Allen Ginsberg on Nineteenth-Century Poetry (an additional note)
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AG: In fact, I wouldn’t bank on it (life-after-death) in poetry. If I were really writing serious, I wouldn’t bank on a figmental fictitious possible (reality from) somebody else’s experience of a blue pearl at the end of the tunnel of light. I’d rather write more directly what I see rather than by what I fantasize.
Peter Orlovsky: But it’s…
AG: It gets more serious in poetry if you actually cut it down to what you know, rather than what you don’t know. The poetry gets more serious and odder and mortal and more interesting.
Student: Well, even the concept that space sort of exists once we die is just a concept.
AG: Yeah, it is. So I wouldn’t … the paradox of that particular concept is that it’s totally empty – there’s nothing there.
Student: I think it’s a really interesting concept however that perhaps you can induce it from the process of those dying or going back to dust and that the dust itself is continually transmuted into rocks and streams and … energy that’s picked up and it’s just really a wave, although we do die, there ain’t … you know, it’s obvious that our … our energy, you know, doesn’t die, it goes somewhere in a different form.
AG: Our energy?
Student: Well.
AG: Some energy.
Student: Yeah.
AG: Some mesons. If you want to identify with a gluon or a meson and think of it as yours.
Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately fifty-seven minutes in and concluding at approximately fifty-eight-and-a -half minutes in