Allen Ginsberg at Naropa, in 1976, discoursing on his Early Poetry continues from here
AG: So basically what I’ve done is covered the development of my poetry up to about 1953, several years before “Howl” in preparation for, say, application of the basic grounded realistic humor of the practical world, and then the application of maybe more free energy for that, or once having found a place to put my feet, once having gotten grounded a little then you get a little playful, maybe, or you can make big rhapsodies about people who have lost their visions. So I’ll just leave it up to that and then in the reading tomorrow night I’ll pick out and start reading from around that point on. I talked to (Michael) McClure on the phone and he said, “Let’s begin the reading with the period that we first read together,” from 1955. So tomorrow night I’ll read poems that just take off from here, lead up (to) around the time of “Howl” and a little after that, probably. Has this made sense?
Students: Sure. Yes.
AG: At all?
Student: Yeah.
AG: Does anybody feel that I took the wrong turn? Or made the wrong decision? Made the wrong decision spiritually when maybe I should have held out for more? Gone to the bughouse and held out for more?
Student: (Go back to when you were twenty-three)
AG: What?
Student: Go back to twenty-three
AG: Go back to twenty three and start all over again? Well, oddly enough, you know, in Tantric Buddhism you have a chance to do that. You eat your cake and have it, too. It’s really miraculous (that), in a sense, the advent of Buddhism, or if not Buddhism at least Gnostic experience, the breakthrough, culturally, of the Western Gnostic tradition, (because Blake is in that Gnostic tradition, which is parallel to the Oriental knowledge, mind knowledge), gives a whole new movie, starts a whole new movie in America, where everybody raises his hand and has had a vision. It’s really terrific and what’s going to come out of that is something that is going to astound the imaginary angels. Because people had visions before. My theory is that they were just pushed to the back of the brain. They weren’t socially usable. They weren’t anything you could work with. You could build a rock band on visions, get a lot of electricians working for you. You could make movies out of it, probably build industries out of (an) ecological a vision of everything intertwined in nature. You could have a whole shit-recycling industry and make money. You can make money on visions actually nowadays. You can reform the society or you can reconstitute the nature of the society or the direction, but one thing Kerouac said in 1961 that I always took as a keystone, a key statement when (Timothy) Leary visited and turned everybody on to psilocybin, Kerouac, high, turned around and said – “Walking on water wasn’t built in a day.” And I think that’s basically the situation in America – that, having had a vision, having dropped acid in the ’60s, or having had a breakthrough in the ’40s, it will take decades and decades to cell-by-cell reconstitute the body of America, to rebuild the physical body now that the mental picture has changed. Now that the mental body has changed, or now that there’s another consciousness. it would take as long to unbuild the old consciousness and recreate a physical world corresponding to our mental picture, it will take as long to do that as it took to build up this physical plant that we have here. In other words, obviously you couldn’t transform this relatively ungainly cafeteria into a metaphysically appropriate arcade filled with green bower leafs and natural sound systems without decades of slow delicate adjustment of the material world to our desire.
Student: It started to happen though. [glances around the room] Look at these chairs (sic). They came right out of the psychedelic…
AG: Yeah. Yeah, well, this very school, the conception of a school like Naropa or the notion of a Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics is something that would have required a spiritual breakthrough, freak-out, failure, grounded-ness and then beginning at the beginning with “close to the nose” – beginning at the beginning all over again and just sort of putting our worlds together, slowly. Yes?
Student: (Miracles take time)
AG: That’s the whole point. “Walking on water was not built in a day.” That was the meaning of that.
Student: Why is it “Disembodied Poetics” if the emphasis is getting back to the body?
AG: It’s a joke. Because he’s dead, Kerouac’s dead so he’s disembodied, so to speak. Also we were fools and we didn’t know what we were getting into and didn’t realize that it would be such a serious body. Also because of Beatnik poetic inspiration that made it sound funny and then I objected after a while, saying, “Wait a minute, this is contrary to all the basic principles enunciated by Pound and Williams and the Imagists,” but Trungpa said, “Ah, it’s pretty funny. Why don’t you leave it?”
Anne Waldman: It’s too late to change it.
AG: It’s too late to change it. Too late, too late.
AW: Bad luck.
to be continued