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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.
Ginsberg on Kerouac Inter ntervie viewers: ers: Semantic structur ucture, but it’s s natural. Ginsberg: Right, it’s structural and it’s natural as all good structures are, or enduring structures are. Inter ntervie viewers: ers: You are e one of the only poets in the U.S., and I would imagine in the history of the world, who has been able to survive financially from reading and writing poetry. . A lot of us would like to know if you have any advice for anybody else. Ginsberg: Write good poetry. . .Now wait a minute, I want to put a little clip into that. First of all, I didn’t anticipate this, I got pushed into this situation when the customs seized my book and the vice squad descended on Howl and put it through a trial so notorious that people started buying it because they thought it was a dirty book. Normally, when Howl was printed in a thousand copies by City Lights like any other book of poetry, that’s all they expected to sell. So it’s just an accident that I got pushed by the government into this situation. Before that, I made my living washing dishes in Bickford’s or mopping the floor of the May Company or vacuum cleaning, or working as a welder in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, or I had a year’s time on the ocean as a merchant seaman. I have several years’ time in market research. So I had whole different kinds of careers as a day laborer, night laborer, blue collar worker, white collar worker, and I always figured that I’d have to make my living some other way beside teaching or writing poetry. I think people should figure on that because there aren’t so many poets that can make it. And I don’t make enough money writing poetry and publishing it to support myself really—if I live real cheap, which I do, I live in penury, not poverty. Like the suit I’m wearing which is beautiful is Salvation Army, $12, including the alterations to make it look distinguished so I can wear my National Institute medal with it. But it’s all Salvation Army. I live on the lower East Side of New York in a real terrible slum rat street where the garbage is all over the street and I’ve been mugged and shot at with B.B. guns. So I’m not exactly living the life of luxury. But all I get from City Lights (which is my main publisher) is probably $7,000 a year. See I don’t make a lot of money. For years I used to read free. From 1955-65 I made it a business of reading for free and supporting myself by sailing in merchant ships up under the DEW line. Cause I didn’t think poetry and gold should mix. Particularly in that kind of America, where everybody was competing for gold, things would get too mixed up, I thought poetry should be something outside the system. I read now for money and I try to recycle the money to other poetic projects like this reading I’m doing in Washington. I get some money for reading when I’m broke and strapped and I have to pay off my debts. Cause I get extravagant like $200 phone bills and call Ann Arbor, call Ira Lowe* in Washington, call Ed Sanders, call Marty Lee of the Assassination Information Bureau here. You know to get it all together, call Princeton and get FBI Cointel- Program, Xeroxes from The Princetonian, call back to Ann Arbor to the Daily Michigan. “Have you got your story out, can you send me a copy so I can send it to the Assassination Information Bureau?” So I’ve got phone bills, and taxi bills and plane bills. My actual living expenses are pretty cheap. So I wouldn’t suggest anybody anticipate making money on poetry. Your college prof makes anywhere between $15,000 and $25,000-$30,000, and the super college prof, $35,000 . . .Vonnegut or Schlesinger . . . special chair at CCNY. I could do that if I wanted but I’d rather be at Naropa Institute where I get $1,000 for the whole summer. Because there’s a live scene there with student meditators and great teachers and Zen masters and Tibetan lamas. Kerouac didn’t make any money. In his biography I saw some years he had nothing. A thousand dollar check from his agent, two thousand. He had to sell my letters to move to Florida. William Burroughs doesn’t have any money, now, for instance. Burroughs, with all his books. He has money you know like a high school teacher, he doesn’t have a lot. Inter ntervie viewers: ers: Didn idn’t t he get anything for the film rights to Junky unky? Ginsberg: He got I think twenty grand, which stretched over a two-year period, which is about $10,000 a year, which is what? A grant from the NEA gets that, Guggenheim, or something. Gregory Corso has no money and he’s a productive poet. He’s a world figure, sort of, but he gets what? I think his royalties from New Directions are a couple thousand, if that. From City Lights maybe $500, $400, $300 a year. He has to live by his wits. So I would suggest poets learn to live by their wits. Or best like Gary Snyder, get some kind of honest labor job, carpentry, something planting trees, something involving reforestation. Or applying for grants, maybe that’s the way to do it. *Ira Lowe, a lawyer engaged in extracting the author’s dossiers from FBI, CIA and Secret Service files. Editors Note: Dennis McNally’s biography is entitled Desolate Angel. The Warren Tallman essay on “Kerouac’s Sound” is available in Open Letter, Third Series, No, 6, Coach House Press, 401 (rear) Huron St., Toronto, Ontario. Rick Peabody is the editor of A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation. Published by Serpent’s Tail. he can be found at www.gargoylemagazine.com 33
Page 1 and 2: Number 73 Summer 2014 £4.50 Lew We
Page 3 and 4: Number 73 Summer 2014 Editor ditor.
Page 5 and 6: fall 1972 I moved from California t
Page 7 and 8: Robert Duncan, Jess, and Friends Du
Page 9 and 10: Robert Duncan, Jess, and Friends ra
Page 11 and 12: BILL BURROUGHS IN AMSTERDAM by Eddi
Page 13 and 14: Bill Burroughs in Amsterdam ‘Patt
Page 15 and 16: A Half-American Writer During the p
Page 17 and 18: A Half-American Writer Another impo
Page 19 and 20: CONVERSATIONS with KEN KESEY edited
Page 21 and 22: company alongside Charles Olson, Ro
Page 23 and 24: abstract expressionist painters wer
Page 25 and 26: Jeffers is my God interest in it. H
Page 27 and 28: Cajoled Not notified of ancient Cur
Page 29 and 30: Ginsberg on Kerouac Buddhism, too,
Page 31: Ginsberg on Kerouac after being in
Page 35 and 36: ----------- It’s Monday morning.
Page 37 and 38: they discover a dead seal and say,
Page 39 and 40: We pick up all our garbage and spli
Page 41 and 42: eaders. Since I was driving taxi, I
Page 43 and 44: Write a Madder Letter if You Can by
Page 45 and 46: Write a Madder Letter if You Can ho
Page 47 and 48: Billy Burroughs’ Prediction by Ed
Page 49 and 50: Billy Burroughs’ Prediction Despi
Page 51 and 52: THE BEAT SCENE REVIEW SECTION Dexte
Page 53 and 54: Damn Fine Letters work but he reall
Page 55 and 56: Jack Kerouac The Haunted Life and O
Page 57 and 58: The Haunted Life talk on porches, l
Page 59 and 60: Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn The Coll
Page 61 and 62: Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn happens
Page 63: Diane di Prima having her long hair

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