ON THE RECORD, ALLEN GINSBERG: POETIC LICENSE

Allen Ginsberg speaks his mind on hypocrisy, compassion adn the Establishment. Daily Pennsylvanian: Why do you think the beat generation holds such mystique for writers today? Allen Ginsberg: I don't know if it's a mystique, I think has some practical use -- Particularly now when the government has returned to the conservative and neo-conservative repression of individual expression in the sense that there seems to be an increasing underclass and a very strong elite with a lot of money plunging the government into deeper and deeper debt as under Reagan and Bush, transferring the rights from the middle class and the poor to the rich and an increasing number of people in jails -- since poverty breeds crime, an increasing number of jails -- and increasing the police monies and again increasing the military budget in arming the country, and simply reading a lot of misinformation about "bell curves" and intelligence in minority groups so that finally the new group is [beginning] a war of the counter-culture?and calling it a war. So, in that sense it is oppression, both economic and cultural -- trying to cut off money for the arts and increase money for the military. Naturally, the individual wars of people who are not getting rich on this scam has more and more importance. The sense of individuality, self-empowerment, peace protests, sympathy or compassion for the poor -- a traditional Christian value -- and there is candor instead of hypocrisy. A personal candor instead of a political hypocrisy of the political elite. And we're a real moral minority, only voted in by 38 percent of the eligible voters. So what was interesting about the Beat Generation was candor, some sense of liberal idea, something called? sexual openness, curiosity without individual consciousness, inquisitiveness about marijuana and psychedelics, a social program for legalizing grass and psychedelics, and in providing medical treatment for addiction, and/or counselling for addiction, providing some kind of meditative Eastern thought as a counterweight to the monotheistic, judgmental Pat Robertson fundamentalism. Pat Robertson and the Ayatollah are the same thing. Some of the counterculture is considered with ecology, whereas the new government is trying to abandon all the regulations on restaurants. And the values that the Beat Generation has proposed -- respecting other life forms, not cutting down all the forests, not killing more species, not being species-centric, that there is some sense of balance in nature, some kind of compassion for all living beings. All these values are being really desecrated by this moral minority. A minority of moralistic people who are basically hypocrites. And their hypocrisy is obvious. They talk about balancing the budget, putting across Constitutional amendments, but they're exactly the same people -- the Reaganites and others-- who plunged the nation into a $4 trillion debt. You talk about the liberals and Democrats taxing and taxing, but it was the Right wing and the conservatives that plunged our nation into this debt, so that now 14 percent of any of our tax money goes to paying interest on that debt. They talk about a free market but there's no free market in drugs, so alcohol and nicotine, the real killer drugs, are legal, and the more mild drugs are not psychologically damaging -- like marijuana -- are instead sold on the black market? If you read today's Daily Pennsylvanian you see a couple of letters on that subject by the students of the Wharton School that make a lot of sense -- applying free market principles to the drug problem and pointing out that if the prohibition which is causing the rise in organized crime, organized gang warfare, among these, corrupted the police, and created impossible situations where we have a 1,400,000 people in jail and build more and more prisons cause the courts more and more and another $12 billion drug enforcement agency budget -- when all of that money could be used for drug rehabilitation and education. We need a more sensible drug policy. So we have a very neo-conservative attack on the drug problem which is directly contrary to the free market philosophy. And the whole idea of a free market anyway is utterly absurd. The military is not a free market, the oil industry is not a free market -- the government has subsidized it to rescue oil companies. The banking industry is not a free market, the government has to pay billions of dollars -- hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize the savings and loans catastrophe. The auto industry, the transport industry is not a free market, we pay for highways but not for railroad lines. The highways are public, the railroad lines are privatized, or we sell them off. And as far as media, there's censorship on the radio, there is not a free market there. And what free market there is is co-opted by the monopolies and now they're going to get rid of the slightly liberal, counter-cultural educational television and radio. So they set up a political move to start the roll of descent of counter-cultural expression-- not only by withdrawing government funds but by imposing direct censorship and it isn't just that they say "we don't want the citizens to have to pay for these radical ideas on television and radio." They impose to direct censorship on non-government supported media, radio and television, through the [Senator Jesse] Helms law?In 1988, it all went through, sponsored by Helms and the Heritage Foundation, signed by Reagan. It directed the FCC ban all "indecent" material from the radio 24 hours a day. And that put poems like Kaddish which I read the other day and Howl and a number other poems off the air until 6 a.m. Well, at first it was 24 hours a day then we fought it in the law. We beat the law back because it was unconstitutional. But there still is a ban from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. So there's real censorship. It isn't just something proposed, but something that's accomplished by the Right wing, the neo-conservatives. They keep talking about a free market, but actually its the actual opposite. So there's no sector in American economy which is not subsidized or controlled in some way by the government to the advantage of the rich. And they get richer by the S&L; subsidies, Chrysler subsidies and this new GATT and NAFTA arrangements make no real provision for ecological carefulness. And we'll lose American jobs, too, without guaranteeing the right of labor unions to organize with Mexico labor unions. Without guaranteeing minimum ecological standards in other countries. So the whole neo-conservative political program is a hypocritical, self-contradictory scam. And the Beat Generation people proposed something completely different as an American basis -- and that is compassion. DP: At the time when you were writing Kaddish and Howl, did you have any contact with the more "academic" poets at that time, such as Robert Lowell? And if so, do you feel you had anything in common with them? AG: Yes?when I came to Harvard University to read Howl in 1959, before the reading I had tea with Lowell. And [later] when I was reading Kaddish at Harvard, at that occasion he got up and left the room and I couldn't understand it. I thought maybe he thought it was too vulgar. But 18 years later we gave a reading together in Saint Mark's Church, in New York. And afterwards he came over my house and he brought me this striped tie and I finally got the courage to ask him why he had left. And he said he was so overwhelmed by the emotion of the poem that he was afraid he would break up and so he had to leave the room. So what I took paranoically for disapproval was actually his strong emotional reaction to the poem, which he later called a masterpiece, a terrible masterpiece -- I quote, "a masterpiece...a terrible masterpiece." But when I was at Columbia I knew a lot of poets. Robert Lowell, John Hollander and others -- we were all contemporaries. DP: Do you feel that you've been revered by people for the right reasons? AG: I didn't know I was revered. I am banned off the air. For the wrong reasons. I think a younger generation doesn't know much more than Howl, that's why I was glad to read Kaddish -- because it's a stronger poem and more important. It has more of an emotional impact. And there are more obvious senses of compassion and humor and tragedy than Howl. Its misinterpreted often as an angry wrathful poem. As the word protest is misinterpreted. "To protest against something" is a senseless phrase, because "protest" actually means etymologically "pro," in favor, and "test," witnessing. To witness in favor of something. So you can say a peace protest makes sense. Some people see as a protest poem as something renouncing the government or stuff like that, not understanding it or coming to terms with it -- Howl, I'm talking about, which is more a gesture of friendliness. DP: Do you think the word "protest" is something that has become misunderstood particularly in the past 30 years? AG: Well, its always been misunderstood, maybe particularly in the past 30 or 40 years. But most people who know English realize that protest means to witness in favor of something. "I'm innocent, I'm innocent!"-- "Methinks the lady doth protest too much." Witness too much. Declare in favor. Protest means to declare in favor. DP: Besides William Carlos Williams, who were your other influences? Did Henry Miller have an impact on you? AG: Not much. No, more Kerouac and Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Ezra Pound, Whitman, Blake, Rimbaud?Guillaume Apollinaire, Tristan Corbiere, Cendrars, a lot of French poets?a lot of Dostoyevsky. And Herman Melville, and Poe. Those I would say are my main influences. DP: I was wondering if you could speak about the influences your religion and your homosexuality have had on you. AG: I'm of Jewish background so there's that Jewish intellectual cafeteria cosmopolitan background. That's what Stalin accused the Jews of being, cosmopolitan. That's what the neo-conservative people believe the people of the counterculture are -- cosmopolitan. Now I'm a Buddhist practitioner -- Buddhist Awareness practice. I practice meditation to enlarge the awareness of my own mind, and it sensitizes me to things happening around me. So in Buddhist practice, the notion of spontaneity is basically the sexual act. DP: What do you think of literary criticism of your work? AG: Some has been interesting, some has been dopey. The best criticism I think you get is from poets themselves. Robert Creeley has been helpful, William Carlos Williams wrote a couple prefaces to some of my books. Kerouac has made some very interesting [criticism]?Not all of it has been very friendly. Some of the critics have made a lot of mistakes. DP: How do you feel that you have been misunderstood? AG: Well, first of all, people don't understand Eastern thought or the notion of spontaneity in writing. It's a very ancient practice. Both in old Hindi work and in Eastern composition. Indian, Tibetan, and Nepalese, as well as Western. As well as in dance, painting, the notion of action poetry, movement of the mind and the movement of the hands, at the moment of composition is what the subject is. It's not very well understood. Kerouac and I have been accused of having no discipline. When actually, we had a stronger discipline than most academics? It's a misunderstanding of the middle-class critics. The New York Times Book Review, the Times Magazine said that we were angry, but they were angry at us. What we were proposing was compassion, but they mistook it for anger. As I was saying Howl was mistaken for being an angry poem, when I thought actually it was extremely humorous and sensitive and touching. DP: How old were you when you first knew you were going to be a writer? AG: My mother was a writer, so it was sort of the family business. Maybe Kerouac put some of it in me. DP: How do you think a young poet should go about studying writing, and do you think an academic education is necessary or relevant? AG: Kerouac never finished college. And I doubt Dostoyevsky did. It's useful. The most important thing is to connect with some older poets. And pick up on the older generation. Make friends with your peers and your older friends. DP: Has being famous influenced your productivity as a poet? AG: Sometimes it can be difficult answering letters, which takes up a lot of time. DP: Do you answer all of the letters you receive? AG: I did for a number of years. I can't any more. I have a secretary who tries to answer some. I read everything, though -- at least I did up until this year. DP: Do young poets send you their work? AG: Yes, I get piles of letters a day. I can't read them all. For many years I worked with the poet Ted Berringer and he answered some of the letters. I paid him to answer them. And I wanted him to answer them, because he's a good poet. DP: Did he critique them? AG: Yes he did. He answered them. He would read it, critique, and answer it. DP: Are you flattered or offended by young poets who try to imitate your style? AG: Oh, I'm flattered if they're intelligent about it and if they do something interesting. It's usually a drag -- when he doesn't get the point, doesn't get the humor, he only gets the affect. He imitates only Howl. He botches the rhythmics. He just doesn't get it. He doesn't get the verse line. He doesn't get the integrity of the verse line. He repeats everything over and over again, and that's the thing. Rather than having a sensibility of verse line. It's a different thing if somebody tries to adapt a style, as I adapted Kerouac's. Like Bob Dylan, who said he was influenced, or the modern rap poets, who make use of the basic idea. DP: Do you ever feel frustrated by the limitations of language? AG: No. Except for sometimes when I'm high on acid or something like that, a psychedelic. Then it's not that I'm not frustrated by its limitations of language, I'm frustrated by my inability to focus on one subject, to keep my mind concentrated it takes meditation practice. Then you can express it in words because you're in a state of ecstasy. DP: Do you think that young writers who come from sheltered backgrounds should try to somehow force experience into their lives, or try to use what they have as material? AG: I wouldn't say force -- obviously you shouldn't "force" anything. Some people should look to expanding their experience. Sexual, travel, understanding the way underclass lives, living in the underclass for a while. DP: Are you ever uncomfortable because you're famous for poetry -- which I would assume to be an intimate expression of who you are -- instead of being famous for being a movie star or a tycoon? AG: It's more honorable than being rich, or being a movie star. No, I feel like I got a good deal. I'm not famous for being famous, I'm famous for poetry. I'm not famous for being rich, I'm famous for poetry. That's something most people would envy. I really think that's a very honorable kind of fame. It's terrific. If you have to be famous at all, I'd rather be famous for being an artist than for having bought out Chrysler or something. Or enacted a law censoring television. Or piled on sales taxes to poor people. Or refused to give medical treatment for the underclass. Or declared a war.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.