Allen Ginsberg interview continues from here
Interviewer(s): Speaking of warnings and opposition … we have noticed that in America the voices of opposition to the materialistic society historically seem to have been connected to certain geographical areas, like The Village here in New York?
AG: Yes, that is true, but it is nothing new. It is an ancient Bohemian thing, to protest against the church, protest against the powers, the land-owners, and the state in form of the aristocracy and the king. All the powers usurping the commons. And it is all about this old saying: In unity, there is strength At this time, on the Lower East Side, there is a culture of younger people with grunge and rock’n’roll and rap and literature and painting and experimental films. It is all taking place in this neighborhood. Larry Rivers, the painter, lives upstairs. CBGBs is on Third Avenue. And last night, we took part in the reopening of a very interesting club called Sin-é, an Irish place which used to be on St. Mark’s Place down by Avenue A, and now they’ve moved it down to Stanton Street where they’ve opened it up again in an old Korean grocery store. Last night was the opening night so I went down there with the producer Hal Willner and Lenny Kaye, Patti Smith’s guitar player, and Stephan Said, who plays a lot of instruments, and we did a little set. They will have music and poetry and all sorts of things, and it is one of those places that will carry on with the tradition that you are talking about.
Interviewer(s): How would you compare what is happening on the Lower East Side now with what was happening in Greenwich Village in the 1940’s or ’50s?
AG: It’s always happening! And if you want to talk about Greenwich Village, it wasn’t at its height in the 40s or 50s, but rather in the 20s, with Hart Crane and Elinor Wylie and Edna St. Vincent Millay and many others, some of them being in touch with James Joyce. In the 20s, people had magazines and all sorts of things were going on, whereas by the ’40s, The Village had kind of faded, in that way. It had become more expensive to live in, even though it still was a little grungy. In the late ’40s, when I used to go there with Kerouac and Burroughs, there was still the San Remo bar, which was a meeting place where Frank O’Hara and the New York Poets and Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline would go. I remember seeing Dylan Thomas there in ’48. And I have a photograph I took of Burroughs at the door of the San Remo in 1953.
Then things moved over to the Cedar Bar on University Place. That’s where the painters were – but also some writers – Rauschenberg – and myself and Amiri Baraka and Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch and Larry Rivers and de Kooning and Kline and Jackson Pollock. And that went on for quite a while, throughout the ’50s and up to the beginning of the ’60s.
Interviewer(s): What was it about places like The Village and East Village that generated these visions?
AG: Cheap housing! Combined with the fact that in those days you could survive on welfare for some time. I worked very hard in marketing research, but then I realized that everything I had been doing could be done by IBM. So I asked my boss to fire me so I would be able to collect insurance for half a year, and then I stayed home and wrote “Howl”. Also, there was more psychotherapy available from the experimental hospitals at that time. All in all, in the ’50s and ’60s there was a little extra money around so you didn’t have to worry so much about getting a job or having a career. It is tougher now. In 1953, I had an apartment in this neighborhood, on 7th Street near Tompkins Square Park, which you might know about because that is where I took a lot of my early photographs – Kerouac on the fire escape, Burroughs on the couch, and so on.
The rent there was 30 dollars a month, and my weekly salary for unskilled work, as a copy boy on a newspaper, was 30 dollars a week. So my rent was one quarter of my salary. Now as an unskilled laborer, you get 200 dollars a week or 800 dollars a month, but rent for a small room – smaller than my apartment back then – is 900 dollars. And that is the cheapest there is around here, unless you’ve got your own place or rent stabilization. So the housing problem prevents people from moving in. So they are moving over to Williamsburg which has led to a little artistic renaissance in Williamsburg, but soon the rent will also start going up there. This is how it goes. Wherever there is cheap rent, artists will go there, and then the rent is going up.
Interviewer(s): But if we look at your poetry, it cannot all be explained by cheap rent and welfare. Apparently it has also something to do with certain places being more inspiring than others – you can walk down the street and then the environment seems to generate certain visions or ideas?
AG: Well, that is true, but this is because I follow the aesthetics of one of my mentors, William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), who said you should write close to the nose. “Clamp your mind down on objects – No ideas but in things”. So there is a certain naturalistic style, kind of (Émile) Zola put into poetry, condensed. Everyday occurrences. And the localism is interesting, to build something more general from an individual observation. Also, my problem always has been that I, like most people, have a tendency to go off into abstraction, generalization, motif, so I try to discipline myself to keep my focus on something real that you can understand. That I can understand. To be present rather than to let your mind go wandering to imaginary dragon houses.
Interviewer(s): Which leads us to this whole notion in the American history and culture of traveling in the open landscape as a means of gaining insights and visions?
AG: Well, you know, that is a Middle European thing, too. Who were the first to be traveling to Tibet? Hungarians. Germans. Even nowadays, if you go to India, there will be lots of Americans, but there will also be lots of Germans and French and other Europeans.
Interviewer(s): Okay, maybe we are talking more about Kerouac here – the concept of being on the road in the American landscapes, spiritually uplifted by the movement itself, but also always with the possibility of disappointment or disillusionment as the other side of the coin?
AG: Well, there is some truth to that, but that was his dream. And, you know, then we are talking about the sacramental aspect of things, what appears to be sacred, and all that. The sacred aspect of things is the property of the attention you give to it rather than any external circumstance. Any place is sacred if you build a church there. So it is always depending on the amount of attention you give to it. Is this my sacred loft? Or is it just a loft? I got so familiar with the place where I used to live, just around the corner, until about two months ago (437 East 12th Street), that it became very sacred to me and I couldn’t write about it. The sacred quality depends on the quality of your attention more than anything else.
Interviewer(s): But isn’t the open continent a very important part of the American history and imagination?
AG: Of course! And at the end of the open continent, as Kerouac pointed out, comes the land of sadness and the land of madness in San Francisco. And from there, you have nowhere to go except the Orient. So we went to the Orient. So you have The Dharma Bums or the Indian Journals or Gary Snyder and that whole group of people that we came into contact with during the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance in the mid-’50s, and who introduced us to Zen. You know, Gary Snyder and his various friends from the Northwest – Philip Whalen and Lew Welch and others, some of them from Reed College in Portland – were all Buddhist oriented. And Philip Whalen is now a roshi, a Zen master authorized to teach. He is the abbot of the Hartford Street Zen Center in San Francisco. So we went off, imaginatively and physically, to India and Japan and Tibet and brought back our traders. And now there is the Naropa Institute, in Boulder, Colorado, which was founded by a Tibetan teacher, lama, and which has been there for 22 or 23 years. It is accredited as a regular college, the first Buddhist oriented college in the Western world. So I would actually say that we did find something. I mean, we reached the end of the physical geography and then started to go inside: to the spiritual geography. It was an adventure, and an American adventure, but I still think that a lot of that was preceded by Europeans. Havelock Ellis in England took peyote. Antonin Artaud came to Mexico to take peyote. Roger Heim in France and Jiří Roubíček in Czechoslovakia were very early experimentalists with LSD. Henri Michaux. And on and on. It wasn’t just an American exploration. I think Europeans tend to romanticize America.
Interviewer(s): Maybe so, but the same could probably also be said the other way around!
AG: Yes, Americans certainly also tend to romanticize Good Old Europe. The ancient land. So the Americans go there for whatever reasons, and the French and the Germans come here, and everyone seems to be discovering a New World. But of course, in America, there, the space in the 19th century, and now it is getting crowded everywhere, even on Ludlow Street, where the rent is really going up. Very different from the time in 1906 when my mother came from Russia, and they had a candy store right on the corner of Orchard Street and Rivington Street.
Interviewer(s): Yes, it must have been a very different time back then, also because there was this whole sense of America being a new and free country, with no rulers, or at least not rulers in the same sense as the ones we had in Europe?
AG: Well, I don’t know if they were actually any freer than anywhere else. Of course, in the beginning, you could say that there were no rulers. But ask the slaves, ask the black people if there were any rulers in America. The irony is that black culture is really the dominant, exciting new American culture. Blues, rock’n’roll, improvisation in music, improvised art forms – all out of the black culture, which is such a tremendously important area of American consciousness. Even John Cage can be traced back to African-American philosophical sources, aesthetic sources with the idea of an art which does not preserve all the time – the art of the moment, happening in the moment, like ancient tribal American Indian rituals. And ask the American Indians whether there were no rulers.
And speaking of rulers, even now … I have a very good cardiologist who won the Nobel Peace Prize ( – sic – on behalf of International Physicians For Prevention of Nuclear War), Dr. Bernhard Lown is his name, and he lives in Boston and recommended a book to me about American aid to Africa. What he said – referencing the book – was that while we are arguing about whether we should give Africa a billion dollars in aid or give them half a billion or two hundred million, we are extracting from Africa every year four hundred billion dollars worth of raw materials, all bought very cheaply. And while the World Bank will subsidize, say, Nigeria, to expand its coffee fields, they will not lend them money to build coffee factories which would really improve their situation economically. Instead, we manufacture the coffee here in America and sell it back to Africa or Europe and take in most of the profit. So there is a kind of economic fascism going on, and American prosperity and European prosperity is at the expense of the labor and suffering of other nations and other peoples. But it is hidden so people don’t notice it, and at the same time this system is making it appear as though there is something wrong with those people – they can grow coffee beans but they can’t manufacture their own coffee! Anyway, the title of the book is The Debt Boomerang (Susan George, 1992), and it is really interesting. Where does American expansionism come from? Might it be that we have just been sucking the blood of the rest of the world?