from acm #21: allen ginsberg, a conversation
In the thirty-five years since "Howl" premiered at a San Francisco art gallery reading and permanently changed the landscape of twentieth century poetry, Allen Ginsberg has gone from cultural bad boy extraordinaire to increasingly distinguished eminence. Though he comes now in coat and tie for public appearances, his evolution to perceived distinction probably has more to do with the cultural changes he helped precipitate than with any essential change in his politics or aesthetics.
Our conversation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago the day after he read there in December 1988 began with his poetry, ranged over some of his old friends and literary colleagues-Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and others-as well as the state of politics and culture, and, inspired perhaps by the setting of an art school, went on to some comments on the role of painting and art in "Howl" and other work, and the qualifications to be an artist in any medium. As we talked it was clear again in his mild, articulate manner, that the critique of American culture and politics that began to be heard that October night in 1955 is still just as sharp, the intelligence upon which it is based as keen and quick as ever, and as prodigious in the assemblage of information it brings to bear on the discussion.
:Barry Silesky:acm:How would you like to be remembered in a hundred years?
ag: Through
some texts. Probably "Kaddish," "September on Jessore Road," "Father Death
Blues," and some photographs probably, though I don't know how long photographs
last.
acm: The texts you mention cover a number of years, and certainly
your work has changed over the years. I was intrigued in talking with Ferlinghetti
that he dated what he thought was radical change with your poem called "The
Change" that you wrote on the Kyoto-Tokyo Express in 1963. He saw a change
from a more-I'm paraphrasing here, perhaps inaccurately-rebellious attitude
in the earlier poems to one where the Buddhist influence had become much
more dominant and the attitude of the poems became one of assimilating the
opposition more. Do you consider that an accurate assessment?
ag: Yes, but it wasn't just that one poem. That poem was
like an overt statement of it, but it had already taken place, I think,
with some of "Kaddish." Where I would take exception is the notion of rebellion,
because I don't think that's quite the point, even of "Howl." That was the
media idea, which always was a stereotype. Partly because they miss the
humor of "Howl" or the humor of "Sunflower," which is more celebratory.
As "Howl" is somewhat celebratory too. Even celebratory of failure. So I
think the humor was always missed, and the exuberance was missed, and the
basically healthy attitude was missed. So there were several different mal-interpretations,
one from the Marxist point of view, that it was rebellion against capitalism-them
thinking there was nothing to rebel against in communism, naturally. That
was the "Holy Barbarian"-Lawrence Lipton version. Then there was the anarchists'
ideological version of Rexroth-disaffiliation-which was his imposition of
an earlier political vocabulary on something that had nothing to do with
that. What we were interested in was a spiritual search. "We," meaning Kerouac
or Burroughs or myself or, say later, Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen-both
of whom are now Zen sensei. What they were up to had nothing to do with
disaffiliation. More like affiliation with the Bodhisattva, an impulse which
is totally social, working for the benefit of mankind. The other interpretation
was the conservative view; this is rebellion against capitalism. The
Time Magazine view: quote, this is the only rebellion around, and why
are they rebelling against the great casabah melon of American prosperity?,
unquote.
Then there was a book called The Beat Generation and the Angry Young
Men, and people who didn't read the book, and probably most people
who did, thought that the beat generation were angry young men; that is,
their main characteristic was anger. So a stereotype arose of rebellion
and anger. I always thought of the situation as having much different fish
to fry, specifically the question of alteration of consciousness, expansion
of consciousness, deepening of consciousness, related to psychedelics later,
related to poetics through Blake, related to meditation practice in Buddhism.
And that seemed to me a much vaster ambition than a local rebellion against
the capitalist system.
acm: Of all the people whom you've mentioned, it seems you and Ferlinghetti
are the only ones whose interest has continued to be what we might call
political, or to have that public political interest.
ag: Except that you
know Burroughs is a lot more analytic and political than either of us. If
you want an analysis of what's going on with Reagan and Bush, or AIDS, or
colonialism, or any of these issues, just read Burroughs. He's got it there.
An analysis of the cold war from the very beginning. An analysis of CIA,
an analysis of the board rooms, analysis of the image bank propaganda machinery,
the real, almost Orwellian analysis-Orwellian style grand analysis-in detail,
of the mechanisms of control is the major subject of Burroughs. He predicted
these homemade diseases, the CIA cooking up diseases, tied to the whole
newly recognized realization that politics is just theater for TV, an extension
of the advertising business. Burroughs had that down long ago. That's real
politics. That's really the gut of it. He didn't localize it to transitory
issues, which are already forgotten, like the SDS prairie fire or this or
that little local issue, electing this or that local senator or whatever,
but he had it on a large scale so that it is applicable, comprehensible
decade by decade.
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ACM is partially supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a CityArts I grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, a Community Arts Assistance Program grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.