Word: ginsbergs
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...BEEN almost 30 years since Beat poet Allen Ginsberg published the poem that first made heads turn in American literary circles. Giinsberg, who finished "Howl" in 1956, was part of an American troupe of writers which included novelists Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs and poets Gregory Corso and Philip Whalen. Known for their experiments with hallucinogens, affection for jazz, dabblings in Buddhism and spontaneous lifestyles, the Beatniks formed one of the major literary movements in the post-modern era. In the midst of the 58-year-old Ginsberg's East Coast tour to promote his new book, Collected Poems...
...Ginsberg: My main interest was art for art's sake, purely literary. But literary means a lot of different things. There is an old saying by Plato or Pythagoras, "when the mode of the music changes the walls of the city shake." Or, what [William Carlos] Williams said, "the new world is only a new mind." Or, Blake: "the eye altering, alters all." When there is a new perception in poetry and a change of the form, it generally means a change of body rhythm, a change in thinking about language, and a change in consciousness itself. And this...
...Ginsberg: In some areas. There has been some sensitization to the fact that the world is impermanent. This awareness of impermanence today is more clear than in say 1980 or 1940. World War I changed all of the intelligent people's view of the safety of the world because, in the midst of a purely hyper-rationalist enlightenment, they saw supposedly enlightened, creatures turning into beasts and killing each other...
...Ginsberg: Williams helped my work in several ways. I used his idea that things are only symbols of themselves and his attention to precise details. I was also interested in the way Williams gave measurement and structure to the longline poem. This showed up in parts two and three of "Howl...
...Ginsberg: I learned from Kerouac, whose poetry is greatly unackowledged, what poets call "phonic knowledge." Nobody studies it in the universities, but every poet studies Kerouac's seminal book, Mexico City Blues. Kerouac's had completly free form and he listened to jazz artists like Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk and Miles Davis. The idea behind the jazz was spontaneous improvisation and long breath. That had an influence on the line in "Howl" and any other long-line poems I've done. Thelonius Monk's idea of thinking then silence, thinking then silence affected "Kaddish." It would go: clonk, clonk...clonkcklonkcklonk...