Word: ginsberg
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...Ginsberg: Content is visual because you see pictures. According to one of Kerouac's quotes in an essay called "The Essentials of Modern Prose": "don't stop to think of the words but to see the picture better." The sound is something I here in my ear. There are no rules to that, you've just got to like the sound of the words. I wrote a poem in China called "China Bronchitis." Immediately the title sounded funny because of the sounds. It has sort of a bee-boop sound, and the "a" sound in "China" goes together with...
...Ginsberg: Chanting more than music. Pound used to say "pay attention to the tone meaning of the vowels." In Greek you have the pitch. That's why people don't know how to chant Home: anymore because the oral tradition has been lost. And they have to figure it out from the diacritical marks. If you become sensitized to the pitch of the vowels you will begin to appreciate the consonants and bite them like Bob Dylan does, or as any great singer does. You also savor the vowels as physical marbles in your month and become more interested...
...Ginsberg: That's all over the world. I've spent a lot of time working, studying and performing with Australian aborigines. They have the oldest body of epic literature in the world; it goes back 12,000 years. Non-written language, purely writing on the breath, on the spirit, was a world tradition that preceded the invention of the printing press. Words are separated from speech when printed on the page. They lose their body, their breath because with the written word it is just the eye to the page, bypassing the physical element...
...Ginsberg: An enormous amount. Many word sociologists like McClure and Pound say that when words get separated from direct conversation when they are just on the page without the physical component of sound, then the head gets cut off from the bod. And people will tend to go into generalizations and hyper-abstraction of the language. Words have to refer to something real, and when we begin to take words as having eternal abstract essence without any physical reference, the human content is removed from the language. As Pound points out, when the words in poetry get cut off from...
...Ginsberg: The problems are hierarchical authoritarian control, replication of everyday household artifacts and automatic replication of poetry, film and television. All of these things can happen under a communist bureaucracy or a capitalist bureaucracy. Disasters can result like Mao's great leap forward where millions starved or Union Carbide's Bhopal where hundreds of thousands were injured. When a society's hyper-mechanization moves out of the people's notice they suffer from depersonalization...