"I'm Putting My Queer Shoulder to the Wheel."
By Jon Randall and Wesley Joost
Ginsberg was an emotional safe harbor for his famous, frantic, Beat contemporaries. So many ultimately self-destructive, anarchic souls benefited from his kindness, wisdom, generosity, and legendary patience. Mr. Ginsberg has, continuously and with phenomenal energy, championed the fight against, cultural, political, and sexual repression worldwide.
We were deeply honored to be able to talk to him about some of his recent concerns and projects.
Goblin Magazine: What is the secret to writing poetry that always appeals to a younger audience?
Allen Ginsberg: Sex, desire, longing, and solitude.
GM: Do you have any take on the government's campaign to censor Gangsta Rap?
AG: I have three or four takes. First of all, a lot of the gangsta rap is commercial crap, a commercialization of the shock element. It has nothing to do with anything anybody really thinks. On the other hand the tradition of rap goes back to a very ancient source in the African warriors boasts that migrated through America and were transformed into the various Signifying Monkey rhymes, branching and styling out into the street corners, like contests of bards, where hyperbole, imagination and insults were used as humorous gambits.
So you insult each other and boast and whoever gets angry loses the game. It seems to me White critics have lost the game, because they didn't realize the rules of the traditional boasts and toasts.
The Signifying Monkey is a very old African American tradition which has reached its prominence with its rhythms in the last decade or two. It's been on the street for a long time to the extent that it expresses political dissent and personal self empowerment. It's quite extraordinary and beautiful.
GM: What sort of music do you ordinarily listen to at home?
AG: I listen to a lot of old blues, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Richard Rabbit Brown, Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson, Texas Alexander, etc. Then I listen to a lot of Beatles, Stones, and Dylan, and anything else that comes my way, whether it's the Sugarcubes ... or from members of various punk and grunge bands that have visited my house; from an all girl band of the 70's, the Stimulators, to the False Prophets with lead guitarist Steven Taylor, who is also the guitarist of the Fugs. Taylor's been my accompanist for the last 20 years.
GM: The Beats and the Punks seem to have similar attitudes.
AG: It's a historical development, up from hip and punk and grunge there's always been some intergenerational learning, respect, and interest. Though there was a period in the 70's when the punks rejected the Beat historical background, thinking it had failed - but after that the punks found they didn't save the world either. Iggy Pop was saying 'You guys failed,' and then we met five years later and he was asking me how to meditate, 'cause he had a kid and got settled down. I see Lou Reed around a lot in Tibetan benefit circles.
The early Beat writers did not reject their elders. There's a tremendous intergenerational affection. Particularly as we saw a lot of the older people as mentors, like William Carlos Williams, who I met when I was about twenty and I sent him my poems, and he edited them for me. He wrote a prefix to my first book which was not published until much later, then he wrote a prefix to my second book: Howl. My father was a poet and I learned a lot of the classical poetic rules from him. I also learned a tremendous amount from Burroughs who was ten years older and I learned a lot from reading earlier writers like Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, and going all the way back to the classic Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Brown for prose.
And one interesting characteristic of my own 50's generation was going back and rescuing a lot of the lost great poets that had been neglected. In the 40's and fifties -- Whitman was neglected and put down, and Carlos Williams was considered a provincial jerk. The ideal was Eliot and Wallace Stevens. We also went back to the neglected poets who now are more and more popular like Charles Reznikoff and Carl Rakosi.
We felt that we were not necessarily breaking rules but inheriting a tradition of open form that had been explored by Whitman, Pound, Williams, on up through me and others, and onto a second generation of poets after us like Anne Waldman, Ed Sanders, Ted Berrigan, and many others. There was also the influence of Gertrude Stein who was an enormous influence at the Naropa institute, and the reason for that is that all these writers were interested in the texture of consciousness, and language and its place in consciousness. One characteristic of the Beat generation was its interest in consciousness itself and its root. Much modern writing like Gertrude Stein and Williams does explore that. It's poetry as an awareness practice like meditation.
GM: Are all the old rebels becoming Buddhists?
AG: No, but one interesting thing is that from the very beginning in the Beat Generation movement there was a strong Buddhist element, from 1950 at least with Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Diane DiPrima, myself, and many others, up into the 70's when we founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder Colorado; which was the first Buddhist College in the western world. So the Beat Generation did continue the introduction of Eastern thought of all kinds into American poetry and culture, and I think itıs one of the more glorious of our achievements.
GM: Could you give our readers some concrete steps on how to try and oppose the radical greedy reactionary movement in our country? Besides registering to vote there must be some more radical steps they can take.
AG: People could take heart, and believe their own hearts and desires. There's supposedly, mythically, an apathy among the young; Beat in a sense. Feeling the game is up, the right wing have taken over and the planet is burning down and the right wing will burn it down faster because they believe in the Apocalypse, the Rapture. There's not going to a be a blow up or Apocalypse. It'll be slow suffocation and gridlock if anything. The longer we can prolong human conditions the better, and that means to the extent that the longer we can work for other people and relieve other people's suffering, we're doing a good job.
Also, people should observe their own anger and their own aggression. The problem is aggression against nature. Monolithic aggression against open space and natural awareness, in an attempt to put a roof on everybody's feelings and mind. Or to close it in like a Stalinist claustrophobia with the right wing trying to tell everybody what to think. It's for the kids to take heart and empower themselves, but to do it by observing your own anger and have a reflection on that aggression. You don't have to do anything about it, you don't have to stop it; you just have to observe it and after awhile it withers and diminishes. The right wing probably don't even notice their own aggression. It bursts out with some Jew killing Rabin or the Right To Lifers assassinating a doctor.
Obviously political networking is necessary. It's a dirty job but as I wrote in an early poem: The world is a mountain of shit, if it's going to be removed it has to be removed by handfuls.
GM: What rock groups do you approve of these days?
AG: For song-writer poets I like people like Lee Ranaldo. Two nights ago I had a visit from David Byrne and he introduced me to Tjendersgh, an Indian-English kid who has a new record out. I've been listening to Tujuka music, Claire Dumont, a little Natalie Merchant ...
I like Beck. Who was making fun of the loser attitude with his "I'm a Loser" song. He's a very beautiful blues man, in his words and his music.
GM: It seems that bisexuality has become almost mainstream now and I was wondering if you think homosexuals and straight people can have a long, serious, stable relationship almost the equivalent of being lovers.
AG: Peter Orlovsky is primarily heterosexual and I'm primarily homosexual but we lived together on and off for 35, 40 years. There have been painful moments, but not so much as it has to do with the sex as it has to do with the overwhelming activity Iım involved with.
I don't know about it becoming mainstream. You could say that there's always been an enormous leavening of bisexuality in the populace. But people are able to articulate it now and come out of the closet. It's mainstream in the sense that now you have young gay Republicans.
A long time ago you had Mick Jagger coming on "campy," Then the New York Dolls and Glitter Rock. In any case in vaudeville and in music there's always been some of that ambivalent gender. Like castrati singers, Boy Choirs, and an element in Black R&B like Little Richard.
GM: On this side of the ocean people weren't aware that Jagger was bisexual. People always thought he was straight and surrounded by beautiful women. Were you aware of what was happening between Jagger and Bowie?
AG: He was surrounded by beautiful women but on the other hand he was open ... I never made out with him. I once found myself sitting on the edge of the bed, with Marianne Faithful and Jagger, naked, long ago, discussing Blake.
GM: But I've never heard of any relationship like the one between you and Orlovsky, are there obstacles in the way ...
AG: It's like any relationship, you have to work it out. Like any relationship it has problems of power. Just ask women about the problems they have with men and vice versa. I donıt suppose it's any more complicated. A relationship between a straight man and a gay woman, or a gay woman with a bisexual man, or a bisexual man with a bisexual woman ... those combinations have always been there.
I think when things relax and people can be themselves you'll have less of the Jesse Helms aggression. I think his preoccupation and seriousness is quite pathological and morbid. I don't think he's a repressed gay at all but I think he's into S&M. He'd like to humiliate gay people like the top man. His crew is preoccupied with the subject in a way that no normal straight man would be. They run around flashing pictures of dirty gay people as they think of it, and reminding people of it, passing laws against it. Nobody normal would be interested.
GM: Can you define the difference between Queer, Gay, and Homosexual at this point?
AG: There's no intrinsic, built in meaning to those words, it's just meant as people use them. They used the term queer in the 40's and 50's like, "I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel." Then it became homosexual, then they thought it too awful so they thought gay might be better. Then in the 80's and 90's people starting taking words like dope and transforming them into honorific words. Queer began to be used again as a challenge, while gay seemed to some to be too campy or tending toward middle-class and non-obtrusive.
GM: Do you think it would solve a lot of the country's problems if marijuana was legalized and then taxed like cigarettes are now?
AG: One problem it would solve is the rehabilitation of the countryside. The small family farm fails as the milk producers become more and more monopolized into big milk farms. In California in the 60's and 70's there were many intelligent people who wanted to go back into communes and farms, growing small weed plots and selling it; until the Feds, the state, and the local brownnoses came along with their dirty helicopters, invasion of privacy, new laws and bigger and bigger prisons. But it was a good way of sustaining the nourishment of the countryside and giving people a chance to get outside of the city; having a local product for which you were responsible, rather than importing from outside the country and losing money.
It would be economically usable and feasible, and if you wanted to tax it you could. You could have grass as a cash crop for the small family farm; but not encouraging, or even prohibiting, advertising.
I also think junkies should be restored to their original medical situation as it was before 1920, and send the doctors for either maintenance or cure. If there's no cure then maintenance.
And probably, this is a new idea on my part; many, many people who are mentally ill and taking prozac, thorazine, depracoat, all the central nervous system antidepressants, might be better off with opiate as an antidepressant. I've had some experience with that in France and I have noticed that the junkies are not subject to the ups and downs of extreme violent nature that manic-depressives are. The manic depressives and schizophrenics are being kept down by thorazine and prozac but those have side effects, like trembling, tremors, and twitching. It might be easier on the nervous system and more effective as prophylaxis against manic and depressant attacks if a simple or natural remedy like direct opiate (no junk or morphine) were used.
GM: The government won't even allow marijuana use for the dying. It seems like it would be very difficult to get opium for the mentally ill.
AG: Somebody's got to reintroduce some common sense and speak the truth or speak the possibility, whether its true or not. It's not going to do anybody any good if there's not some research on the subject. Research is forbidden even. Legally now, if you have the lawyers, money, and energy you can get marijuana for medical uses but it's very rare. And as far as the psychedelics; it should be given back to the priests, the psychiatrists, and the doctors.
That leaves cocaine and amphetamines, and I say if the government would get out of the cocaine business; i.e. Ollie North and all those guys meddling around with drugs in exchange for guns for the Contras. If the government would have more supervision of the pharmaceutical companies dumping amphetamines in Mexico and elsewhere for reexport to the United States, you might get a handle on the destructive effects of cocaine which does bring on a cocaine psychosis.
GM: Are you still occasionally taking acid?
AG: That last thing I had was XTC. I had it twice, the first time was brilliant, the second time was repetitious and not so good, and it seemed to me there was too much amphetamine in it. But the first time I came away with a permanent insight, which kept with me while I was down. Which was there was a guy who wrote for the Partisan Review and later Commentary, who was always criticizing Kerouac and me. He was a real right-wing reactionary hawk. Once he said Kerouac and the Beat generation with their approval of homosexuality were weakening America's will to survive. I knew him in college and tried to talk and make peace with him back in the fifties but he was very hard to reach.
So I began having a dream when I was high on XTC, and I said, "Oh, good old guy. He's been there as my bogeymen for three decades, he's been working for me. Every time I want someone to argue with there he is in my head. I can always yell, get mad, throw my lightning thunder bolts at him. He's been working so hard under all that anxiety, he's worse than me. The poor guy has been working for me all these years, how can I be angry at him?" He's the iconography of my existence on earth. It just turned me around I no longer felt that same animosity.
GM: When you go on poetry reading tours are there poetry groupies like there are rock groupies?
AG: There are several different kinds. There are a lot of young intelligent kids that have read a lot and are a pleasure to talk to. Even High School kids, 14 or 15, who have read a lot of Burroughs, but no Gregory Corso, no Robert Creeley, Walt Whitman, or Peter Orlovsky. It's amazing and charming to me, all these generations of young kids who have absorbed that culture and also would know old blues and jazz stuff, as well as some classical music. And they know all the classical music I Iisten to, like Bach, Schumann, and Beethoven; and are also more knowledgeable than me about contemporary and grunge bands, so I learn something from them about that.
Then there's the younger/older guys who are addicted to alcohol and generally a nuisance, because they think that they're the really hip ones and the only beat ones and everybody else is square. They generally interrupt readings with, "Read Howl! Read Howl!" They know one thing, its like a broken record. Or they want special attention because they served in the alcoholic army.
Then there's the really young kids who have heard about the Beat generation superficially, or read one poem and an anthology, who are a little bit gaga and silly, who ask if I still write poetry. Not noticing I publish book after book, year after year.
GM: What do you think are the advantages or disadvantages of having a younger lover?
AG: For someone my age the advantage is you get the energy, the strength, and the essence of youthfulness. You also get the physical help. like someone can get on a ladder and screw in a light bulb, or run an errand. If you're younger you get the wisdom and devotion of an older person, who easily can become very devoted to a younger person who is kind and pays attention to them. So its a very nice exchange and a classical one. I'm still in a relationship like that, I always am. In the last four years there have been three of four young fellows, twenty years old and on, who I've had much luck with, I've known quite a while and are very attentive. They alternate in their visits and go off to do their own thing, but I'm never alone.
At this point I'm quite ill with bronchitis, and there's a young fellow living next door who is studying the Beat generation who will go down and get me a carton of rice milk or do some shopping for me, or whatever.
GM: So you're quite happy right now.
AG: No, but not unhappy. Existence contains suffering and I'm in the middle of a bronchial problem. But a certain sadness is built into the whole scene.
GM: What did you think of Carolyn Cassidy's book? She sure suffered.
AG: I haven't read it all the way through yet. She says she suffered but didnıt anybody else? Existence contains suffering. Neal Cassidy did provide a house and a stable environment for a long while. He was in and out, and he had other women, but thatıs very common. However, it was out of his control when he was singled out by the cops to be busted for a couple joints. And the very source of his stability, his job on the railroad was short-circuited. He was plunged into a very difficult situation where instead of having a good job with medical benefits and all that, he had to change tires part time. So that was government intervention, it wasn't his fault. I don't know if she regarded it as some sin of his, but it internalized a lot of guilt with him when he was in San Quentin.
GM: Do you think there was a vendetta against him because it seems incredibly draconian to put someone away for two years for three joints.
AG: You have to remember this was the end of the 50's. Yes there was a vendetta against him. They knew about him as a sort of Johnny Appleseed of pot and as the prototype for Kerouacs' On The Road and they went out to get him. He was hitchhiking to work and he was picked up by a couple of plainclothes cops who asked him for grass. He gave it to them as a return for the ride, and weeks later he was busted.
That still goes on. America has more people in jail than any other country in the world and over half of them are drug related, and 80% of them are Black. It's the rich manipulating politics and communication, so the rich get richer and the underclass are being forced down. It's like double-bind fear schizophrenia. They're told they better go out and find a job and there are no jobs. So they say follow the rules and you'll fall into the safety net but the rules are so bureaucratic they fall out of the safety net. They call that the double-bind. The real problem is the unmitigated suffering that the underclass are being put through.
There's also over-population and inadequate distribution of what wealth there is. Having added to that it's true what the Right Wing says that government bureaucracy forces inefficiency, but on the other hand the dog-eat-dog competitive capitalist system is apparently without conscience or heart, boastfully so.
GM: Since the fall of Communism people seem paralyzed in what direction to go.
AG: Communism rose because of the inadequecies of capitalism. Those days people had to work in sweatshops so there was child labor, no education, hopelessness, starvation, and slave wages. That's why we had the rise of the union movement. Communism was a way to compensate for that but it was the wrong way.
GM: Are there any grounds at all for being optimistic about the future?
AG: I think one optimistic thing is that people no longer believe the government; where in the 50's everyone thought the authority of the government, the military, and the CIA, and the FBI were the final human authorities. Now everybody realizes that J. Edgar Hoover was a vicious old queen and a big flop. Joe McCarthy was an alcoholic. The Pentagon is empty and a paper tiger. All the institutions that were supposed to be the bulwarks of society are falling apart. The schools are getting more expensive. But the key is trying to balance the budget. The right-wing congress has given the military more money then they asked for, and cut money from the underclass. So it's been welfare for the rich. People have to catch on to the hypocrisy of the right wing.