactyl, trochee. (Demonstration of rhythm.)

So the first line of "Howl":—

No, I wasn't thinking of that, but I was so trained and I had all those in my bones. But the one that pointed out to me, many years later, that the Moloch section (demonstration of rhythm), "Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows," was Ed Sanders, who's trained in classical prosody and versification. Then I got interested in what the names of these were.

Let me ask you something else.

Yes, well that's what you're doing.

Have you ever considered yourself a Jewish poet?

Yeah, I am a Jewish poet. I'm Jewish.

You are? You surprise me.

I'm Jewish. My name is Ginsberg. I wrote a book called Kaddish.

No, that's great!

My last book has a long poem called "Why I'm Jewish."

I'll have to take a look. I've got it.

It's called "Yiddishe Kopf."

Cosmopolitan Greetings?

Yeah, "Yiddishe Kopf."

I'll have to look it up. So you're a Jewish poet.

I'm also a gay poet.

I know that.

I'm also a New Jersey poet.

You're a Buddhist poet.

And I'm a Buddhist poet. And also I'm an academic poet, and also I'm a beatnik poet, I'm an international poet,—

What was the Jewish influence? Your mother, essentially?

No. My mother, my father, my grandparents were all Jewish. My whole family is Jewish and that's just the whole thing in my bones.

What about the Bible? Did that influence you?

Yeah, I read a lot of the Bible, sure. I read it all through, a number of times. But you know, like I know wherever the golden bow be broken and the silver cord be loosed wheel be broken at the cistern and so forth.

Is there a cadence—

The cadences of Ecclesiastes and the Psalms. The Song of Songs.

And you probably get some inspiration from the parallelism of the Hebrew prophets.

Oh, of course. But also, you know, indirectly. One of my great models as a poet, or for me a great model, is Christopher Smart.

Right, "Jubilate Agno."

Right. And he was a fantastic translator of the Bible, of Hebrew.

Of psalms?

Of psalms and everything like that. And his "Jubilate Agno"—I don't know if you've seen my annotated "Howl"?

I have, yeah.

Well, at the end you'll find a selection from Smart.

That's right. I remember that.

If you'll notice, it's done in the parallelisms of the Bible. And my own verse line in "Howl" and elsewhere is drawn from that. The Bible via Smart, as well as the Bible itself that I'm familiar with. You know, my father was a poet and so all this stuff, the Song of Songs, was part of the family heritage.

Are being Jewish and being gay connected in any way? I mean, being oppressed?

I've known gay Jews. Who was it, David and Jonathan? I mean, that's an old business. What is it, Jesus and young John?

Here's a chance to talk about the present. Because I started out interviewing Stanley Kunitz and Carl Rakosi, who are in their nineties.

Yeah, marvelous people. Rakosi, I love. I love Rakosi.

Well, I was in Maine and I talked to him a lot. I was in Maine when he did that reading with you.

And I saw him last summer at Naropa.

And I interviewed him in December in San Francisco, and he's great.

I think he is our greatest poet, Jewish or non-Jewish.

He told me you like Reznikoff even more.

No, I like both.

It's good that you like him.

I think Rakosi—you know, his Collected Poems is a great volume.

Yeah, I have that. I got it in Maine. I really fell in love with it.

Did you think I liked Reznikoff more?

Well, Rakosi said that. He said that when I saw him in San Francisco.

I discovered him earlier.

But he hasn't gotten enough attention.

He got a lot from me.

Most of the attention has gone to the other Objectivists: Zukofsky and Oppen.

Well, fortunately we pay a lot of attention to him at Naropa.

That's great.

And in Maine.

Are you going to go to Maine again?

I won't be able to this summer. It's there when I'm in Naropa.

I was there, I talked to you a lot. I'm going to England this time.

What's your business?

I teach creative writing and I write poetry and criticism.

Where?

At Wright State University in Dayton.

Where?

At Wright State University in Dayton.

I think I've been there.

Yeah, well, you were at the University of Dayton. You were with a poet named Herb Martin.

Long ago.

A long time ago.

Where is he now?

He's still there. He's become famous for his reading of Paul Laurence Dunbar.

He's doing Dunbar's work.

Right, he's doing a lot of that. Well let me ask you another line of questions. Let's go on. Does maturity give you any kind of new, fresh perspective?

Look at my new poems. Cosmopolitan Greetings is all about that. There's one particular poem, but you know there are lots of poems about being a senior citizen in there.

Yeah. That's right.

But there's one particular poem that begins, "At 66 just learning how to take care of my body." Do you know that?

I've got it right in front of me. I'll look at it.

Hold on. I'll get it.

The one I really like is the one where you've got the photograph.

"May Days."

And then you've got all the details about the apartment. There's great concentration of imagery, the minute particulars.

Yeah, that's a good one. That was translated, incidentally, into Hebrew by Natan Zach, a Hebrew poet.

Did you take the picture? "May Days 1988" with the New York Times on the window sill.

The new book has similar stuff, a thing called "Charnel Ground," which is going out the window and looking around at the neighborhood. Anyway, there's poem called "Autumn Leaves."

It's also in Cosmopolitan Greetings?

"Autumn Leaves."

All right. How does one face death? You've written poems about death.

Every poet does. Shelley did when he was twenty-seven. Keats did when he was twenty-four.

Does poetry help?

Yes. I think poetry helps because you imagine your death, and you begin to blueprint and plan and realize mortality and then after awhile you become consciously aware of the fact that mortality is limited and then you begin to appreciate living more. As well as appreciate the great adventure of dying and then realize that it is part of the vast process and an occasion for lamentation and rejoicing and everything. The whole thing comes together. It's the great subject. Because, you know, without death there's no life. Without life there's no death.

So, sort of like "death is the mother of beauty."

I think in "Kaddish" I said, "death is the mother of the universe."

What about love?

Well, what about it?

That's not as big? Okay.

I think above death and above love, I would say, in a poem I did say, awareness encompasses love, death, and everything.

Awareness of mortality?

No. Awareness itself. Conscious awareness. It leads to, encompasses compassion, love, and awareness of death.

What has poetry taught you about language, words?

I don't know. What have words taught me about poetry? You could say that's the same thing.

Well, how about it?

It taught me not to bullshit. It taught me not to indulge in abstract language which is undefined, but to try and nail down any generalization with a "for instance." You know, like "give me a for instance." So it taught me that. "No ideas but in things," as Williams says. Or "The natural object is always the adequate symbol," says Pound. And again, I'll repeat, as Trungpa said, "Things are symbols of themselves."

Okay. I like that.

That's a great one.

I believe in all that. It's just that it's all being challenged today.

By whom?

The Language poets.

Well, they're saying that language is language. A word is a word.

But it doesn't symbolize anything. It's just a nonsense sound.

No, they're saying that it actually—there are conditions. Their angle on symbolization is something different, that the conditioning, the social conditioning is built into the use of the word. That the social conditioning outweighs the visual or the auditory meaning.

Well, they deconstruct or break down all the syntax and the meaning and you end up with nothing but sound.

But the purpose of the deconstruction was to break down the social conditioning associated with the sounds.

Right. And then you end up breaking down poetry, I think, as well.

Ah, I wouldn't worry about poetry. Poetry can take it. And sometimes it's interesting, like Burroughs's cut up aspect was very interesting. A deconditioning to conditioned language. A whole way of inventing new, interesting phrases like "wind hand caught in the door" which is a by-product of Burroughs's cut-ups. "Wind hand caught in the door."

Your poetry always makes sense to me. I mean you don't seem to try to distort—

Well, I try, and you know, I'm out of Williams. I come from the Williams lineage and Kerouac. Kerouac wrote spontaneously and wrote nonsense, but there was always this basic theme. Burroughs cut up his stuff, but there was always this basic theme. No matter how you cut it up, it's still Burroughs talking about authoritarian hypnosis from the state.

And you can always see that?

Yeah. It comes through no matter how you cut up his works.

Because when I read these language poets, it's more like Gertrude Stein. I don't know what they're talking about.

Stein is interesting in her own way, you know what I mean? Have you ever heard her record?

No.

There's a Caedmon record of Stein, and if you hear her once you really get the idea what she was after. Williams told me that she had one specific simple thing and it was really great and you know, if you get that then you get something. An inimitable voice. Speaking voice. A Yiddish voice, too.

A Yiddish voice. Not Stein! What place do you most identify with, in other words, what physical location, like Jersey or—

Living Lower East Side, probably.

Have you lived there much of your life, even though you've traveled all over the world?

Well, I've had this one apartment where I am now for twenty-one years.

I didn't know that.

And then before that I had—see, my mother, when she came to America, moved to about a mile from here on Orchard and Rivington. That was her first place of residence. Then they moved to Newark. So Orchard-Rivington is about a mile from where I am now.

So it's really your roots.

So, I'm really back where my mother's family—my father's family came to New York and then Newark. But before I lived here, I moved here in '75, I lived for five years or so on East 10th Street, a couple blocks away. And before that on East 2nd Street in the sixties. And in the fifties, where I took all those photographs, early photographs of Burroughs and Kerouac, that's East 7th Street.

You wrote a powerful poem about being mugged. It must have been down in one of those neighborhoods.

That was in 1972 on 10th Street, when I was living there. Two blocks from here.

And where are you now?

East 12th Street.

In the Village?

East Village. Lower East Side.

If you could do it again, what would you do differently, if anything?

There's a certain guy I was in love with when I was young who invited me to bed and I was too shy, because I was in the closet. And I've always regretted it. And I wrote a poem about it. I wrote about it in Sapphic verse. In Mindbreaths, something like that. One of the books. It's in my Collected Poems—1978 or so.

Helen Vendler sort of surprisingly to me wrote very warmly of you, I think, in her anthology.

Yeah, I was surprised.

Right, I was surprised.

She likes me and Snyder and she has no reaction at all to Creeley or Corso or Kerouac's poetry or anyone else.

Maybe it was another critic I was reading, and she talks about what must have been the great difficulty for you, especially as a young Jewish man being gay. I thought that was a sensitive remark.

I didn't think it was that difficult, you know? I was in the closet until I was about seventeen. But then I had such nice company, with Kerouac and Burroughs, who were themselves so far out and Burroughs was gay. Kerouac was very straight, but none the less—

He wasn't gay or bisexual?

I wouldn't say so.

What about Neal Cassady, whom you're always writing about?

Cassady was a lady's man, but he was sort of pan-sexual. I made out with him, but I was one of the few people he made out with. Maybe he hustled as a younger kid, as a young orphan.

In a sense, you always had a family.

Yeah. I had my regular family. I was pretty close. And also an alternative family.

I mean a family of brothers. Because I've thought over the years that poets like Roethke and Berryman and Lowell, they were alone, even though they were straight.

They did have that community. Berryman, Lowell, they were all part of that southern agrarian second generation, from Ransom and Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate. But the people who were their elders were such puritanical, such mean people, like Allen Tate was an alcoholic, and he kept putting down Hart Crane for being gay, and drank himself to death. Or drank too much.

I think he smoked too much, too.

Or smoked. And then I remember when Big Table was going to have a post-Christian issue, they invited him and Burroughs and myself and others to contribute, and he said he wouldn't appear in a magazine with Burroughs. So what kind of model is that for those guys? No wonder they didn't have a sense of family. Sort of intolerant snobs.

Well, I think in certain ways maybe it worked for you to have those people you mentioned.

Yeah. The funny part was that I had also connections with that Kenyon Review crowd through Lionel Trilling.

Now, when you say Kenyon Review crowd, you don't mean Ransom and—

Yes, I knew Ransom later, but Trilling was one of the major icons of the Partisan Review.

Were you published in the Kenyon Review?

No. Yes, later on, yes. It's now under the hands of a lesbian editoress.

I don't think she is editor anymore. I know whom you mean, Marilyn Hacker?

Yeah. She's a nice girl. Nice woman.

What is the most amazing thing about life?

Oh, the fact that it's here at all, and that it disappears.

What's the most amazing thing about your life?

I'm pretty dumb, quite stupid in a way. Even backward. I don't know how I got where I am now, to be like a kind of great poet of some kind. And I don't understand how it happened.

Well, from what you told me at the beginning, it had to do with breath.

Breath, but also the other quality was because I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs when I was sixteen and seventeen. I suddenly realized how provincial and dumb I was, and I resolved, rather than asserting myself constantly and arguing and being argumentative, which would have been my normal nature, I should shut up and listen and learn something. So I always took a kind of back seat and listened to my elders. I always had teachers and gurus, you know, from the very beginning. So actually I learned a lot from other people and had the quality of attention, to listen to Burroughs and serve him, in a way. You know, like work with him and be his amanuensis or his agent or work with him and encourage him and listen to him and do what I could to make his life workable, and I learned a lot that way. And I have relations, had relations like that with Chogyam Trungpa, the Tibetan lama, and Gelek Rinpoche right now, since Trungpa did, a Tibetan lama. And so I've always had teachers and I've always listened to them. And I think that's really delivered me to some kind of workable, practical self-confidence.

But you wrote "Howl," no one else did. I think that's what made you famous.

Yeah, but you know, I was trying to imitate Kerouac.

That's interesting.

I was a student of Kerouac's, Kerouac broke ground, and I moved in on that territory. And he said, "You guys," me and Gary Snyder, "you guys call yourselves poets. I'm a poet, too, except that my verse line is longer than yours. I write verses that are two pages long!" Like the opening sentences in The Subterranians. Which are beautiful, poetic sentences, you know.

He was the key influence, then.

Yeah. I would say him and Burroughs. He was the key vocal influence or verbal, and Burroughs the key intellectual.

And then, of course, as everyone's written about, also Blake and Pound and Whitman and Williams.

Well, I had a good education, I had a regular Columbia education, but I also had the advantage of an education through Kerouac and Burroughs and the books they suggested, but also through my father, who was very well cultivated in poetry.

And wrote in a very, very traditional lyric style.

Yeah, well, you know, he would stomp around the house, not stomp, walk around the house reciting Milton and Shakespeare and Poe, "The Bells," "The Raven," "Annabell Lee." I memorized those when I was a kid. When I was eight years old I could recite a lot of "The Bells."

Your parents are in the poem "Kaddish," which to me is probably the most powerful one. Did Naomi actually speak about the key in the window?

Yes, she did speak. No. After she died, a day or so after I got a telegram saying she was dead, I got a letter from her that had been posted just before she died of a stroke. And I'm quoting that letter, yeah.

And then that wonderful talk in there, that Yiddish talk, where she's talking about soup. That's pretty much what she sounded like?

She likes lentil soup. That's literal. Now that I look back, I said, how come she said that? How come I didn't ask her what she meant? That I wasn't more persistent. It was so vivid but I was a little shy of pursuing the subject. For fear that she was completely nuts rather than discovering that she had a good sense of humor.

You put more of the personal into that poem than just about anyone I can think of. I mean of that kind of material. And your father comes off, to me, as a very sad man.

In that poem.

But he wasn't that sad?

Then, but a little later on he and I read a lot together and we got closer and closer. We went to Europe together, and he blessed me on his deathbed, and I blessed him.

He remarried, I gather, at some point.

He remarried a very nice woman who was a very good influence on him, and brought us together quite well, and just had her ninetieth birthday this week.

A Jewish woman?

Yeah, yeah, Edith Ginsberg. She just survived, at the age of eighty-nine, two valve transplants. A pig valve and a sheep valve, so she says, joking, she's no longer kosher.

Let me ask you one—

I don't know if you know this, about a little film, The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg?

I saw it.

She's in there. Very nice.

I'd have to see it again. I saw it in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Have you ever been to Yellow Springs, Antioch College?

Yeah, sure. Long ago, though.

I saw it there. It was too short, almost.

Well, enough for me. But mainly family oriented, in a way.

How do you see your place in American poetry?

Well, I have a poem called "Ego Confessions," which is sort of like a grandiose vision. Take a look at that. Because I want to be known as the most intelligent man in America. Worst case scenario of megalomania. But the whole point of poetry is not to be afraid of worst case neurosis, but to reveal it, go right into the wind rather than being afraid of admitting it.

Well, you certainly showed us that.

So I'd like to be remembered as someone who advanced, actually advanced the notion of compassion in open heart, open form poetry, continuing the tradition of Whitman and Williams. And part of the honorific aspect of the whole beat generation.

You seem to have accomplished a lot of that.

Well, not really, because you know my major poems that we're talking about are banned from the air, from radio and television now, with a law suggested by Jesse Helms. He directed the FCC to ban all so-called indecent language off the air, I think it's between 6 A.M. and 10 P.M. And the Supreme Court just affirmed that by refusing to hear our appeal. And that's just been extended to Internet. So it may be that the text of "Howl" or "Please Master" or "Kaddish" or "Sunflower Sutra" will be soon inadmissible on Internet because of foul language that might offend the ears of minors. So the right wing is reimposing the same kind of censorship on the electronic media that we overthrew in the written, printed media '58 to '62.

That was the famous Berkeley trial?

Yeah. Well, that, and also the trials of Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence, Jean Genet, up to Naked Lunch in 1962, which liberated literature.

So, we're back there.

No, on a more grand, international scale, we're back with censorship in the electronic world, but not in the written book world.

Are we at the end of the long journey of poetry, then?

What do you mean?

I mean—let's put it this way. What can a late twentieth-century poet, given what you've just told me about Jesse Helms and all that what can a late twentieth-century poet hope to accomplish?

Oh, the poetry doesn't depend on electronic media. You could pull all those plugs and it wouldn't affect poetry. Or plug them all in. Poetry is an individual thing that gets around by word of mouth. It's an oral tradition, as well as a written, printed tradition, as well as a spoken tradition. So it'll get around. Anything really good will get around.

You have that faith.

Well, it's experience. I mean, when Howl was on trial, I didn't care one way or the other. Well, I mean, I cared, but I realized if I lose the trial, I'll be a big hero and everybody will want to read my book. All the police did was do me a big favor by publicizing my poetry. They always do that. They're so dumb. Like, do you think Mapplethorpe would be so famous if it weren't for Jesse Helms trying to quash him or something. It's amazing!

Well, they made you famous.

They made Mapplethorpe famous. They're going to make Michelangelo famous when they start censoring his statues of Bacchus or the Slaves. They're already censoring his David.

Oh, you're kidding me.

Yeah, you can't put that on the Internet, because its got a big dick that minors might see. Frontal nudity. (Laughter.) So they just make people more conscious of the censorship and of the restrictions and of the mentality and mindset and then they'll cause a counter-reaction.

One base we haven't touched: How has Buddhism helped you?

Oh, it's made me more aware of the fact that everything can be done 'twixt earnest and joke. Things are completely real and simultaneously and without any contradiction, they are also completely empty and unreal. Just like a dream.

Both?

Both at once. Without contradiction, i.e., a dream is real while you're dreaming but when you wake up it vanishes. There's no inherent permanence. Life is real while you're alive, but then when you die, it vanishes. It has no inherent permanence. So it's like—so it's real, but it also simultaneously has that aspect. One aspect is the reality, the other aspect is the transitoriness or mutability, as Shelley said.

And you see both?

Well, everybody sees both. So it's the ability to see both simultaneously that gives life its sort of charisma and glamour and workability. You're never stuck. There's no permanent Hell. There's no permanent Heaven.

So that liberates you.

Sure! It liberates you from the nightmare of thinking, "Oh god, I'm stuck, I'm gonna die, blah, blah, blah."

You're not afraid?

What's there to be afraid of? It's like being in a dream and realizing it's a dream, so then you're not afraid anymore.

And where do you end up? In the dream, just an extension of the dream?

Well, you end up waking up somewhere else. I guess. Or maybe you don't wake up. Maybe you just go to sleep and that's the end of it.

May be that wouldn't be so bad.

Well, have you ever been in a dentist's chair with nitrous oxide?

Yeah.

Have you ever been put out? Okay, so what's the last thing you hear? Or what's the last sense that disappears? To me, it was sound. The music, the Muzak. So what if the last thing to go is the end of the symphony? Like, the pain is gone, physical feeling is gone, sight is gone, taste is gone, smell is gone, the only thing left is sound. The sound is the music, then you hear the last note of the symphony and—

Well that's a nice one. But then there's all the folks during the Holocaust who were butchered every second by the Nazis.

Yeah, but on the other hand, the last thing they heard was the sound of a scream and then the scream ended. And there was nice, peaceful—

Let's hope.

Well, unless they were reborn. Do you think they went to hell or something?

I don't believe that.

They wouldn't have gone to hell. Do you think they went to heaven?

I don't think so.

I don't think there's a heaven. So therefore where did they go? They certainly went to a peaceful place.

I hope so.

Well, where else?

I think you're right!

Can you imagine anywhere else? Can you even imagine someplace that wasn't peaceful?

I'm Jewish. I'll have to go with that.

The Sheol, or maybe Sheol.

Sheol. Okay.

The Buddhists might give the worst case, that they get reborn to go through it all over again. Reborn as Nazis. Reborn in Israel and persecuting the Palestinians.

That would be hell.

Okay. I gotta stop.



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