Allen Ginsberg on his early poetry (Empty Mirror) continues from here
AG: So among the poems I sent to (William Carlos) Williams which to him seemed to demonstrate a grounded mind, or someone who had finally come down to earth – “A Poem on America”
“A Poem on America”
“America is like Russia./Acis and Galatea sit by the lake./We have the proletariat too./Acis and Galatea sit by the lake./Versilov wore a hair shirt/and dreamed of classical pictures..”
These are all characters out of Dostoevsky‘s The Possessed Images and characters out of the novel … no, out of A Raw Youth. A Raw Youth by Dostoevsky, has anybody read it? Anybody at all? Oh, it’s a really terrific book. It’s about a kid who has a vision, just like me. He has this vision, and his vision is that he wants to be a powerful man on the Russian planet, so he figures that if he lives for twenty years, not spending a penny but getting all the money in, one way or the other, begging, borrowing, stealing, working, but in other words, everything coming in but nothing going out, like making his own boots or eating fried shoes, whatever, but nothing going out, everything coming in, just by simple logic of events at the age of forty he’ll be a millionaire. Anybody can do it. But he’s the only one who’s thought of that idea. So he’s this mad visionary youth who gets out of boarding school with this idea, but he thinks before he starts putting this idea into practice he’s going to go see his old father, who’s an intellectual revolutionary, Versilov. So he goes to see him and discovers that his father is wearing a hair shirt and is a religious mystic, and it’s this old religious mystic facing this young adolescent mystic. Just a funny book. “Versilov wore a hair shirt/and dreamed of classical pictures.”
“The alleys, the dye works,/Mill Street in the smoke,/melancholy of the bars,/the sadness of long highways,/negroes climbing around/the rusted iron by the river,/the bathing pool hidden/ behind the silk factory/fed by its drainage pipes;/all the pictures we carry in our mind/images of the thirties,/depression and class consciousness/transfigured above politics/ filled with fire/with the appearance of God.”
I was still referring to my visionary experience, “filled with fire/with the appearance of God”, but at least I got my mind grounded enough to (write) “The alleys, the dye works,/Mill Street in the smoke,/melancholy of the bars,/the sadness of long highways,/negroes climbing around/the rusted iron by the river,/the bathing pool hidden/behind the silk factory/fed by its drainage pipes..”
I think that’s actually maybe the best poetry I ever wrote, which is just absolutely pure, clear, modern. A hundred years (from now) reading that you’ll be looking down the wrong end of a telescope into the past and you’ll actually see present time. You’ll be looking into the eternity of 1949.
Student: How could you have written both things simultaneously?
AG: Yeah. Very interesting. Poetic schizophrenia. These were written in notebooks, like a lot of us keep journals, as a reminder, little journals that everybody keeps. These were written in prose form in journals and I wasn’t trying to write poetry, so not trying to write poetry I wasn’t then obsessed with writing the eternal image symbol combination to break everybody’s mind open, I was just describing what was in front of me. So because I was doing that they were less obsessional, less hung-up and they were just detail. After I met (William Carlos) Williams and understood what he was doing, I separated a couple of paragraphs like those out of my journals and arranged them in lines like him, sometimes counting syllables, sometimes counting breath, sometimes balancing it on the page to see what it looked like visually, so that these are just ordinary, unselfconscious notebook prose. I just took the nuts out it – the intensest moments of prose – pushed everything else aside, isolated it, framed it on the page. It’s like a painter (would) paint a big painting and in the Abstract Expressionist ‘Fifties era and there was only one or two little spots on the painting that they thought had (a) funny kind of tension and space so they’d white paint out everything else and leave the reds and the blues in just a few areas. Do you know that? So that’s what I did with my journals – I just got rid of everything except a couple lines that were active. And that was Williams’ advice. He said, “Better have one active phrase” – by active he meant alive, focused, precise, grounded, no ideas, a thing, things but no ideas- “Better have one active phrase than pages of inactive opaque poetry.” Poetry that doesn’t move. Better isolate just the one thing that’s active, because that’s what’s needed now, some kind of action, mental action that’s got contact with reality rather than more raving, rather than more babbling vagueness.
So what I did was I just eliminated hundreds and hundreds of pages of subjective scribbling about “When will I see Blake again?” or “Am I crazy?” or “When are they going to love me?” or “Am I ever going to come back?” or “What is the nature of the rare occurrence of phenomenology that other people’s brains….” to “It is December/almost, they are singing/Christmas carols/in front of the department/stores down the block on/Fourteenth Street.” [Allen quotes from his poem “The Bricklayer’s Lunch Hour“]
to be continued