Another gleaning from the archives today. Ruth Seymour’s 1982 KCRW interview with Allen, on the occasion of his appearance in L.A, to pick up an award from the Los Angeles Times for his City Lights collection, Plutonian Ode and Other Poems 1977-1980 (as she says, she and Allen are “old friends” – in bygone San Francisco days, Ruth had once been married to the poet Jack Hirschman)
The audio can be listened to – here
RS: This is Ruth Hirschman (sic) and you’re listening to a very special program this afternoon, recorded on Friday, last Friday. My guest is the poet Allen Ginsberg who was here in Los Angeles to receive the Los Angeles (Times) Book Prize for poetry this year. Allen and I are old friends so I want to begin by asking you Allen, What happened, have they changed or have we changed?
AG: Well, I think everybody has changed, the entire universe has changed, all the constituents of being are transitory, so certainly I’ve changed, I’ve got my great Salvation Army clothes on today
RS: Are those Salvation Army?.. well, you would’ve fooled me!
AG: All except the tie …
RS: Okay, in a pin-stripe blue-and-white shirt. Let me just describe this. You’re not on television.
AG: A blue blazer..
RS: A blue blazer
AG: ..with silver buttons…gold buttons
RS: Right, it’s almost a preppy look. And then you’ve got this marvelous navy-blue tie with red stripes. (well, you’re really all red white and blue but you look quite business (-like).. you could be a banker!
AG: Well the tie was a present from Robert Lowell when we read together at St Marks, way way way back, before Lowell died, about four years ago, somehow (I’ve forgotten when, how long it was now).. [Editorial note – Ginsberg and Lowell read together in February 1977 at St Marks, Lowell passed away that September]
RS: And did you wear the tie, Robert Lowell’s tie, to accept the award in a sort of conscious manner?
AG: Yes, in a sort of funny joke.
RS: Yes
AG: And then the Los Angeles Times, or else the poetry scene, has changed sufficiently that a book of poems, Plutonian Ode, published by a marginal publisher, City Lights, a very respectable publisher (but a marginal one, from San Francisco rather than from New York or Madison Avenue) won a book prize for the year 1982
RS: It’s kind of nice to see City Lights getting that kind of recognition..
AG: Yes
RS: ..because it has been.. what?.. breaking ground for a long time and outside the New York establishment
AG: Yes, and still is breaking ground. It published several great books in the last two years. There was an amazing book by Philip Lamantia, published about a year ago, with a lot of work about American Indians mixed with his traditional Surrealist tones in form and imagery. And a great book by Antler called Factory, which had been featured in the Coevolution Quarterly. It was a long immense poem about working in a factory in Milwaukee in a Continental Can Company. So those were classic books, not much widely reviewed but no less continuing in the great tradition…
RS: Right
AG: …of City Lights as publishing… And then this year they published Plutonian Ode, which is my collection from.. all the poems from 1977 up through 1980
RS: Now the Times is, of course, the pre-eminent newspaper, not only in Los Angeles but really, one could say, in Southern California.
AG: Well, in the West, in the Western United States, it’s one of the major investigative and literary papers.
RS: And it has never really been known as the.. a… I mean, a culturally avant-garde newspaper. I mean, it’s generally considered culturally conservative. Politically, it’s made some remarkable moves toward becoming a much more liberal newspaper over the last twenty years that I’ve lived in California. But the vision of the Times honoring Allen Ginsberg as the poet, this year’s poet of the year, I think does mark a change in the way that your poetry is regarded in the country.
AG: Yeah, probably.
RS: Much more so I think than, for example, if you were to receive a similar prize from a New York newspaper. That would hardly be surprising. But for the Los Angeles Times to confer this award marks, I think, a certain kind of… what? – understanding? acceptance? movement?
AG: Yes. Also they have a very interesting way of determining (it). I think they poll all their reviewers and they submit the nominations to a secret judge nobody knows, who’s independent of the Times even, who has a right to say anything he wants and pick any book he wants, and his name is kept secret so there’s no pressure on him. So it is a totally independent judgment. And I don’t know who it is, (which is interesting). And I liked his judgment this year because, I don’t know all the.. as yet, all the winners, but, Paul Mariani, who wrote the huge biography of William Carlos Williams, got the Nonfiction award, so Williams will be honored also.. So it’s like old-home week!
RS: Oh, what a remarkable.. (Yes) It is! You wearing Lowell’s tie and Williams’ work. And, I think, a book which really will hopefully revive interest in a great American poet. Isn’t it ironic that ..
AG: Well, (it will) energize. The New York Times gave the Williams book a front-page review, in which, finally, the Times and, like, the establishment, came out and said that, all through the period up to the Second World War and after, the great American innovator was William Carlos Williams, along with Ezra Pound, and that the tremendous academic attention paid to T.S.Eliot, (though well-deserved), had, at the time, out-shadowed and overshadowed the enormous technical ability and humane contributions that Williams had made. And, so Williams was, like, finally getting his laurel and being termed the most influential poet of that mid-Century (which was very pleasant to me, since he was my patron and teacher)
RS: Right. I want to talk to you about that. Let’s ask about the poet in America for a minute – the poet in America as a figure outside the university, (certainly Williams was one of those people). What do you think American poetic tradition come out of?, and do you think that something has happened in the 20th Century? It seems to me there was a time when poetry was being strangled inside the academic world.
AG: Well, the thing that Whitman announced was that poetry should be brought into the kitchen, or domesticated, or ordinary mind. or relating it to our own speech, relating it to our own talk, the way we talk to each other, and the way we live, and our environment, the American Scene, the historical American scene, (ahistorical since we were not carrying all of the baggage of Europe). Eliot went back to a European mode and to an English mode, Williams diverged, as Whitman suggested, and tried to write an American poetry, that is, making use of elements of idiom (just talk idiom) and rhythm (as we talk), which you couldn’t put into iambic pentameter. Eliot went back to basically Shakesperean blank verse and so the emotional tone of Eliot went along with the emotional tone of blank verse. The rhythm of the body and the rhythm of the speech does affect your emotions. And if your emotions are American and very varied – you might talk black talk, or Okie talk, or New Jersey talk, or LA talk, or “Frisco talk, but you wouldn’t be talking liked a Cantabridgian.
RS: So you think he did? I always thought it was that strange sort of marriage of St Louis and..
AG: Like (William) Burroughs, actually
RS: That’s right. St Louis, with a kind of Anglican veneer to it.
AG: Except when he wrote in slang he wrote English shopgirl slang..
RS: Right
AG: .. In Sweeney Agonistes – Yes, something happened to American poetry that finally switched it over, even Lowell (that’s why Lowell and I got along). Lowell studied with Williams and Lowell was the prince of the academic poets and Williams liked him, even when he was writing in a very square mode. He wrote a long review of The Mills of the Kavanaughs, Lowell’s second big book, saying that, although he wrote in a form which Williams didn’t like, which had very stable rhymes, nonetheless, the rhymes were “like Inca stonework”, and he had a great power
RS: So he recognized, because Lowell finally was, finally, one of the mad men.
AG: Well they were friends,
RS: Yeah
AG: Well they were friends. Lowell came to visit Williams in the “Forties and early “Fifties in Paterson, (no,) in Rutherford, and it altered Lowell’’s practice so he began opening up and having an irregular line and a speech line and an idiomatic line and more and more (Allen improvises), ‘”cars slide by their feelings of greased civility”
RS: I’m thinking of the Lepke poem which is.. the Louis Lepke poem, (“Memories of West Street and Lepke”) which is full of those kinds of images, and his great poetry really is.. is How did you…. how did you.. at one point was it? that. well, you have known, practically, well…all of the major American poets, I’m thinking of (Charles) Olson, Lowell, Williams..
AG: (Gregory) Corso, (Robert) Creeley..(Gary) Snyder..
RS: Right. And then we come to another generation, your own generation but looking back on others who were, in a sense, older than you were, what was the relationship?, Was it an easy relationship, warm, wonderful?, Did you see them as kind of paternal figures? Was there a frisson between you and them at the beginning, or was there…
AG: Well it was a very complicated matter. The avant-garde writers were always totally open to the young – which is to say. Williams, (Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff (who was a dear old man actually) – And Olson was like a father figure to great flocks of people from Black Mountain and onward.
Pound was more remote but certainly was wide open to the hip new elements of the late ‘40’s and early ‘50s when he was in St Elizabeth’s in Washington.
to be continued