Allen Ginsberg on his early poetry continues from here
AG: Let’s see if there’s anything, any final statement in here [in Empty Mirror] that makes sense. Yeah, I think about the best of the, or the funniest of all the poems in here, most representative, is, finally, like a look at myself from the outside like in a movie, like a burnt-out case, a couple years later. This would probably be 1952 – ’51 or ’52. A burnt-out case in the sense of somebody who’s a total flop, failure. I considered that I’d gotten out of a bughouse (which I’d gotten into) because of my adventures and I thought I’d finally hit the ground and didn’t have anything. I had a job in market research and had a little furnished room on 15th Street, in New York.
“Walking home at night,/reaching my own block/ I saw the Port Authority/Building hovering over/ the old ghetto side/ of the street I tenement/ in company with obscure/Bartlebys and Judes,/cadaverous men,/shrouded men, soft white/ fleshed failures creeping/in and out of rooms like/ myself. Remembering/my attic, I reached/my hands to my head and hissed,/”Oh, God how horrible!”
The taste of actual mind thought, of self-thought or of personal thought in that is so accurate. It’s just like a little flash picture of oneself in a funny moment, but it’s so clear and familiar. I showed that to Kerouac and he thought it was great. “That’s you. That’s really you, Allen. You really got it there. That’s my own little Allen. I mean, that’s actually Allen, or whoever you are, you’re right there, like unashamed, completely free in a sense.” See? Having hit bottom, so to speak, and accepted the worst image. Instead of accepting an image of myself as an angel, accepting myself as a soft white-fleshed failure creeping in and out of rooms like myself, stuck, drab. “God how horrible!” – It was just the willingness to be that nowhere man, nowhere self, to be myself, really. And the humor involved in being that, rather than being a divine Blakean angel, I think that finally makes it possible to stand firmly on the ground in poems like this and then begin constructing out of that reality, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked….” In other words, having accepted all that fact and all that detail and looking at it sympathetically rather than totally freaked out, working with that ordinary magic, ordinary failure, then after several years, possibly, to build a rhapsody of facts, which is “Howl” or later poems of another period.
to be continued