Interviewed by Gerard Van der Leun
Allen Ginsberg: “Born June 3, 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg, Russian émigré, and Louis Ginsberg, lyric poet and school-teacher, in Paterson, New Jersey. High school in Paterson till 15, Columbia College, merchant marine, Texas and Denver, copyboy, Times Square, amigos in jail, dishwashing, book reviews, Mexico City, market research, Satori in Harlem, Yucatan and Chiapas 1954, West Coast Howl 1955, Arctic Sea Trip & then Tangier, Venice, New York Kaddish 1959, returned to SF & made record to leave behind and fade awhile in Orient.” —(Autobiographical statement in The New American Poetry)
After fading out into the Orient in 1959, Allen Ginsberg reappeared on the steps of the Sheraton Palace Hotel in San Francisco in the fall of 1963, as a vocal participant in the anti-Madame Nhu Vietnam demonstrations.
The springboard that the Berkeley Free Speech movement was to give to political activism on a nationwide basis was still a year away. Vietnam was a distant police action involving American troops in an “advisory capacity,” and with no plans for “expanding our present operations and commitments in Southeast Asia.” A ‘revolutionary’ was someone who invented striped toothpaste, or smoked a cigar in Cuba and had a funny beard. If anyone in the United States of America dreamed of violent confrontations with the police and the National Guard, either on the campuses or, God forbid, in the streets, they kept it to themselves and read theory.
There were no conspiracies then. No one knew what one was or, if they did, had absolutely no idea what to conspire against. The cerebral fog of the fifties was only beginning to lift from the street corners of America and petitions for the redress of grievances, non-violent sit-ins, and quite negotiable, reasonable demands were the order of the day. The odor of the day was “Compromise.”
Before Allen Ginsberg faded away towards Satori in the Orient and India, his most well-known poem, “Howl,” had spoken eloquently if not bombastically of his perception of America in the fifties:
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery!
Moloch whose blood is running money!
Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!
Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo!
Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Allen Ginsberg, sitting on the steps of the Sheraton Palace Hotel in 1963, seemed in his rightest of minds. On the large hand-lettered placard he carried were the words:
I am here saying seek mutual surrender tears
That there be no more hell in Vietnam
That I not be in hell here in the street
War is black magic
The sixties were a schizophrenic time for prophecy in America. In the center of the cultural arena, things were never groovier. Rock came into its own with the immaculate conception of the Beatles and proved itself able to captivate the bodies, change the heads, and empty the pockets of millions of young Americans. Marijuana and LSD began to share a place on the spice shelf and in the icebox alongside the buttermilk and the Wheaties. Everything everywhere seemed to be happening at once. Surely some Second Coming was at hand. Surely Bliss Consciousness was just around the corner. Five-hundred mikes and a set of stereo earphones attested to that. There was no getting away from it, Utopia was here now and here to stay.
‘With America gnawing at its own throat like a demented bat, prophecy was a hard row to hoe.’
While the culture rose higher and higher, the political horizon sunk lower and lower. From the time of the Madame Nhu demonstrations to the current buggering of the body politic by Milhous Nixon, the government’s unwavering policy of containment in Southeast Asia managed to get 40,000 young Americans in various stages of dead along with untold thousands or millions of their Vietnamese brothers. Repressive, racist attitudes and tactics on the part of the police and the silent majority had never been more twisted or more deadly.
With America gnawing at its own throat like a demented bat, prophecy was a hard row to hoe. Total immersion into both the cultural and political psyches of America does not recommend itself as a way to prolong life and attain peace of mind. “Sometimes you gotta take your ass in both hands and jump,” said the cowboy in the Cadillac. And jump is what Ginsberg did—down the rabbit hole for seven years.
Everywhere Ginsberg went some new cause or new happening seemed to need him to read, discuss, plan, organize, chant, evaluate, or simply be there. The United States Senate called him to testify before its various impotent committees on marijuana and acid rituals.
During a European reading tour, he visited Prague where the students immediately crowned him King of the May. Czech-Marxist police just as promptly beat him up and threw him out of the country. The Human Be-In in San Francisco in the Summer of 1967 was part of Ginsberg’s doing. He originated and developed some of the basic attitudes and tactics for street theatre during the Vietnam Day marches in Oakland in 1965. He was at the Pentagon Demonstration in the fall of 1967 and participated in the exorcism rites to levitate that chunk of Moloch through chanting. He helped plan, publicize, and participate in the demise of the Democratic Party in Chicago, even though it was a birth and not a death that he intended to celebrate.
And if all that weren’t quite enough, he managed to produce a monolithic body of poetic work that chronicles the myriad events of the sixties and the hopes, insights, visions, trips, illusions, and dreams that grew from and were manifested throughout the decade.
Over the years since his reemergence in 1963, Ginsberg has become more than a poet or “spokesman for his time.” He has become, through a complex interweaving of accident, design, and circumstance, one of the American Bards that Walt Whitman wrote of in the preface to Leaves of Grass, more than 115 years ago:
“In the make of the great masters the idea of political liberty is indispensable. Liberty takes the adherence of heroes wherever men and women exist…but never takes any adherence or welcome from the rest more than from poets. They are the voice and the exposition of liberty. They out of ages are worthy of the grand idea…to them it is confided and they must sustain it. Nothing has precedence of it and nothing can warp or degrade it. The attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves and horrify despots.”
The room in which the following conversation takes place is rather small. Its single window looks out on the trees and the rooftops of North Beach. It is neat, furnished simply with a small pallet on the floor for sleeping, sitting, smoking, writing, meditating, et cetera. There is one comfortable armchair, some tables of various heights and styles, a couple of undistinguished lamps, and one bookcase that seems to hold every title ever published by City Lights. Under the window is a slab of blue-veined marble set eight inches above the floor on chimney bricks. On the slab rest a bronze Buddha, an incense holder, two ashtrays, several vases of flowers and greens, and a pack of Ginsberg’s ever-present Pall Malls. [continue reading…]
Gerard Van der Leun
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