Ginsberg on the Beat

IT HAS BEEN almost 30 years since Beat poet Allen Ginsberg published the poem that first made heads turn in American literary circles. Giinsberg, who finished "Howl" in 1956, was part of an American troupe of writers which included novelists Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs and poets Gregory Corso and Philip Whalen. Known for their experiments with hallucinogens, affection for jazz, dabblings in Buddhism and spontaneous lifestyles, the Beatniks formed one of the major literary movements in the post-modern era. In the midst of the 58-year-old Ginsberg's East Coast tour to promote his new book, Collected Poems 1947-1980, he took an hour to talk to The Crimson.

Crimson: What kind of affect did your poetry have? Was it more literary than political or sociological?

Ginsberg: My main interest was art for art's sake, purely literary. But literary means a lot of different things. There is an old saying by Plato or Pythagoras, "when the mode of the music changes the walls of the city shake." Or, what [William Carlos] Williams said, "the new world is only a new mind." Or, Blake: "the eye altering, alters all." When there is a new perception in poetry and a change of the form, it generally means a change of body rhythm, a change in thinking about language, and a change in consciousness itself. And this has a fallout. It changes the way people relate to each other sexually, how people relate to the authority around them, how people relate to the military, how people relate to religion. I would say that poetics and politics are inseperable.

Crimson: Have people become more aware of the world around them since yours and other Beat poetry?

Ginsberg: In some areas. There has been some sensitization to the fact that the world is impermanent. This awareness of impermanence today is more clear than in say 1980 or 1940. World War I changed all of the intelligent people's view of the safety of the world because, in the midst of a purely hyper-rationalist enlightenment, they saw supposedly enlightened, creatures turning into beasts and killing each other.

Crimson: in what ways did Williams influence your work?

Ginsberg: Williams helped my work in several ways. I used his idea that things are only symbols of themselves and his attention to precise details. I was also interested in the way Williams gave measurement and structure to the longline poem. This showed up in parts two and three of "Howl."

Crimson: Did your jazz experiences affect your work?

Ginsberg: I learned from Kerouac, whose poetry is greatly unackowledged, what poets call "phonic knowledge." Nobody studies it in the universities, but every poet studies Kerouac's seminal book, Mexico City Blues. Kerouac's had completly free form and he listened to jazz artists like Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk and Miles Davis. The idea behind the jazz was spontaneous improvisation and long breath. That had an influence on the line in "Howl" and any other long-line poems I've done. Thelonius Monk's idea of thinking then silence, thinking then silence affected "Kaddish." It would go: clonk, clonk...clonkcklonkcklonk. The big silences in Monk's work are equivalent to the dashes that I use for short breath "thinks" inside the verse line, separated by dashes.

Crimson: To what extent do you visualize your writing in sound and what extent is the content of the words important?

Ginsberg: Content is visual because you see pictures. According to one of Kerouac's quotes in an essay called "The Essentials of Modern Prose": "don't stop to think of the words but to see the picture better." The sound is something I here in my ear. There are no rules to that, you've just got to like the sound of the words. I wrote a poem in China called "China Bronchitis." Immediately the title sounded funny because of the sounds. It has sort of a bee-boop sound, and the "a" sound in "China" goes together with the "i" sounds in "bronchitis." But I don't know how you know that. . .it's intuitive.

Crimson: Has your knack for the sound of words been sharpened through your studies in music and chanting?

Ginsberg: Chanting more than music. Pound used to say "pay attention to the tone meaning of the vowels." In Greek you have the pitch. That's why people don't know how to chant Home: anymore because the oral tradition has been lost. And they have to figure it out from the diacritical marks. If you become sensitized to the pitch of the vowels you will begin to appreciate the consonants and bite them like Bob Dylan does, or as any great singer does. You also savor the vowels as physical marbles in your month and become more interested in the purely musical quality of language.

Crimson: This sounds similar to the oral tradition practiced by the African griots who passed history to the community through speech.

Ginsberg: That's all over the world. I've spent a lot of time working, studying and performing with Australian aborigines. They have the oldest body of epic literature in the world; it goes back 12,000 years. Non-written language, purely writing on the breath, on the spirit, was a world tradition that preceded the invention of the printing press. Words are separated from speech when printed on the page. They lose their body, their breath because with the written word it is just the eye to the page, bypassing the physical element.

Crimson: What sort of cultural implication does this have?

Ginsberg: An enormous amount. Many word sociologists like McClure and Pound say that when words get separated from direct conversation when they are just on the page without the physical component of sound, then the head gets cut off from the bod. And people will tend to go into generalizations and hyper-abstraction of the language. Words have to refer to something real, and when we begin to take words as having eternal abstract essence without any physical reference, the human content is removed from the language. As Pound points out, when the words in poetry get cut off from the song and dance they have lost their muscularity, their physical presence.

Crimson: In the last poem of your new book. "Capitol Air," you condemn the political left and the right, Marxists and capitalists. Do you fall on either side of the political spectrum?

Ginsberg: The problems are hierarchical authoritarian control, replication of everyday household artifacts and automatic replication of poetry, film and television. All of these things can happen under a communist bureaucracy or a capitalist bureaucracy. Disasters can result like Mao's great leap forward where millions starved or Union Carbide's Bhopal where hundreds of thousands were injured. When a society's hyper-mechanization moves out of the people's notice they suffer from depersonalization.

Crimson: In your writings on the Vietnam war it seemed that you were writing about the media that presented the war rather than the war itself.

Ginsberg: Yes. That's because I wasn't in the actual war--I was in the media war. So I was just reporting what I could contact with my own senses, which I think was wise. I didn't have to fake going into the war because I was interested in the war's affect on my own and America's consciousness. I stopped with what I was actually experiencing through my senses and maybe only once or twice imagined what it would be like to be a thin-bodied Vietnamese kid blown up by, napalm. I wrote about my experiences while driving through America in a car, reading newspapers, thinking my thoughts, and having my sexual desires. It makes a good time capsule of the mid-60s and it doesn't fake experience I didn't have.

Crimson: You have written about William Blake in earlier works and said he influenced you then. Does he still have that affect on you?

Ginsberg: Blake is always an inspiration. I once made a recording of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. Blake turned me on to the voice in poetry. I once had an interesting psychedelic experience, without drugs, while reading Blake. It was an auditory hallucination of his voice pronouncing "the sunflower and the sick rose." Years later I began working with that to extrapolate tunes and melodies from those tones. I tried to reconstruct what it sounded like when Black orignally sand those words.

Crimson: How do you react to today's pop culture?

Ginsberg: I like to sing with the Clash, I was on their last album. I've also made some movies with Bob Dylan. I'm supposed to be doing some work with "X" sooner or later. I like the Dead Kennedys and Sting. I ran into Sting at a birthday party for [William] Burroughs last year. Burroughs has had an enormous effect on new wave pop music. There are a lot of bands that use his terms like "soft machine." He's talking on a Laurie Anderson record now. I think that is natural because the poetry runs back to music, and the musicians after Dylan went back to poetry.