Allen Ginsberg at Georgian Court, 1995, Q & A continues: – see here
Student (8): Were there ever any minority black Beats, in the line of Leroi Jones/ Amiri Baraka...
AG: Quite interesting. In the “60s there was quite a liaison, during Baraka’s time, between the black musicians and the white poets, black poets and white poets (like A.B. Spellman, David Henderson, Ishmael Reed, Quincy Troupe, among others of the famous black poets). Ted Joans shows up all the time, he’s in New York now (1995). There are quite a few women poets that were cultivated in the end, survived, it isn’t well known. Very few people have read Diane Di Prima, a great poet. And of the later generation Anne Waldman, the next generation down.
Student (9): Respecting the influence that you and your Beat generation have to sort of give a voice to a counterculture or something that…
AG: We’re giving a voice to our own subjective perceptions as individuals, but everybody has subjective perceptions, so it gets generalized to be called, well that’s the counterculture because it isn’t like television. It’s not a counterculture, I think it’s the main culture. The television is some kind of a cancer.
Student (9): Yes, I wish you were not a counterculture but…
AG: But we did have a party line and a unified view.
Student (9): Right, but you gave voice and, in a sense, unified a lot of us…
AG: Yeah. “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin – [Allen quotes here a line from Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (Act III, Scene III) – it also became the title of a famous O.Henry short story] – or the old saying, “What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.” [Allen quotes from Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism” here] – Somebody says something that’s real, everybody says, “oh yeah, I thought that too”
Student (9): About I think, two years ago, I heard Ram Dass speak at Princeton and his phrase was if you thought the” 60s were something, wait until the ’90s. (sic)
AG: Well, he’s always sort of, like, dramatizing.
Student (9): My real question is, do you see young people today finding a voice, like the poets in your generation? Do you see that capability to galvanize us?
AG: Yeah actually, among the younger poets that I like, there’s a young music poet called Beck. Anybody know him? He’s like a really good poet and really unique and individual and goes back to old blues traditions. Would you count him a poet? I think he’s really interesting. There’s a nineteen-year-old kid in Chapel Hill called, Geoff Manaugh, who just astounded me with a couple of, two, pamphlets in a row. One was written when he was eighteen, one when he was nineteen, and published it. That were amazing poems, that really blew my mind and actually made me cry. It was still nice.
Previous generations have always turned up like one generation after mine, the two I know, there’s Anne Waldman, Ed Sanders, Ted Berrigan, Bob Dylan, the whole.., the Beatles, (who were all poets, with music or without). Following that, but they’re not, they haven’t been picked up on properly by the academy, they’re not in anthologies yet – poets like David Cope, Antler. Cope is … where is he? Michigan. Antler, Milwaukee. There’s a great poet I think, a very good poet, near great, in New Brunswick, Eliot Katz. He’s a social worker there, writes long lines and social calls, really good, and was a spark-plug around Rutgers for a little while and is still there. There’s a really interesting magazine from Hoboken called
Long Shot which carries a lot of these people. So, I think sure, you know, first of all, there’s such a renaissance of poetry-reading, and poetry workshops, and rap, and cafe- and coffee-shop readings, that the compost is there for the growth of a lot of genius. There’s an audience. And so, a lot will grow out of that, (and a lot has come, as far as I can see -I don’tthink that Maggie Estep, particularly, goes to the Lollapalooza, she’s more of an entertainer). So, sure. Yes.
to be continued