Allen Ginsberg on his early poetry (Empty Mirror) continues from here
AG: Another thing that gave me a big lesson was I spent several years keeping journals, and, in 1947 or ‘(4)8, I went to Africa, came back with all my baggage and all my journals and left them in a friend’s apartment on 8th Avenue in New York and went away for a couple of weeks trying to find a place to live and get settled in New York. I went back to get it and I found he’d read through all my secret journals, and I was ashamed because it had all this sex stuff and love babblings about Cassady and Blake and everything, so I asked him about it and he said he’d read it, and I said, “Well, how was it?”, and he said, “It was awful. It stinks. It’s unreadable. You can’t read it. It’s unreadable.” (Actually, he didn’t read very much of it) “There’s only one page that was readable.” And I said, “Well, what was that?” and he pointed to the page and he was right! – It was the only page of actual description of something outside of my head. So I took that out of journals from 1944 to 1948, and the only single page of poetry that remains from that era that’s still readable is “The Bricklayer’s Lunch Hour”
(The Bricklayer’s Lunch Hour)
“Two bricklayers are setting the walls/ of a cellar in a new dug out patch/of dirt behind an old house of wood/with brown gables grown over with ivy/on a shady street in Denver. It is noon/and one of them wanders off. The young/subordinate bricklayer sits idly for/a few minutes after eating a sandwich/and throwing away the paper bag. He/has on dungarees and is bare above/the waist; he has yellow hair and wears/a smudged but still bright red cap/on his head. He sits idly on top/of the wall on a ladder that is leaned/up between his spread thighs, his head/bent down, gazing uninterestedly at/the paper bag on the grass. He draws/his hand across his breast, and then/slowly rubs his knuckles across the/side of his chin, and rocks to and fro/on the wall. A small cat walks to him/along the top of the wall. He picks/it up, takes off his cap, and puts it/over the kitten’s body for a moment./Meanwhile it is darkening as if to rain/and the wind on the top of the trees in the/street comes through almost harshly.”
So what is that? That’s just like a little looking out of a window, sketching. It was something that I got off (Jack) Kerouac, the idea of making a verbal picture just like what you see through the window and making a little pencil sketch; the detail – a cat, a hat, a ladder, spread thighs, workman, maybe a little daub of red if you got a red pencil, a tree maybe moving along the wind. Oddly enough, “Meanwhile it is darkening as if to rain/and the wind on the top of the trees in the/street comes through almost harshly” – there, strangely enough, without even intending it, is that little shiver of a moment in time preserved in the crystal cabinet of the mind. There’s a little shiver of eternal space in that, anyway, if that was what I was looking for. If that was what I was looking for. Without even trying. Simply by looking outside of the window and seeing what was there. So that’s probably the earliest text I’ve published that makes real sense as a poem…
Student: Allen?
AG: ..probably 1947, Denver.
Student: Were those other things you were reading from Gates of Wrath from that period?
AG: No, they’re ’48-’49.
Student: Oh.
AG: See, this is earlier than The Gates of Wrath even. In other words, this ordinary consciousness was available all along, except I despised it or thought it was not important or didn’t avail myself of my own intelligence and my own direct perceptions and my own detailed perception in writing. This is 1947 and all that other symbolic churning is quite beautiful but doesn’t have the clarity of this. Which is better, I don’t know. See, the other kind in Gates of Wrath has a kind of mantric magical onanistic masturbatory sing-along power. But this actually you can see through and use. I don’t know which is better.
to be continued.