Conversations with Allen Ginsberg

David Stephen Calonne

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781496823519
• eBook ISBN: 9781496823526
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) was one of the most famous American poets of the twentieth century. Yet, his career is distinguished by not only his strong contributions to literature but also social justice. Conversations with Allen Ginsberg collects interviews from 1962 to 1997 that chart Ginsberg's intellectual, spiritual, and political evolution.Ginsberg's mother, Naomi, was afflicted by mental illness, and Ginsberg's childhood was marked by his difficult relationship with her; however, he also gained from her a sense of the necessity to fight against social injustice that would mark his political commitments. While a student at Columbia University, Ginsberg would meet Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Gregory Corso, and the Beat Generation was born. Ginsberg researched deeply the social issues he cared about, and this becomes clear with each interview. Ginsberg discusses all manner of topics including censorship laws, the legalization of marijuana, and gay rights. A particularly interesting aspect of the book is the inclusion of interviews that explore Ginsberg's interests in Buddhist philosophy and his intensive reading in a variety of spiritual traditions. Conversations with Allen Ginsberg also explores the poet's relationship with Bob Dylan and the Beatles, and the final interviews concentrate on his various musical projects involving the adapting of poems by William Blake as well as settings of his own poetry. This is an essential collection for all those interested in Beat literature and twentieth-century American culture.

Ginsberg [Parts One and Two]

William D. Knief / 1966

Cottonwood Review, Vol. 1, No. 2 Spring, 1966, 3–10 and Vol. 1, No. 3, November, 1966, 3–11. Reprinted with permission.

Interviewer: The first thing I want to ask you is, what poets have influenced you particularly in your poetry and your poetic style?

Allen Ginsberg: Guillaume Apollinaire, a French poet, 1910 or so; Ezra Pound; William Carlos Williams … Primarily, however, above those, Jack Kerouac, who I think is the greatest poet alive, but is not well-known as the greatest poet alive. William Burroughs, a prose poet. Christopher Smart, an eighteenth-century friend of Dr. Johnson. Blake more than anyone, from spiritual points of view; an Indian poet named Kabir, another Indian poet who is called Mirabai, as well as an American poet who’s called Emily Dickinson. And Whitman. A little Poe on account of the crankiness in it, and the spiritual isolation … a little of Vachel Lindsay … a little bit of Robert Creeley. Charles Olson. A lot of Shelley, and a lot of Rimbaud and Antonin Artaud, then Laforgue, a Frenchman, and Chuang Tzu, who is a Chinese philosopher-poet who said “I am going to speak some reckless words now and I want you to listen to them recklessly.” And, um, a little bit of Milarepa, who is a Tibetan poet. And then a couple of other people, let’s see, who else—Gary Snyder occasionally, recently, influenced me a little, and Gregory Corso has influenced me a lot. And Orlovsky because I live with him, and listen to his conversation all the time, and his humor all the time, and his goofiness, influences my writing style a lot.

Interviewer: What is your opinion of what seems like the most widely accepted conventional poets at this time? I am thinking in particular of Sandburg and Frost—

Ginsberg: Accepted by whom? The question is, accepted by whom. Really, literally, it is a question of being accepted by whom.

Interviewer: Then you wouldn’t accept them?

Ginsberg: No, I think they’re fine poets. I don’t think they’re the best poets we’ve got around. Well, Frost is dead; Sandburg is a fine old man—is he dead or alive?

Interviewer: I think he’s still alive.

Ginsberg: Yeah, I think he’s still alive, and he’s a fine old poet, too; however, they’re not necessarily the best poets that we’ve produced in this century. Like Pound was incomparably a better poet than Frost. William Carlos Williams was a much better poet than Frost. As far as my feelings and my uses are concerned, I can find more use for Williams and Pound that I could for Frost. And even if you stacked the work of Frost against the work of a younger poet like Gregory Corso, after one hundred years I think we’ll all find a lot more use of Gregory Corso than we will have found out of Frost.

Interviewer: What fiction writers do you most admire? You mentioned poets, primarily.

Ginsberg: I’m not so much interested in fiction as I am in prose. And I do make that distinction, because fiction is a vaguer term, and prose means something. Prose means somebody interested in the composition of syntax, composition of a sequence of language that does reflect some actual process of verbal phenomena going on in the consciousness. So—whereas fiction writers are interesting in writing stories to sell for movies or something, a prose writer is interested in composition, in the sense that Gertrude Stein, who was a great prose writer, spoke of composition as creation. So the prose writers I am interested in are—in America, you mean?

Interviewer: Well, let’s start there.

Ginsberg: Kerouac, primarily, who continues into the sixties to be the most interesting composer of prose sentences, and also the most sincere and spiritual reporter of the phenomena of existence, and probably the wisest reporter, because he is one of the very few who realizes that the universe doesn’t exist. And second, William Burroughs, who has written a whole series of prose books that are affecting a lot of people, mainly the young, in the sense of altering their own sense of consciousness. And Hubert Selby Jr., who wrote a book called Last Exit to Brooklyn, who has the virtue of being able to write a sentence in which three or four different people are speaking in different accents, and he doesn’t use punctuation marks, but you could tell that there are three or four distinct people individually speaking. He’s that wise and canny about accents and diction.

Another prose writer that I am in love with, Herbert Huncke, who is about fifty years old and never published anything except this year for the first time his journals were published by a small press in New York, and the book is called Huncke’s Journal. About seventy pages of that have been published. And I think in a hundred years, we’ll look back on Huncke as the great creator of Americana, in the sense that Sherwood Anderson was. Huncke is the big ex-thief-junkie-hustler-faggot-charmer who’s influenced a lot of people in New York. He’s had a big influence on me and my poetry—I left him out when I was talking about influences. He also had a big influence on Burroughs and Kerouac. But he never published anything and he never collected his writing. He just wrote little notebooks and nobody paid any attention to it until a few people began typing them up in the last few years, and now something’s being published. The only place you can get that is through the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco at 261 Columbus Avenue, or through the 8th Street Bookstore, 17 West 8th Street. If there’s anybody interested in prose composition and wants to examine Huncke’s Journals, they have to get ahold of them there, in those places.

Interviewer: What do you think of the—

Ginsberg:—Other prose writers. We haven’t finished with other prose writers, like Genet, and more importantly, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, who wrote a book called Journey to the End of the Night, and Death on the Installment Plan, and Guignol’s Band, all of which were published by New Directions, as well as Castle to Castle, another book of his—let’s see—who else is good in prose? Robert Creeley’s prose is interesting, the book The Island—LeRoi Jones’ prose is interesting. There’s a novel by Michael McClure, of Wichita, which is interesting but has never been published—all about fucking and drinking and riding around in the night mist with neon lights on the streets of Wichita when he was seventeen. And then another half of the novel is the same thing except it takes place when he is twenty-seven and he’s married.

And there’s an unpublished book by a guy by the name of Kirby Doyle Jr.: The Happiness Bastard, which is a great piece of prose also. There’s a very great composition by a young kid about being a happiness bastard in America.

Henry Miller’s prose is important. Sherwood Anderson’s prose is important. William Carlos Williams’s prose is important to me as specimens of real composition.

And going back before that, Gertrude Stein’s prose is important. She’s really, in a sense, the mother of prose composition. She was the first one to try to write prose without having any idea in mind as to what she was supposed to write; she wrote what was in her head at the moment of writing, where the writing itself was the primary activity, where the terms of the writing were the immediate consciousness of the moment while writing, whereas everybody else was looking into their memory—or looking into space or looking into the future or looking into some imaginary project. She was the only one who looked into her head and the visible eternity around her while she was at the desk writing. And that was a big experiment and discovery, just like Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

Interviewer: You mentioned Sherwood Anderson. Hemingway, who was writing at about the same time and place as both Stein and Anderson, has said that he was profoundly influenced by these two. What do you think of Hemingway?

Ginsberg: Well, Hemingway was a nice guy, but he should have been sucking cocks for a while to get rid of the excessive necessity of being a man … because he had too formal an identity with being a masculine mammal. And that’s not worthy of our species. Our species is much more variable and ample than that, which is something that Sherwood Anderson understood. Not that Anderson was a fairy, or anything like that, it’s just that Anderson was a much more open soul to reflect the loneliness of the middle American scene, and the extremes of desire which grew like sunflowers in the middle of whatever state Anderson was from. Whatever lonesome earth he walked upon. See what I mean? Now Hemingway was a very, very great technician, and a good head and a real sharp mind, and basically a very sympathetic person. Especially toward his death. Especially in his prose of his last years he is much underestimated, I think. But Hemingway did have this problem of being too proud, with capitals PROUD—like too proud!—a desperate man. He had a nice beard—

Interviewer: Do you see any particular direction in modern American poetry today?

Ginsberg: Yeah. Toward reproduction of the actual consciousness of the poet, and communication of that, which is going to be the communication of the kind of consciousness which is just like the consciousness of the people listening. Meaning that he ain’t gonna lie no more, meaning he’s going to talk about the hairs around his asshole.

Interviewer: I noticed that there seemed to be a difference between your poetry and Whitman’s; that you seem to have more of your own consciousness in your poems. Would you agree with that, or not?

Ginsberg: Whitman was constantly reflecting his subjective nature, and if you read Whitman aloud, it’s pretty shocking. And he also had to deal with the repression of the time, and I don’t. We have fought against that and beaten it down. So now we have free speech according to our American constitution, so that at this point a poet is constitutionally, legally, empowered to communicate to the public anything he wants to communicate. Whereas previously there was an isolation of constitutional rights by police, judges, publishers, district attorneys, mayors, newspapers, media of mass communication, where they all were conspiring to suppress individual expression, which occasionally affected emotional or political life in what Whitman would call “these states.” The Supreme Court has now said that you can’t stop anyone from saying what he wants about persons. You see how that sentence ends. Persons—meaning in the sense of persons, rather than objective Object. Someone can say something about feeling being the being who feels, and has imaginations and fantasies. So, anybody can say what he wants, now, about that, without being told that he’s not supposed to have fantasies when they border on areas people want to repress, like sex. Or God.

Interviewer: Am I correct, then, in assuming that you consider sex and God fantasies?

Ginsberg: Everything is a fantasy; the whole universe is a fantasy. The universe doesn’t exist.

[Here, someone in the group of people around us asked, “Can you talk a little louder?”—and Mr. Ginsberg replied]

I have to think while I’m talking and I can’t orate. It’s hard to think as it is, without having to talk louder. It alters the syntax if I have to scream. You see, it becomes abnormal if I have to talk that much louder. It’s not normal any more. It would be interesting to have to satisfy the conditions of the microphone and the conditions of the ears. That’s normal.

“We could ask the people to stop playing the guitars.”

No, it’s normal that they’re playing…. Guitar strings in the background—.

Interviewer: People have described your style of writing as being anything from obscenity to actual written music. How would you describe it?

Ginsberg: That’s a good enough description.

It depends on who I was describing it to. As far as I’m concerned, like if I’m describing it to someone I know well and trust as a writer, like Kerouac, or Peter Orlovsky, or Corso, or Robert Creeley, or Charles Olson, I just say I’m scribbling whatever comes into my head, because that’s really where the action’s at. I’m not trying to write poetry. I’m not interested in poetry, I’m not interested in art. I’m interested in like reproducing the contents of my consciousness in a succinct, accurate way, trusting that the contents of my consciousness, as the contents of anybody else’s consciousness, have symmetry and form and rhythm and structure and—lack-of-logic like anybody else’s. Like the whole universe, in fact.

After structure, before we got to lack of logic, there’s a dash in the prose transcription of this sentence. You understand? Structure and—lack-of-logic—to indicate a shift of thought. See, that’s what I’m concerned with, the sudden shifts of thought; the sudden contradictions of mental activity, the shifts of thought which have a beautiful structure of their own, and if you try and eliminate those shifts and eliminate the rhythm of those shifts, you eliminate the music of thought and speech, and you eliminate the truthfulness of the way people communicate. So my writing, if it’s going to be called writing, is actually simply a model of the consciousness which is manifest in language—rather than a substitute or a denial of that consciousness. By substituting an artificial model. Like a model of “syllogistic” discourse.

Interviewer: Why do you write? What is the purpose of—

Ginsberg: Because I’m lonesome. I want to get laid.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chronology
• Meeting Allen Ginsberg
• Conversations with …
• Ginsberg [Parts One and Two]
• A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami and Allen Ginsberg: A Conversation
• Allen Ginsberg on Everything
• An Interview with Allen Ginsberg
• Louis and Allen
• An Interview with Allen Ginsberg
• Allen Ginsberg
• Allen Ginsberg: Interview
• Interview with Allen Ginsberg
• Allen Ginsberg: An Interview
• Red Bass Interview: Allen Ginsberg
• Catching Up a “Bitter Buddhist”: A Conversation with Allen Ginsberg
• Politics, Pederasty, and Consciousness: Interview
• Allen Ginsberg: An Interview
• A Conversation: Ginsberg on Burroughs
• A Conversation with Allen Ginsberg
• Allen Ginsberg in India: An Interview
• Public Heart: An Interview with Allen Ginsberg
• Allen Ginsberg Interview
• Allen Ginsberg: The Last Australian Interview