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from acm #21: allen ginsberg, a conversation
acm: I wonder what kind of influence that might have had on
your own work, specifically your engagement in photography?
ag: Since '84? Well, at least theoretically I get more interested
in visual phanopoeia, visual imagery, as a substance of poetry. Best of all
in the poem, "White Shroud," where it's a dream but reproduced in detail-a great
deal of minute particular visual detail. So the whole thing is like in a dream,
lots of detailed visualizations telling a sort of story. "White Shroud" is like
a magical movie picture with some flashes of specific moments within it. Like,
"She opened her mouth to display her gorge." And there's a sort of surrealist
vision of teeth like "hard flat flowers ranged around her gums." That's like
a magnified photograph, a close-up, a still close-up.
Then, I don't know if anyone noticed it, but within "White Shroud," there's
a description of three photographs of Berenice Abbott, which anyone who knows
photography may recognize, who's a specialist in that kind of thing. It mentioned
"a spry old lady carried her / Century Universal View camera"-that's the formal
name of those big view cameras that she used-"to record Works / Progress Administration
newspaper metropolis / double-decker buses in September sun near the Broadway
El…" That's taken directly from one of her photographs. Then she has a great
4:30 P.M. before Christmas Eve in the dark [photograph], all the lights in the
office buildings lit, from the Empire State Building looking out on Herald Square-"skyscraper
roofs upreared ten thousand office windows shining / electric-lit above tiny
taxis street lamp'd in Midtown / avenues' late-afternoon darkness the day before
Christmas." Then she has another great photo of Herald Square itself. In the
daytime at noon hour, lunch, with crowds crossing in straw hats and shoes, by
the frankfurter counters and Macy's-"Herald Square crowds thronged past traffic
lights July noon to lunch / Stop under Macy's department store awnings for dry
goods / pause with satchels at Frankfurter counters wearing stylish straw /
hats of the decade, mankind thriving in their solitudes in shoes. / But I'd
strayed too long amused in the picture cavalcade."
So those are literal descriptions of Abbott. Things which were not quite in
the dream, but which were sort of half in and half out of the dream, but were
representative of the time era that I was flashing back on.
acm:So you say the business with photography has helped you
in your focus on visual imagery-
ag: No, I always did from [William Carlos] Williams, but it
sort of re-emphasized that.
acm: Because you had said once before when I had talked with
you that you felt one problem with "Howl" was that in some ways it was too general,
and you were striving towards a fourth part-you mentioned "The Names" and "Fragment
1956" and others in an effort to make it more concrete-
ag: Yeah, it's still somewhat abstract, but here I got it all
the way out to like almost cinematic photography. See, the problem with cinematic
photography-literalism, naturalism-is it's boring. You're just stuck with nature,
and the surrealists would object and the romantics would object and the new
romantics would object. But on the other hand, if you've got a naturalistic
skin on a surrealist dream, you have both the advantage of naturalism, and the
skin of a believable texture, that you can follow along until suddenly you realize
that it's magical, like the inside of a balloon of a dream.
acm: Naturalism in the sense of containing a narrative thread-?
ag: Narrative in details, like in frankfurters, straw hats,
you know, Macy's department store dry goods-everything that you might actually
see-an old Negro swept the streets, ladies walked baby carriages in front of
silent house fronts, "blackened subways Sundays long ago, / tea and lox with
my aunt and dentist cousin when I was ten"; smoking cigarettes and reading books
"in vast glassy Cafeterias"-it's all based on some kind of almost ash can school
of painting. It might be Hopper or Rafael Soyer or any of the Americans. Because
this is a dream in which I see my mother as an old bag lady; it climaxes when
she opens her mouth and complains about her teeth, and then there's a horrific
vision of worn down teeth that's like in the surrealist film,
Zero de Conduite.
Or the early surrealist film where all of a sudden there's this door magnified,
this weird thing in somebody's face, somebody turns to Jell-o-.
acm: One last question-What in your view are the essential
elements to being a successful poet, and are they different in any other art?
ag: No, it's the same in all arts. Concentrating on the work
you're doing, and avoiding chasing success. Avoiding concern with that. Because
what's interesting is the revelation of the personal, which always is embarrassing
at first sight, and always nonsocial. And always militates against commerce
and sale because it's embarrassing and so personal. But when you visit the Gauguin
show, though he wanted success, he's constantly painting personal things, and
the last painting in there is several Tahitian women and his old Dutch friends,
like a sort of devil, or a totemic object-it's totally personal. On his death
bed, his recollection of his Dutch friend with the red beard, a disciple, and
the new relationships he has with young women in the southwest Pacific-how did
they get there on the same canvas, except his personal, autobiographical flashback?
Which has nothing to do with anybody, what anybody could understand. And if
you saw it for the first time, people did in 19-whatever it is-when he died-probably
it's incomprehensible. But when you read his story, as you go along seeing all
these pictures, you suddenly realize how poignant that collocation of the two
is. It has nothing to do with success, or success in terms of what other people
might want to buy. It isn't Jesus Christ on the cross or Napoleon at the Battle
of Waterloo, it isn't a public event at all. It's a totally subjective, visionary,
or nostalgic recollection. [A] record that's genuine and sincere and grounded
in actuality. And later on that becomes valuable to everybody as a benchmark
or reference point for truthfulness about your actual experience or you awareness
of your own experience. And it makes other people more aware of their own experience-of
the poignance of their own experience. You know, if you have a dream of the
old girlfriend you had in high school when you're fifty years old having a heart
attack? You suddenly realize how it's with you all the time and that's your
real life? And that's your real reference point. So I think the poets and artists
who are, quote, successes, use their unsuccess-private area-as reference point,
and later on, like a photograph developing, it's genuine. Whereas the people
who go for an immediate success hit using pop art of the day as their totems-they
don't manage to get much feeling into it. And maybe it's a little bit too manipulative.
Like George Bush's election campaign. So the element of real sincerity is missing.
And passion. Passion and sincerity, confession and revelation for God or revelation
for the soul, or revelation for eternity, or revelation for your girlfriend,
or whatever.
So the common element there is poetry, painting, seems to be seeing your subjective
mythology as a sacred world. Painting or writing about that sacred world as
the sacred or sacramental view of your own subjective experience. Realizing
it's the only experience you actually have on earth, and you only have it once
when you're alive. Does that make sense?
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