Allen Ginsberg/Ruth Seymour – 1982 KCRW Interview – 2

Ruth Seymour‘s 1982 KCRW interview with Allen Ginsberg continues from here

AG:  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.

RS: Really? Is that true? I don’t think that’s really well known at all.

AG: Oh yes, he had… yes, he was holding court in St Elizabeth’s and he was being visited by Sherri Martinelli and Bill Heine, who were people who knew.. Charlie Parker! – and also was being visited by the young, proto-Fascist that, you know, followed his ideology and had The Square Dollar

RS: Yeah, what a strange, what a strange kind of…   You had these.   Really nuts – they were , these kind of …people
AG: Some.  John Kasper, yes
RS: John Kasper, people who were going down making the anti-Integration speeches
AG: Except that what Kasper also did was the Square Dollar series which was the paideuma, or reading list, culture cultivation of Pound and he did a service oddly/

RS: Right. and at the same time that he was seeing these people he was seeing friends of the hipsters really
AG: Yes, well, no, people who were definitely part of the New York world of the 1950’s to 60’s around the San Remo at MacDougal and Bleecker. So there was a big connection that Pound had with the younger generations (he always had had). Eliot was more remote. I remember sending him a copy of .. a copy of “Howl” (that had been typed up by Robert Creeley before the book was published) and getting a letter from his secretary, you know – “Mr Eliot doesn’t…”
RS: Receive poems?
AG: “..receive poems” or “doesn’t receive unsolicited manuscripts” . And I remember sending him Naked Lunch, asking him if he’d take a look at it for Faber and Faber, and also getting another letter, that’s ten years later, no, five years later, from his secretary, saying that “Mr Eliot  doesn’t read unsolicited manuscripts”.

RS; Did you ever resolve it? Did you ever meet him and…
AG: I saw him read..
RS: Yeah
AG: …and I sat two rows away from Marianne Moore at the New York (92nd Street) Y when he came to read in… I guess it was the early ‘50’s probably (I’ve forgotten when)

RS: He never really accepted the whole Beat thing..

AG: There wasn’t very much communication at all. There was some attempt. I tried. God knows, but.. He had more communication with Donald Hall and W.S.Merwin and others who were coming to him through Harvard or through other channels that were more academic or through, probably through Hudson Review, because I think Hudson published some of the Four Quartets. (tho”) a strange letter I got this month in the mail from the editor of Kenyon Review saying that he had met me fifteen years ago and he was now the editor of Kenyon Review and he hoped I was not holding any feud, inviting me to send poems

RS: And you’re completely at a loss to know.. what? why?

AG: Well no

RS: Oh, you do remember? what fifteen years ago,  San Francisco, I have to remind you, was the middle of the Year of Love, the Summer of Love” as we called it, so..

AG: what was (it)?.. well, ok,  he had been at a beer.. steam-beer party, where a poet who I like a lot, Andy Clausen was with his wife. and Andy had gotten, got drunk on the steam-beer and taken off all his clothes and his wife had taken off all her clothes ..so.. But he was a sort of bohemian..
RS:  Right
AG:  …the editor. So apparently things have opened up because I think formerly,. the Kenyon Review people would’ve been much more stiff.
RS: Much more buttoned down.
AG: Yes

RS: Is it your perception that the university, the academic poets have become more open?

AG: Well, most of the poets who were considered conservative…no… most of the poets who were disapproving of Williams’ adventures in idiom are now themselves…have now evolved into Williams’ mode or affected by him – like Louis Simpson, for instance, who,  Louis Simpson went to Montclair State College four years ago to do a Williams honorary… a day honoring Williams and he had originally gelt.. thought I think that Williams was ok but you know crude  or raw, awkward, provincial. Donald Hall, who, with Simpson, made a sort of.. a very conservative anthology in the late 50s now is retired from the academic world and gone to a farm where he took care of his grandmother and grandpa and has gone back to the land and has opened up his own style. So many of the poets who were sort of pillars of what’s called the academic establishment as time has gone  on have softened their hearts and opened their heads an, maybe smoked a little grass, or just seen the world change around them.

RH: And let me ask you another question. What about the.. well I wanted to… there was one question I did want to ask you..I’m trying to think…Karl Shapiro  is what I want to talk about.  Karl Shapiro, I (and I want to know how you feel about this). At one point Pound was up for the Bollingen award (and this goes back aways, because, we’ve been talking about, what? the 50’s now) and he was  at St Elizabeth’s and through, I think, the intercession of people like Williams and Eliot

AG:  And (Archibald) MacLeish and Robert Frost

RS: He did – right – he won the award. And at that point..
AG: For The Pisan Cantos, which is one of the great poems of the century.
RS: Right. Ah! – and this is what I wanted to ask you. At that point Shapiro wrote a very interesting essay in which he said that it was a.. (that) it was wrong to give Pound this award because finally all great art, all great poetry, had to be in the service of a certain kind of humanitarian vision and one could not say that Pound was in that service. Now it has always seemed to me that art is full of paradox.
AG: It doesn’t sound like a very humanitarian statement by Shapiro
RS: Okay. that’s your answer.
AG: Yes
RS: So you feel that..
AG; But I’ll.. just putting it very simply..
RS: Yes
AG: The Pisan Cantos, for which Pound got that award are among the great monuments of poetry of the whole century. So..

RS: Alright. A lot of us have loved Pound’s work and are particularly disturbed that..

AG: And particularly that, and particularly, it was a very rueful passage –  Pull down thy vanity, it is not man/ Made courage, or made order, or made grace” – “The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world”  – Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail,/A swollen magpie in a fitful sun,/ Half black half white/ Nor knowst’ou wing from tail/Pull down thy vanity…”

So it was an attack on his own vanity that Pound.. and I don’t think that Karl Shapiro fully understood the emotion and the humility of The Pisan Cantos/

RS: So its your feeling that finally the poet…finally the poetry has to be (judged)/

AG: Well it was a poetry prize!

RS: No but even…if one looks a a person.  Because there was a kind of disturbance I think among a lot of literary people, certainly, anybody who was anti-Fascist has always been disturbed by Pound

AG: But see, if you look back, it was always.. I like Shapiro’s work, but other than Shapiro, I think it was mostly inferior poets like Robert Hillyer. I remember that controversy,  who were making objections and the major poets, T.S.Eliot, Robert Frost, the great poets, (William Carlos) Williams were all in favor of Pound getting the Bollingen Prize so it was a battle of pygmies against…
RS:  against the giants
AG: ..The Olympians
RS: Right.  Let me ask you another concern..
AG: As there is now incidentally. There are lots of sort of moral majority right wing attacks of a very similar nature on the National Endowment for the Arts and the poetry prizes given to that and The Heritage Foundation and The National Enquirer, the sort of like the supermarket gutter

RS:  Oh look…But we’re more comfortable with those attacks because, after all, what are they doing but they’re attacking liberal or left-wing poets but here..
AG: Sure, but obscenity
RS: ..,whereas Pound..  well obscenity,  but here..

AG: Well here they may wind up shutting off funds for the National Endowment of Arts simply on the basis of their political judgment that they don’t like these poets who are getting these prizes because they don’t like the politics of the poets, they don’t like the morals of the poets.

to be continued

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