Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

interviewed & recorded by iain sinclair

Ginsberg walks in: characteristic flat-food waddle. Archetypal non
athlete. He wears a white linen jacket and his trousers are somewhat too short, hairy ankles dividing them from the white tennis socks. He is tired, slumps down, confronted with yet another situation, two more faces to store in the memory bank, two more names for the list, two more people wanting a favour, setting up a deal, asking for a poem, an appearance, the use of his name, a loan, a taxi fare, bail money, a floor to sleep on, advice, a promise.

   He's just been down at the BBC: Panorama. Window on the World.  Permanently bricked over. The programme was a total cop-out, & he went into it openly, his energies free, & it exhausted him. The opportunity was lost.

   The men from the big glass tower took the administrative trouble of gathering Carmichael, Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, all in one room - & then forced them to talk about pre-arranged subjects, with the eternal middle-man, faceless, voice-of-reason, sitting in, keeping them under control.

   Ginsberg went through with it & it was futile. And now he is depressed.

   So anyway, what do we want? A film, huh? Ok - but he's pretty
busy right now, but ... only two of us, doing it on a shoestring, a
platform for some workable ideas, say what he wants to say, say it
fresh, no talk-throughs, no studios, might be liberated, might be spontaneous, might be authentic. Ok, listen, I'll try. Let's say thursday.

   Then the phone rings & Ginsberg is nodding, writting down an
address, he's got to go to this party, holland park. Got to leave right
now, actually. Chris says that he'll drive him over there. Ginsberg
accepts. It saves him one cab fare.

   Confused, we embark into the twilight. Ginsberg sits beside chris
in the front, smoking his english cigarettes, not wanting to talk. But the cider is still cloudy in Chris' brain. The sweat & the adrenalin are
pumping. His hand is clammy on the wheel, his throat dry: and i'm
like a drugged donkey, sprawled heavy across the back seat, a prop, looking up at the lights.

   Chris drives nervously, breaking hard, does not know his London, open to sudden manic inspirations. This drive is yet another fiction, left over from the days when Ginsberg was a character in the novels of Jack Kerouac.

   We bolt down Oxford Street, kamikaze u-turn & back up the
other side. More streets, rubbing across the window, strange &
familiar. The blackened tops of buildings, goldbrown muddy light of
early evening. Hulks of grey stone. Oxford Street again. I keep see-
ing that waterfall of neon, Studio One. Chris is driving faster, shut
off in a black claw of silence. Today's second clean shirt sticking to
his neck. Finally even Ginsberg realises that something is wrong &
insists on getting out to ask the way. A policeman puts him right.

   Down Bayswater Road, the park shadowy on our left, sinister
hotels on our right, a big argument develops between Ginsberg &
Chris, both men tired & on edge, dredging up old confusions.

   Chris wants Ginsberg to tell him the way out of the situation as
it has developed in western culture: the deadlock. He asks, in a tight
voice, a long question, tortured in its syntax, schitzophrenic in its
content - something about: interpersonal, religio-spiritual, linear
structures, of colonized, formalized, institutionalized, inhuman, containment. He is demanding help & refusing it at the same time, by the way he lays it out, the reality is shattering.

   Ginsberg replies very loudly, very determinedly: I DO NOT KNOW I DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU ARE ASKING ME.

   But Chris blindly pursues his point, or tries to find it again in a
labyrinth of - words. Ginsberg sits there, hunched & miserable, grunting. Then he notices a group of heads on the corner outside Finch's Wine Lodge & he says, 'WOW, LOOK AT THOSE GUYS,' and is amazed that nobody is calling them queer or attacking them. England is learning toleration. He says. Stroking his beard.

   Half a mile on & we're caught at some traffic lights: a pale dusted young man leans in at the window, a nodding opiate mask,
whispering, 'Gins-berg / Gins-berg / Gins-berg.' As we pull away his friend is shaking his head & denying it & trying to treat it as just another vision; visions were cheap then, being bought by the ounce.

   Albion is rising. Says Ginsberg. As we find the street the house
the lighted window open to the hot summer night, the noise & talk & disembodied laughter of the party.

   Ginsberg leaves us, pulls himself up out of the belly of the green
car. He does not invite us to come in & join the party.

thursday july 27 / hanover terrace

GEOFFREY: It seems that Grogan & you are the only people who have any viable method for guiding & controlling the inception of mass psychosis which has to take place in order that any change of consciousness can come about.

GINSBERG: Is that what Laing said? I wasn't thinking in terms of
inducing a mass psychosis. Of course, his definition of psychosis is: a breakthrough of the old consciousness formation & an insight into the new.

GEOFFREY: How about spiking the water supplies of the big cities?

GINSBERG: Yeah, the problem is that there is so much force already. I think that spiking the water supplies or forcing people to change their consciousness can only result in the kind of change that brings about more deception & hostility & force.- The whole thing is deception & hostility & force anyway.

GEOFFREY: You go for seduction rather than rape?

GINSBERG: Wooing. Wooing rather than rape.

GEOFFREY: Will it work in time?

GINSBERG: I don't know. I don't think it's important whether it works in time. I think the important thing is to stay where you really have to be. If it can work it will work. Otherwise let the dolphins take over. The dolphins are just as intelligent & they can live in water. It wouldn't be such a bad thing. We all have that resevoir of awareness which has been repressed or suppressed or conditioned, but as anyone knows who has experienced a unitive experience or an LSD experience, it's there all along, the awareness. What Blake & all the visionaries have been saying for centuries is that we all have the awareness but we're not using it. It's not up to the surface, as the analysts will say.

   Under the realisation of conditions of threat the awareness DOES
come to the surface. Even the LSD is not finally necessary. And the
condition of threat is now apparent in America - enough to make people break out into violence. Is the condition of threat apparent yet to the civilized portion of the planet? I think so.

GEOFFREY: There were always the equivalents of LSD around.

GINSBERG: There were always the equivalents of LSD around, ok. The whole point of the 1945-55 breakthrough that was called Beat was that it was a natural breakthrough of that kind of awareness. Though at that time we did use psychedelics also. I started with peyote in '52. And there was mescaline around. The Doors Of Perception was written in '45. And Michaux had been working in that area also. Artaud even earlier. When he went to the Tarahumare Indians for peyote it reconfirmed what he knew already.

   So I think that the metal crust on the planet finally sinks under its own weight of consciousness.

   Even if LSD disappeared & all the beards & all the hair disappeared the awareness would spread. The actual heavy metal conditions are at a dead end.

   Is it LSD that's turning-on american youth or is it the practical
problem of having to face going to Vietnam?

   Even if the police captured all the LSD manufacturers like Owsley, put everyone in goal, I think, Z A P, everything would spread anyway. you can't stop it now.

   Kerouac used peyote very early. But he had his own natural thing which was so powerful that the LSD was like a cartoon for him. He
doesn't dig LSD particularly. He has his delirium tremens - as described in BIG SUR, where he says, 'talk about LSD horrors....... this is ten times worse.' He has his own thing.

   Kerouac's breakthrough is described in a book called THE
SCRIPTURES OF THE GOLDEN ETERNITY, which is a Buddhist thing. And one long paragraph in that is a description of how he was out in the backyard one night doing some deepbreathing exercises, because he started turning-on to Buddhist meditation very early, around 1948 - it was in Jacksonville, Florida. He was sitting under a tree, when he took a deep breath & all of a sudden he fell flat on the ground in a faint, with his eyes closed, & saw the golden light permeating everything.

   This is a description of a phenomenon which is familiar to anyone
who has taken LSD, or who has had the experience of a divine suchness to the whole substance that we are involved in: the place where we are.

   Then you have the big argument as to whether it's real or unreal,
whether it corresponds to the old mystical,experience or doesn't correspond to the old mystical experience.

   The good people take both sides.

GEOFFREY: By what practical steps do you envisage the change of consciousness coming about? Do you envisage people setting up their own self-satisfying communities & these communities spreading, other people forming similar communities?

GINSBERG: Once you have a large group of people who have touched the basic ground of their own nature, or the nature of the universe, then they are mutually supportive. They reaffirm that insight constantly instead of discouraging it.

   If you have a guy that flips-out & sees he's in the middle of the
universe & comes rushing into his house to tell his family & they put him down & say 'stop that' or 'you're nuts', then he tends to reform his old consciousness, or readjust back to the mechanical/rational thinking.

   But if you have a cat who flips-out in the middle of Hyde Park
with five thousand people around him or up in Newcastle in Morden Tower & suddenly touches on a new sense of being & there are fifty kids around him who know the same thing & say, 'Yes. of course. it's true', then the experience is reconfirmed, validified; the consciousness does not close up over him.

   The young have models & examples set up in front of them on a
high level: the beatles, the stones & all the poets & writers. An inter-
national conspiracy of seraphs to provide language models, gestures of the hand, winks of the eye, touch, orgy.


in the park

IAIN : Is it a good time for you now?

GINSBERG : Yeah, it's a good time. The only time I get a chance
to write. One of the few times when it's quiet & meditative & there is the roar of change.

IAIN : In your poem THE CHANGE you seem to renounce visions & the drugs you used to form that visionary consciousness.

GINSBERG : It got really scary for me. Then it was all right & I
could be scared & live with that because I was more important than
the LSD.

   It's not that the human need not be afraid of the change. They have to say screw the change if the change is going to be mean.

   In a way I renounced LSD & at the same time I got such a flash
of my own presence & the presence of everything around, because my mind was not fantasizing about LSD. My mind came back to the present - which is where I was. So I got a sort of LSD high that way. A unitive experience based on the strength of compassion for myself. And that made it allright to take LSD. The LSD was no longer a god, or an authority above my own authority.

   After which I went to Vancouver & had a big meeting with all
the poets: Olson, Creeley, Philip Whalen, Denise Levertov, Robert
Duncan. All the seraphs of that area.

   Olson declared that history was ended - in the sense that what we
know of history is only what we know from images left behind. Those images were an abstraction from the actual event - so history was just another poem as interpreted by those poets, some of them bum poets,who happened to be around. And now there has been a change of consciousness to include event as part of the abstraction of history.

IAIN : What are you doing in your poetry now?

GINSBERG: Ah, scribbling - that's all. I don't have any schematic
thing. I just follow what happens.

   I have got this long poem of which WICHITA VORTEX SUTRA is a part. And what it is is travelling around the United States using a tape recorder, a Uher, in a volkswagon, a camper, with Peter at
the wheel & I'm in the back at a table. And I include all the relevant
data that comes to my attention: the car radio - whatever newspapers are lying around in the car - the news broadcasts coming through - the landscapes through the window - the stops for coffee - the plains or forests or mountains we are passing through - the thoughts going on in my head - portions of the conversations in the car. In other words, all the simultaneous data of those instants, with the taperecorder funelling them, reducing them to language.

   Probably the sound tapes are more interesting than the page itself. Though reading it aloud, acting it out for the audience, can be
interesting too.


august / the summerhouse

We break off there. A quiet moment. All sitting back. Breathing deep. Geoffrey looking at the ground, immersed in his own crust of thought. Ginsberg stroking his beard.

   And then. The telephone rings. The girl comes out of the
summerhouse naked holding the phone aloft long legs small breasts dark glasses very pale. And Ginsberg yells at Robert 'Get that get that get that oh you missed it again' as Robert goes on quietly checking his lens & the girl unconcerned by the whole thing walks back into the summerhouse.

   We follow Ginsberg inside. For our last session of talk. But there
is a cloud over it. Something. Is not. Quite. Right.

   The room itself is a good one, an easy one to imagine holding his
london life. It is calm & restful. Like a fish graveyard. We can hear
a shower running somewhere behind the mirror that covers one wall.
   There is a typewriter. A heap of letters. A narrow bed draped with bright coloured rugs. A sitar. Books: ten or twelve, mainly paper-backs, NOVA EXPRESS among them. And a bottle of Gordon's Gin.

   We sit on the floor. Ginsberg smokes for a moment & then says
that he's ready.

IAIN : The more we read, the more we talk, the more we go on with this thing, the more it seems that everything is the same. That the Diggers the Provos The Hippies, black rioting in Detroit, guerrillas in Bolivia, Geoffrey talking to you in the garden, wherever it is, it's all
part of the same global erruption.

GINSBERG: Apparently.

IAIN: Is this true, do you think?

GINSBERG: You said so. I don't know. How the fuck should I
know?

GEOFFREY: It's like the end of the cycle. All the religions seem to
have forseen this. It's thought that every 500 years or so the doctrine was going to decline radically & at the end there would be a period when the doctrine was pretty well gone & presumably after that a new doctrine would arise & a new cycle.

GINSBERG: Yes.

GEOFFREY: Do you think this is the end of the cycle in a cultural/
evolutionary sense, & that something new & radically different has to emerge now?

GINSBERG : I don't Know

   I have no idea anymore. It's all too confusing. Peter Orlovsky is in New York flipping-out. That's what's on my mind. I got a letter
that all the windows in my house were smashed & that Peter was in
Bellevue. So I've no idea what's happening. I'm just trying to figure
out what to do. I'm not in much of a mood to make movies. The end of the world? I'm worried about my windows in New York, Peter's
sanity.

   I have nothing to offer in terms of clarity, except how to be confused without getting too flipped-out.

   As to whether it's the end of the world - I don't know. I was
talking to Burroughs last night, he thinks so. He thinks it's the end now, in the sense that the heavy metal structure's gotten too heavy, that the power & money are in the hands of fewer & fewer people in America, that at this point they have so much to lose, the secret rich people.

   The negroes, hipsters, disaffected groups have come to realize they are not getting anything out of the atomic explosions except misery.

   A great many groups want to opt out of the whole structure, and
should be allowed to but that would mean that the whole government would collapse. The government is only there to serve the interests of those few people who have an investment in the structure as it is & they won't give up that investment without violence.

   So Burroughs sees Carmichael's cries for violence as justified or
as inevitable. but he also feels that if the disaffected people get together to vote in a new kind of government, then like Spain in the 30ies, the military & the rich established people would take over and prevent that change from happening.

   At the same time the rich or the investors as he speaks of them,
the controllers, the senders, are scared of the right wing. They don't
want any Goldwater in because the old experience has always been
that when the Goldwater or Hitler takes over the military also take
over and they can't be controlled.

   Government policy hasn't come into focus with the desires of
the people. We've got a giant inertia going forward towards murder & fear. The cities are decaying from the centre. They're so bad there's nothing left to do except burn them, as Carmichael says.

   Well, is there a way out?