We feature today the first part of an October 25, 1996 interview with Allen by Danish interviewers, Lars Movin and Henning Pryds, that took place back then in Allen’s new loft at 405 East 13th Street, New York. The transcription has recently been updated, (October 2023). The interviewers also gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Dan A. Marmorstein
Howling Visions & Diminished Expectations – an interview with Allen Ginsberg
It is a bright and crisp autumn day in New York when we take our short walk from the Washington Square Hotel to the building at 405 East 13th Street. Upon our arrival, we press the buzzer for Allen Ginsberg’s new loft (as instructed to do so by the poet’s secretary, Peter Hale, whom we have been phoning regularly for the past two weeks in order to set up the appointment). Having been a resident of various cheap rental flats in the East Village, more or less since the early 50s, the poet, now approaching seventy years of age and with an increasingly frail heart, has finally bought a spacious loft in a building with an elevator. On the floor above Ginsberg’s loft resides the painter Larry Rivers – the same Rivers who, in 1959, played opposite Ginsberg in Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s now classical Beat movie, Pull My Daisy, which was based on a play by Jack Kerouac. It is around noon, and we are told that the poet has just finished his breakfast and will be with us shortly. The place is still almost empty, except for a table, some chairs, and a number of moving boxes stacked against the wall, heavy with books and waiting to be unpacked. After spending around twenty years living at 437 East 12th Street, just a block or so away, Ginsberg moved in here quite recently. “It will take us a few more months before we are fully settled in,” Hale remarks as he brings us coffee and water. We notice some movement going on behind another pile of boxes, at the far end of the room, and there he is, Ginsberg himself, dressed casually in a white shirt, light blue jeans, a dark red tie, and a sweater that easily could be from Iceland or the Faroe Islands. He is forthcoming and relaxed, with a mild countenance, but could appear to be a little tired in the way that can sometimes be observed with people who are used to be generous with themselves but no longer have the energy to make friends with everybody they meet. There is almost no small talk. After having asked about our nationality, followed by a few comments about some of the people he remembers from Denmark – Poul Borum, Erik Thygesen, Dan Turèll – Ginsberg declares himself ready to field our first question.
Interviewer(s): One of the things that we would like to talk about is the idea of the poem as a song?
Allen Ginsberg: There has always been this category of the lyric poetry. Lyric means “the lyre” – like Homer or Sappho. You know, Sappho sang with a five-string shell lyre. So poetry always was going towards vocalization, and with chant or song. And Ezra Pound points out that there has also always been a tradition of music, poetry and dance – as in the Greek choruses where they dance across the stage or chant. In English we have the idea of the poetic foot as a measure of a five-foot line, pentameter – da-da da-da da-da da-da-da-da –
a five-foot line. So the word “foot” comes from the footing of the dancers. It is a term for measuring the rhythm of the line by the dance. The closest we have in our day are performers like Little Richard and Mick Jagger and Tina Turner, who dance, have the words, and sing. So it is an old tradition. Through the years there have always been minstrels. Some of the most beautiful elements in English poetry are the early ballads, songs. And the sonnet used to be a musical form; not now, but it used to be. And in the 19th century there was the opera. And then in this century the most powerful form of music has been black blues, which has developed into rhythm & blues and rock’n’roll, and in a sense it has been the strongest American product which has spread around the world – mostly an African-American art, of course, with echoes of various ancient rhythms and practices; warrior toasts from Africa translated into new forms. Now it is rap. So it is very venerable, nothing new. Blake sang – Songs of Innocence and Experience. And Shakespeare wrote songs.
Interviewer(s): You have also been working with the song format, yourself: writing songs, composing, recording – in more recent years, it even seems to be taking up more time for you than before?
AG: Yes, I have a lot of old projects that I would like to get off my back so I can do new work. Just last week, I was performing at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project with a song, “The Ballad of the Skeletons”, which I recorded some time ago with Paul McCartney and Philip Glass and Lenny Kaye and David Mansfield and Marc Ribot. A great band! It just came out. And so did another thing: two cassettes with a complete reading of all 242 choruses of Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues. It was recorded about a year ago but just arrived now. And there is a third one that also came out this year which is a recording of a recent reading of “Howl”, set to music by the Boston-based classical composer Lee Hyla and performed by the Kronos Quartet. The album is called Howl, U.S.A. So these are all different projects that have been cooking for a long time and have now, finally, seen the light of day. It is a good feeling.
But then I still have a number of projects that I would also like to get out there. Philip Glass and I have been talking about doing some work with Shelley and Hart Crane. From Shelley we have selected “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Ode to the West Wind”. And from Hart Crane it is an excerpt from “The Bridge”, the section called “Atlantis”. I don’t know if you are familiar with Hart Crane’s work, but he wrote this very powerful oratorical address to the Brooklyn Bridge, a rhapsodic narration which could work very well as a recital with Philip Glass’s music. And I also have another project which is to complete William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. Blake sang them with music played on instruments of the day, but they failed to notate the melodies. So we don’t know what they sounded like. Years ago I composed about twenty of them on a harmonium, a pump organ, which were all recorded, but that is only about half of the songs Blake wrote, and I would very much like to complete the whole cycle of 44 songs. But it is expensive to do, and as it is hard to find somebody to finance it, I would probably have to pay for it myself. But to do that, I would have to go out and do poetry readings to make some money, and I don’t have the time for that right now.
Interviewer(s): Walt Whitman has obviously played an important role for you as a poet. Can you talk a little bit about how he influenced you in the sense of using poetry as a way of singing?
AG: Well, I don’t know about singing, but he expanded the breath in poetry so that it tended more towards the longer forms: chanting, litany, and the Biblical prophesy. ‘Cause basically Whitman was taking a lot of his style from the Bible, which is both poetry and prose; or was poetry translated into some kind of paragraphs with a kind of cadence which is characteristic of poetry. But before Whitman, there was a very great English poet called Christopher Smart, who wrote in long verse lines, also, and won many prizes for translations from Hebrew and Greek and Latin to English, and also did translations from the Bible. He wound up in Bethlem. He has been an important inspiration for me in terms of the long verse line. What I got out of Whitman was the expansion of not just the lines but the spirit, the breath. Expansion of the breath to proclamation of inner feelings, that kind of joy of your own sexual nature, joy of friendship, exuberance, enthusiasm for delicacies of your own body and others, and the delicacies of the mind, rather than being ashamed. I am thinking about the gay proclivities in the “Calamus” section of Leaves of Grass which is a very open declaration of affection between men. Some brief poems that have what still today would be considered quite shocking references. Like sitting holding hands with a young man in a bar where everybody else is making oaths and smutty jests, and they are sitting quietly, happily enjoying each other’s company, not saying a word, just holding hands, having a thrill of understanding. Nowadays it would be considered to be suspicious, but back then it was just sort of guys or men being together. It was very unspoken.
There is a funny story that goes with that. The first biography of William Blake was written by a man named Alexander Gilchrist (1828-1861), who couldn’t finish it because he died. So his wife, Anne Gilchrist, finished it for him. It is a very elegant, beautiful book with illustrations, some by Blake. Anne Gilchrist lived during the time of (Algernon Charles) Swinburne and others, and then she read Walt Whitman’s poetry and said, “This is another Blake!” So she wrote big long love letters to Whitman and actually moved to Philadelphia to be near him. She actually wanted to marry him. First he was… “Oh, nooo…”, he was frightened. But then, being a very intelligent woman, she became friends with him and became a regular visitor to his house. On weekends she would send a carriage for him – she had money, he was poor – and he became like a godfather for her children. And, through her, Whitman learned about Blake more intimately than before. And finally, before he died, he built a tomb in Camden in the form of a design of one of the opening pages of Blake’s last work, Jerusalem (1804-20). It is like a big stone door with a guy with a big hat, carrying a great fireball going in through the door to death. It is an interesting sequence. I am teaching now a course called “Beginners’ Blake” at Brooklyn College, so I am beginning to read the early prophetic books. But what Whitman has got is candor, frankness, and openness which is not strained, not pushy, not aggressive, just this natural overflow of feeling and exuberance. And Blake said, “Exuberance is beauty …”
Interviewer(s): Whitman was a kind of visionary in regard to what America was about to become. In your generation, and in “Howl”, there is also a kind of vision but it has become a scream, a howl?
AG: There is also a howl in the Bible, remember? All this about warning Babylon, warning the city to clean up its act. As for Whitman, if you read Democratic Vistas (1871) or some of the rejected poems, he has a kind of … well, he is too great to be embittered, but towards the end of his life, he has a great beautiful, disillusioned warning in which he says that this nation will become of the fabled damned of nations, unless there is some kind of spiritual infusion that moderates the materialistic inquisitiveness and aggression and power-hunger and conspicuous consumption. I think I am referring to it in the preface to The Fall of America (1973). And that’s exactly what I think that the generation of younger poets in the 90s is beginning to catch up to or suspect or get an inkling of. This realization that the entire Faustian Western civilization is beginning to ruin its own nest. In America people are now talking about the first symptoms of diminished expectations, you know, that this generation is not going to have it as good as their parents did in terms of houses and money and living and exploitation of other nations.
Interviewer(s): But if we then talk about Whitman’s vision and how it was expressed in his singing, his “Song of the Open Road” (1856) and …
AG: Remember, at that point there still was an open road. Now everybody is afraid of hitchhiking. Around the 1950s, J. Edgar Hoover used to put up bulletins in the post offices saying …”Don’t talk to strangers.…”, “Don’t pick up hitchhikers…”, spreading this blanket of fear.
Interviewer(s): But what we wanted to get at is that if we compare Whitman’s vision with the vision in the mid-20th century, maybe it was already extinguished by the ’50s?
AG: No, not entirely. I mean, Kerouac in the late ’40s and early ’50s could get around and be on the road. There was still some openness. Maybe the materialistic vision, yes. Remember how Eisenhower was warning the nation against the growth of a military-industrial complex? And what do we have today? A military-industrial-scientific-space-hyper-technology! But Blake had warned against that already two hundred years ago. Blake saw the smog and the slavery of the chimney sweepers as a really sick serious flaw in the society and wrote poems about it. In fact, he used the image of the mill to represent the destruction of the landscape and the pollution of nature. And he warned against the hyper-rationalistic limited use of reason that much later led us to create nuclear power without knowing how to get rid of the nuclear waste. That was a half-assed reason, a reason that was not really rational, but a reason that was sort of like Hitlerian reason that didn’t take into account the complete equation, the consequences of the visionary power-drive.
to be continued