o_190rdufvh17l119a81ci61qo68hta.pdf

Ginsberg on Kerouac
actually it’s the depressing case of American
commercialism getting a text screwed up.
Interviewers: Do you have any comment on the
Jar
arvis book, Visions of Ker
erouac
ouac?
Ginsberg: Well, Jarvis is kind of funny. It’s a lot of
local gossip. Kerouac kept patiently answering foolish
questions by Jarvis who’s a prurient questioner. So it’s
a kind of funny book. It’s useful for you know that
phase of Kerouac when he talked to local Charlie.
Charlie’s very shocked about my sleeping with Jack;
he says he doesn’t believe it or something. It’s kind of
naive. But it’s useful source material. The new book
by McNally I think is the best
account of his life. That’ll be coming
out in a year or so.
Inter
ntervie
viewers: ers: Music is fascinating
with some of your poems. When I
read things I put on music in the
background. Do you write much
with music going on, or are you
consciously aware e that you
ou’re
putting music on at all, no matter
what kind it is?
Ginsberg: Well following the example
of Hart Crane who wrote “The
Bridge” with a lot of Bessie Smith
records on or jazz or Bach, I used to
do that, but I find it interrupts my own rhythm. I get
a lot of influence through Kerouac by music,
particularly for that long breath saxophone cry that
you might get out of Lester Young, solos of Coleman
Hawkins, Charlie Parker’s long bird-flighted tunes
that begin and end finally at the end of a sentence-
MAWP! So the long breath, which is derived
somewhat from Black American speech and which
has been the inspiration to poets in America for the
last fifty years. Lately I’ve been working with
musicians. Well, not lately—I’ve been working with
Don Cherry since 68-69-70. We recorded together. I
set Blake’s “Songs of Innocence” to music. And I’m
still working on it. This past month I’ve been working
on Blake’s “Tiger” to get that together. It’s a
heartbeat. “Ti-ger, Tiger, burn-ing boom-boom,
boom-boom. . .” (chants part of the poem). And I’ve
been working with Bob Dylan who’s been teaching me
chords. So I’ve been singing blues and I put out a
book called First Blues and I worked with John
Hammond, Sr., who recorded Billie Holiday and
some Bessie Smith and Dylan and I made two
records of First Blues. And this last long poem I
have (The Rune) has a four chord rhapsody. Mostly
with music I’ve been working on rhymed matter. I
don’t know how to handle the long line with music, as
in -Howl-. I could in sort of Hebraic-Indian form “I
saw the best minds of my generation. . . .” (chants
“I get a lot of
influence through
Kerouac by music,
particularly for
that long breath
saxophone cry that
you might get out
of Lester
Young....”
32
first couple of lines from “Howl” in C chord). But I
don’t know ... could get something going that way, I’d
like to.
Lately what I’m into through the influence of
Ed Sanders—he being a classics specialist—is digging
the tremendous dance music rhythms of Greek
prosody, where they had feet that went BA-DAM
BAM BAH . . . BA-DAM BAM BAH. Ionic meters,
they’re called. Or DUN DA-DUN DA ... DUN DA-
DUN DA. “Moloch” was built that way. “Mo-loch
whose eyes are a thou-sand blind win-dows.” The long
feet, which are basically ancient Greek dance
rhythms. I didn’t know that—I just got my own ear.
But Sanders is making me more and
more conscious of that. He said that
he read “Howl” in Kansas City and
he’d been studying classics and
recognized old Greek dithyrambic
rhythms and that was his specialty. So
we’ve been working on that and he
may teach that at Naropa. So I’ve
been influenced by both irregular
asymmetrical rhythmical run-on bop
and the symmetrical meters of the
Greeks, as well as Poe and things like
that.
One other thing. We’ve been
talking about rhythm. Now tone,
notes. The big discovery I had in
putting Blake together, I realized that when I
pronounce my poetry I try to follow William Carlos
Williams, try to use the whole gamut of what does a
normal voice talk like. How many different tones do
we use? In his preface to Basil Bunting’s poems back
in the fifties, Pound wrote a poet should “follow the
tone leading of the vowels.” One vowel leads to
another in different tones and those tones are
emotional tones, for emphasis. We don’t in America
have a study of the vowel lengths like classical
prosody. The traditional measure of the line is accent,
rather than the length of the vowels which Pound
returned to American practice, emphasizing
particularly the tone leading of the vowels. So when I
began putting Blake to music I tried to figure out how
you’d go about saying it if you had to say it “Ti-ger,
Ti-ger,” high-low, high-low. So actually if you’ve got a
really good poem and you pronounce it as you would
speak it, you’ll get the different tones of the vowels
and you can actually make melody or you can
extrapolate it or project it into melody or into tunes
real easy but you gotta first be able to pronounce it
natural, because if you pronounce it like poetry it all
runs out to monotone—there’s no variation. If you
say “Ti-ger, ti-ger,” you’ll get a different tone and
you’ll be able to get a melody out of it.