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from acm #21: allen ginsberg, a conversation
acm: Why do you think this rollback has happened?
ag: I think the consolidation of television, controlling
news and information, and the consolidation of television news programs under
the big monopolies like Du Pont. Du Pont sponsors Channel 2 news in New York,
so what are they going to report about nuclear disasters coming out of Du Pont?
Nothing.
acm: There seems to be an analogous sort of conservatism
affecting poetry.
ag: Yeah. A lot of idiots are trying to bring back
rhyme, as if there were any virtue implicit in rhyme all by itself. As if we'd
lost something.
acm: I wonder why you think that is?
ag: Those were like the jerks that were students
of William Buckley. Who are now in the White House. Dinesh D'Souza, who started
the
Dartmouth Review, is now a policy advisor in the White House, and
he's probably behind the new FCC things; or if not him, someone like him, some
replica. What he is, is a sort of virginal, sophomoric egotist, parroting whatever
he can make money on. Very smug. I've talked a lot to him.
acm: Though you yourself are now being accepted
by institutions, which had excluded you for-
ag:I have been for twenty years. It's just not
reported in the paper. But I've been reading at colleges and teaching at colleges
since 1959.
acm: But there's a sense that there's a critical
attention by the institutional organs-
ag: Yeah. Well, if you live long enough-it's been,
what, '57 to '87, that's thirty years, a third of a century. And I've been in
all these regular anthologies all these years. It'd be pretty impossible to
be totally ignored. I've been in
The Norton Anthology for years and
The Oxford Anthology and now
The Harvard Anthology.
I think it's-you know that phrase, "as perceived"? Nothing has changed except
"as perceived" has changed. Perception has changed on the part of media. Probably
because when a lot of the media writers of today were young they were reading
"Howl" and they took it for granted when they grew up that it was serious literature,
whereas thirty years ago the older, senior writers on Time or whatever didn't
take it for granted. So a whole two generations have grown up with, say, On
the Road or Naked Lunch or my own work as considered classics. It's taken for
granted more. Although you still get from the New Republic or the neoconservative
journals or Kramer's New Criterion the accusation that I'm a juvenile jerk or
that the work is sleaze. In fact, that's the word that the Criterion used in
a thirteen-page denunciation of Collected Poems. But the funny thing there is
there's a split between the neoconservatives and the conservatives. The book
editor for the National Review, though he doesn't like my politics, he thinks
the poetry is good and I should get a Pulitzer Prize or something, whereas the
people who are neoconservative, Hilton Kramer and New Criterion, think this
is all sleaze. So there's a kind of schizophrenia among them.
acm: To get back to the question of your own influences-since
we are at an art school-I was reading the other day the long Paris Review interview
you did with Tom Clark and you talked about the role of Cezanne in inspiring
the ending of Part I of "Howl"-
ag: Did you understand what I was saying about
the notion of creating space by contrasting hot and cold colors, and creating
planes by means of the optical? Basically, it's the basis of op art. As George
Wald points out, because he got a Nobel Prize for it, the eye, the pupil of
the eye, can only focus on one plane of color at a time. So to go to another,
the muscles of the eye have to expand or contract to admit more or less light
depending on the amount of light coming out of the bright red or the dark blue
or ground. See, if not much light is coming out of the ground the muscles have
to expand to open the pupil. So that accounts for this sense of shifting of
the venetion blind, like when you move from one plane to another plane to another
in Cezanne. And Cezanne, making use of that, wanted to create the sensation
of space by means of these hot and cold colors advancing and receding in planes,
so that you could build up a series of planes in the distance, the appearance
of distance, without the converging parallel lines of the older-fashioned perspective.
acm: I can see that the description that you were
giving, at least in the poem, at least as I understood it, really became a gloss
on your method in the entire poem.
ag:Yes. So, my own method-maybe it's a little too
literary an interpretation-but at the time that I was writing "Howl" and "Sunflower"
and a few other early poems that are considered major benchmarks of my own work,
I had the notion, talking with Snyder and Kerouac and others, derived from haiku,
that the punch of the haiku comes from one idea set next to another idea, totally
disparate perhaps, like "Old ants, tiny, climb Mount Fuji, but slowly, slowly."
So that you get this small and this vast, and the mind has to put them together
in the picture. So that space or gap between the two holds images, is connected
by the electric thought. So that led me to explore what kind of aesthetic sensation
you'd get if you put contrasting words together, juxtaposed like paint. You
know, bright red and bright green. You'd get a shimmer. Like in some of Keith
Haring. Or any op art that uses Day-Glo or bright contrasting color. I think
I explained in that
Paris Review, that led to notions of phrases like
"hydrogen jukebox." And one of the models I mentioned was the line from Yeats,
"Out of the murderous innocence of the sea." Juxtaposing murderous and innocence-from
"Prayer for My Daughter": "Out of the murderous innocence of the sea." Now,
how can anything be both murderous and innocent? Well, then you had the sea,
and oh, yeah. It's murderous and implacable but at the same time it has no intention,
it's just there.
So you expand the mind by taking stereotypes and then juxtaposing polar opposite
stereotypes or conceptions, and you break through the Aristotelian either-or,
"a" or "not a"-they're both at once, so it's more like the actual process of
consciousness.
acm: You spent some time hanging around with artists,
I know, in the late forties-
ag: And still-
acm: You mentioned your connection with Robert
Frank, the photographer. Throughout the late forties and fifties, there were
a lot of poets and artists who spent time together-
ag:That was the big scene then. That was quite
a cultural renaissance in New York. And in San Francisco.
acm: I wonder why there was this particular coalescence
of poets and artist at that time?
ag:Poets, artists, photographers and filmmakers.
I think because the principle of art that everybody was practicing had shifted
from a linear perspective storyline to spontaneous action abstract expressionism
in painting, spontaneous glimpse in photography-Robert Frank-spontaneous haiku
in Kerouac, or spontaneous novel, and spontaneous gossip in Frank O'Hara, spontaneous
playful humor in Kenneth Koch, spontaneous reverie in Ashbery-and I mean by
spontaneous, literally unrevised.
Because Ashbery sits down and goes into some kind of state-not a trance, but
some state of writing-and writes for twenty minutes, and when he's finished
writing, that's it. It's like bebop. It's there. He doesn't revise it. He says.
Because he taught in my class at Brooklyn College, and we asked him about his
method. And he said he doesn't write that much, maybe a couple times a week
for an hour or two.
So his method is sort of like this reverie which is related to Kerouac's method,
related to Getrude Stein's method, related to modern art methods, related to
Pollock, related to de Kooning, related to Burroughs' cut-up. Burroughs' cut-up
thing is like Pollock's drip painting in some respects. The use of accident
from Francis Bacon through modern Burroughs' paintings-but certainly the use
of accident-the use of chance operation from Cage to Burroughs also; the influence
of jazz on both painting and writing; the specific thing of the improvisatory
quality of blues going through this spontaneous exuberant improvisation in bebop
and later progressive music into the totally free jazz style of the 70s and
80s; the getting back to basic in exploring monotone, monochord, whether you
get Jasper Johns or Clyfford Still-all black paintings or all white paintings
or whatever-like Charlie Mingus and others in the late sixties becoming interested
in Indian music-the monochord of jazz, the mantra-
acm: You said you got serious about photography
in 1984, though you've been taking pictures, or snapshots, of course, for years,
and you met Robert Frank-
ag: I knew him all along-from '58, because we made
movies then-
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