David S Wills‘ recently-launched Beatdom Substack (which we mentioned here, earlier this month) continues to astonish, with richly-researched, informative, Ginsberg-related content. A couple of weeks ago, it was “Writing Advice From The Beats – Some quotes from Beat writers about how to produce great poetry and prose” – “I will start with Allen Ginsberg”, Wills writes, “partly because he largely created the Beat Generation through his social and professional efforts, and he was the first of them to really break through to the public consciousness with his astoundingly brave and creative work”.
“I’m sorry to keep going on with Ginsberg here” (Wills provides a number of illuminating aperçus) “but honestly, it’s hard not to include dozens of these quotes. He really did have some excellent insights.”
Among those cited:
“Tight formal poetry seems to me result of basic lack of technical understanding and not subtlety, mastery control etc., which academic poets like to think of themselves as “exhibiting”.”
“My own method is that I keep a journal and anything that goes into the journal is anything that goes into the journal. Then a couple months or years later I’ll go through it and pick out the things that look like poems. Things that have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and are in separate lines rather than paragraphs, and seem to have some kind of poem theme. Those I’ll separate out and type up and sometimes present them without any change. Sometimes I don’t realize that they are poems until they are typed up.”…
More recently, it was another of Wills’ extended essays (part of the reason for this forum – see, for example here and here) – “Allen Ginsberg in Southeast Asia – An in-depth exploration of Ginsberg’s 1963 trip through Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia”. (Wills, of course, is uniquely qualified to be writing this, being the author of World Citizen – Allen Ginsberg As World Traveller (2019), as well as having spent a significant time living in that part of the world (back in 2021, he lectured at the Siem Reap Writers Festival, presenting some portion of his research – “On the Road – Ginsberg in Siem Reap & Other Beat Tales”)
“I wrote this essay”, he declares, “because I felt that Allen Ginsberg’s time in Southeast Asia did not deserve to be a piddling footnote in his biography, a tiny side-trip of little consequence amidst greater journeys and events. Or maybe I did it selfishly, feeling aggrieved that a part of the world so close to my own heart had been so easily overlooked… Whatever the reason, the research led me to various facts that have never been included in books about the poet and which add to our understanding of him at that point in his life. It was enough to fill this modest essay, which attempts to explain where Allen Ginsberg went and what he did and wrote and thought in these places. There is much that remains a mystery, but therein lies the magic.”
“After some digging about in the archives, I was finally able to piece together some information about Ginsberg’s time here. I was able to establish a chronology of his travels, to locate many of the places he visited, and to identify some of the people he met with. From what I found, it appeared that he was impressed by the region. The scenery, the food, the drugs, the young male prostitutes, the intellectual companions, the history, the culture… From what few notes he made, it seems that he found Southeast Asia stimulating and enjoyable.”
“So, (then), why did he make almost no effort to document it? – It is quite possible that he was simply suffering from an intense traveller’s fatigue. By the time he arrived in Bangkok, the first stop on his flying visit, he had been on the road for twenty-six months. It had been rewarding but exhausting. He had been perpetually broke and often overwhelmed by the world around him. In the previous months, his health was poor and his relationship with Peter Orlovsky had deteriorated badly, too. He was disturbed by the military build-up in Vietnam and the possibility of nuclear apocalypse. It is likely he simply wanted to get to Japan and relax for a month in relative peace and quiet. Perhaps he needed more modernity than Southeast Asia could offer back then. Perhaps this part of the world was too similar to the one he had just left.”
Hettie Jones was among those featured in the New York Times annual end-of-year profiles, “The Lives They Lived” – “How Hettie Jones Helped Kickstart New York’s Beat Scene” – Read Jordan Kisner‘s brief overview/account of Hettie – here
Lenny Kaye’s birthday today
– and Patti Smith, the remarkable Patti Smith, will be 78 next Monday – more on that on Monday