Kenneth Koch Interviews Allen Ginsberg

Kenneth Koch Centennial this year.  The actual Centennial date is Thursday, but, by way of early celebration, here’s a reprint of Kenneth’s October 23rd, 1977 interview with Allen that originally appeared in The New York Times – Allen Ginsberg Talks About Poetry

KK: What do you like best about your own poetry?
AG: Cranky music.
KK: Meaning?
AG: Vowelic melodiousness, adjusted towards speech syncopation.
KK: Vowelic?
AG: Assonance, long mellow mouthings of assonance. Classic example: Moloch Moloch. In “Howl,” “Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets..” – and so on.
KK: You like the music in your poetry more than you like the content. Because your content is so striking and so..
AG:. My ambition for my content was to be totally personal. So it could rest on fact. I mean the world I knew. But the sound in my throat, that mellow music’s part of the world I know. So if I get “hot” poetically, the vowels heat up.
KK: Could you explain getting “hot” in poetry?
AG: I mean inspiration in a literal way, as deep breath flowing out unobstructedly as long vowels, musical.
KK: What brings on this state, if you can say anything about that? I believe some people have the idea about your work that you get poetic inspiration from, or have gotten it from, certain drugs, from certain political experiences, and so on. What’s the truth about this?
AG: The vowelic heat comes from single-minded devotional awareness of death. And the preciousness of the human body alive. Drugs have been a side experiment, just to cover those classical possibilities – Baudelaire, Gautier, old Bohemia. Buddhist Vajrayana studies reinforce natural inspiration. Because it’s practice of breath awareness.
KK:. What helps you most to be in a single-minded devotional state?
AG. Not trying to. It’s an accident, from resting in ordinary mind.

KK:. What things do you think keep you from having that experience, if any? Do your travels, your political activity, your literary ambitions, etc.?

AG:  All those, including the telephone and excessive masturbatory activity as a man of letters – publishing journals, teaching, trying to keep up with punk rock.

KK: What would you consider an ideal existence for yourself as a poet?

AG: Retiring from the world, living in a mountain hut, practicing certain special meditational exercises half the day, and composing epics as the sun sets. I did that actually, for ten days early September in a mountain hut in Southern Colorado.

KK:. Is that when you wrote “Contest of Bards”?
AG:  No, I didn’t do any writing then, purposely.
KK: . How long would you have had to stay to feel good about writing?
AG. About a thousand days. There is in Tantric study a specific three-year, three-month solitary retreat doing non-conceptual practices.
KK:. What does that do for you as a poet?
AG: It clears the mind of false poetry, let’s say. That is to say, self-centered poetry.

KK: You said earlier your ideal in poetry was to be completely personal. Can one be that and not be self-centered?
AG: That’s a problem I have, and I’m working on it. I think there is, though. One would still be looking out of one’s ego eyes, without attachment. If you sat for three years not doing anything you’d sure wind up that way, if you had a good teacher.

Q. About non-attachment – your poetry seems so admirably attached to the world.
A. I’d rather use the word “involved.”
Q. Could you explain the difference?
A. “Involved” means present in the middle of, with complete awareness, and active. “Attached” means neurotically self-centered in the activity. That’s the way I’m using those words.

Q Do you think your poetry may have gotten some of its energy from a conflict between being attached and wishing not to be?

AG:.No, I think the biggest energy is probably in the Moloch section of “Howl” and the “Hymns to Death” in “Kaddish” and the dramatic rants in this new “Contest of Bards” poem. That energy, in the first two cases, comes from total belief in the subject- annihilation of civilization, inevitability of death. In the “Contest of Bards” I found a dramatic form to go all-out into total self-belief through the mouths of characters. They can say anything I want. I don’t have to take responsibility.

KK: Could you say something more about “Contest of Bards”?

AG:. That poem came in a burst of all-night writing. Thirty pages – later to be touched up, unscrambled a little. A few times my attention lapsed and the page got cross-hatched with corrections. But mostly a continuous stream of improvisation. Symmetric and perfect. Like “Howl,” “Kaddish” and another poem I love, “September on Jessore Road” (at the end of Fall of America). Poe said a long poem was impossible because he couldn’t conceive of a long poem being written in one sitting. He thought you’d lose the lyric impulse if you worked on it over a period of years- months, years. But I think most poets have found that every few years they’re liberated into a composition. That they can accomplish a vast epic in one night. Vast thirty, forty pages. I think most poets have that experience – most big poets. How long did it take Shelley to write? “Ode to the West Wind“?  Tea-time? Before breakfast?

KK:. I think he wrote it in a park in Florence in one afternoon or one day.

AG: On the other hand, I write a little bit every other day. I just write when I have a thought. Sometimes I have big thoughts, sometimes little thoughts. The deal is to accept whatever comes. Or work with whatever comes. Leave yourself open.

KK: What do you have to have, or to be, to start with, in order to leave yourself open to produce good poetry?
AG: A little glimpse of death, and the looseness and tolerance that brings.
KK:  I think I understand about the glimpse of death, but haven’t ambition and passion and the wish for fame and power been at least as important in making you a good poet?
AG: No, I think a glimpse of the death of power, fame and ambition liberated me from rigid interpretation of those stereotypes. Not that they don’t exist in my head, but they exist side by side with taxicab noises and the gaps in between sounds.

KK: To go back to what you need to write a good poem. We’ve spoken of experience, mental states, and breath. What about the work of other poets? What part has that had in your writing?
AG: It changes from decade to decade.
KK: Let’s talk about this decade.
AG: Right now. This year I read all through Blake – early lyrics through “Milton,” “The Four Zoas” and “Jerusalem.” And his letters and marginalia. And I read “Paradise Lost” aloud.
KK:. Did you read it aloud alone or to someone?
AG: With a young bard. Next project, read all through Shelley and Spenser. I’d never read silently all the way through “Paradise Lost” before.

KK: I never read “Paradise Lost” in college. I read it when I was twenty-five, and I read all the way through in one night, I remember. It seems one can be inspired to read somewhat the same way one’s inspired to write.
AG: Yes, now that I’m over 50, and I want to read all the great ancient epics. Aloud. So I can hear their vowels.
KK: Allen, what you say suggests a great appetite; has a Rabelaisian sound. “All the epics” you want to read. Comment.
AG:. Quite. The ones that exist and the ones that don’t exist. Beginning with “Gilgamesh.”
KK:. We were talking before about what you liked about your own poetry. I know the subject sounds a little egomaniacal and odd but, in fact, what a poet likes about his poetry is what’s usually called his taste- or that part of it he uses when he’s writing. So what else do you like? You mentioned its music.
AG:The other thing I like is that I think it’s witty or funny. That is the phrasing itself.

KK:. Could you give an example or two?
AG: “Death which is the mother of the universe“ (from “Kaddish”) – The “which” there is weird. In that it sounds archaic, and it means quite literally an im-person. “Which” not “who”. And it sounds better in the mouth. Better than a vulgar “who”. There’s a funniness to the manipulation of the syntax.

KK:. You have a way of speaking easily and openly about things (including what you like in your work)- I wonder if Whitman influenced you at all to be able to do that.

AG: In the “Journals” I put myself down a lot too. There’s a lot of depreciation. I’m just registering what comes in my head. I wouldn’t be studying Buddhism if I thought I were ego-less. I wouldn’t be such a religious fanatic. As for registering what’s going on in one’s feelings, it’s too much work to do anything else but reproduce as exactly as possible the fluctuations.

KK:  Do you feel this makes you a disconcerting person?
AG:  I try to be less and less disconcerting as I grow older.

KK:. Could you tell me another line in your work that has the witty quality you like?
AG: “Taxi September along/Jessore Road/Oxcart skeletons drag charcoal/load.” – There’s a certain nostalgia in the first line, as of some old supper-club lyric (“September in the Rain“) followed by a Daumier-like, objectively-observed fact-condensed into cartoon, literally, charcoal loads dragged by oxen whose ribs are showing – minute particulars, yet in the first line there’s this funny Jerome Kern sentimentality, but the statement I’m making is all newspaper-true.
KK: Did you feel the Jerome Kern sentimentality at the time of the taxi ride or when you wrote the poem?
AG: Both. That’s what I meant by awareness of mortality.
KK: Please explain.
AG: Part of the sentimental nostalgia of show tunes like “September Song” is a little glimmer of actual feeling of the transitoriness and dream-illusory nature of our presence here on the scene. At the same time as the gruesome bones of suffering show in the oxcart skeletons. Same time, there’s an odd humor in noticing they’re dragging a load of coal through the mud. I don’t know if that answers the question. In some respects the lines are humorous because they reflect ordinary mind. What actually passes through your head. Which you recollect and accept if you’re a poet.