We recommended here last week (and even briefly quoted from it) John Feins’ recently re-published 1991 interview – part 1. We now have the republication of the equally substantive and engaging part 2 – “Double Exposure “ -“Allen Ginsberg lives a public life twice over – through his actions and through his poetry”:
“AG: …everything in the universe is subjective or personal.
JF: Do you really believe that as a poet?
AG: Well, yeah. Everybody’s different, everybody’s life is different, everybody’s universe is different, everybody’s interpretation is different.
JF: But after all these years of taking political stands and fighting for particular….
AG: It’s fighting for one subjectivity against another. Fighting for a paranoid or claustrophobic subjectivity as against an open or more graceful one, maybe. Oh yeah. I mean fascism is a psychological state. Power. Some kind of, not democracy, but sort of comradely community is another psychological state…”
On practical assessment:
“JF: You talked last year about when you are done with a poem, reading through others eyes is something you do. How do you do this?…..ls that something you came up with yourself?
AG: Well, I found that I was doing it and then noticed I was doing it. If you do it, consciously what I would say is make a list of everybody whose intelligence you admire, I mean a mental list … you don’t have to write it down; and then check out your texts through their views, so to speak. Put yourself in their place… How would they react to this beforehand? And especially with the people who you’ve learned from, people that have imprinted their insight or intelligence on yours…”
On fame:
AG: One main thing is most of the time it doesn’t feel that way. You know, most of the time you don’t feel famous. Most of the time you’re just doing whatever you’re doing, padding around the house in carpet slippers… But from very early times on I had an interesting idea about it, I didn’t consciously seek fame, though apparently, I must have. I wasn’t conscious of seeking it. I thought I was seeking beauty or truth or social truth, and I think that’s why I’m famous, because the pursuit was not of fame itself, but of another virtue which by its own nature would lead to fame..So the fame was a secondary quality and a fallout of looking for intensity and for love and for whatever, social proclamation or action, or retribution or whatever…”
He speaks also of his Blake visions and visionary experience :
JF: How about the legend of the Blake vision and its existence in you today?
AG: I think it’s maybe the strongest influence I ever had in my life on anything. But I no longer know what it means…
These are mere snippets. We strongly advise you to read the whole interview.
Another interview – Allen was celebrated in India last week on the occasion of the Centennial at the Exide Kolkata Literary Meet.
SS: Ginsberg had an extended tryst with spirituality. He claimed to have seen God in 1948. Was there anything other than spirituality and drugs that drove him to this extended India tour?
DB: He wanted love. He wanted a God-man he could love…a guru where there would be real love.
SS:What insights did your research reveal about Kolkata poets’ mutual influence on Ginsberg’s development?
DB: They were very secular…communists or socialists. Allen was very keen to talk politics…his mother was a communist. He wanted to know about their lives, their struggles. I think they were like a Bengali version of who he had been while at Columbia University.
SS: What do you think Ginsberg would say about the right wing-ruled India today?
DB (laughs) So, you want to get me into trouble? I think he would be very discouraged. The same way he felt when India went all militant against China. Overnight he saw the peaceful, spiritual Indians become raging anti-China demonstrators. He was disillusioned.
SS: What about Ginsberg in America today? I imagine to be a poet like him in this climate of global rise of the right wing would be suffocation.
DB: He would have found a way. I wish we had someone like him now.
Once again, these are just excerpts. See the full interview – here
Here‘s observations too from Subodh Sarkar
One year on – Remembering beloved Marianne Faithfull
See our last year’s celebratory posting – here (and our 2015 posting – here)
Some of Marianne’s Favorite Books
Some of Marianne’s Favorite Music
“Broken English is the Perfect Tribute to Marianne Faithfull”
“Broken English”, the Iain Forsyth–Jane Pollard Marianne Faithfull movie, (pre-release) continues to get stellar reviews