Mary Jane Fortunato, Lucille Medwick, and Susan Rowe interviewed Allen Ginsberg on December 17, 1970. The interview, sometimes referred to as “the Craft Interview,” was published in the New York Quarterly and included in the book The Craft of Poetry.
NYQ: You have talked about this before, but would you begin this interview by describing the early influences on your work, or the influences on your early work?
Allen Ginsberg: Emily Dickinson. Poe’s “Bells”—“Hear the sledges with the bells—Silver bells! . . .” Milton’s long line breath in Paradise Lost—
Him the almighty power
Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy the omnipotent to arms.
Shelley’s “Epipsychidion”—“one life, one death,/ One Heaven one Hell, one immortality,/ And one annihilation. Woe is me!” The end of Shelley’s “Adonais”; and “Ode to the West Wind” exhibits continuous breath leading to ecstatic climax.
Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality”—
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
Also Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” exhortation, or whatever you call it:
a sense sublime
of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
That kind of poetry influenced me: a long breath poetry that has a sort of ecstatic climax.
NYQ: What about Whitman?
AG: No, I replied very specifically. You asked me about my first poetry. Whitman and Blake, yes, but in terms of the early poems I replied specifically. When I began writing I was writing rhymed verse, stanzaic forms that I derived from my father’s practice. As I progressed into that I got more involved with Andrew Marvell.
NYQ: Did you used to go to the Poetry Society of America meetings?
AG: Yes, I used to go with my father. It was a horrifying experience, mostly old ladies and second-rate poets.
NYQ: Would you elaborate?
AG: That’s the PSA I’m talking about. At the time it was mainly people who were enemies of, and denounced, William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.
NYQ: How long did it take you to realize they were enemies?
AG: Oh, I knew right away. I meant enemies of poetry, very specifically. Or enemies of that poetry which now by hindsight is considered sincere poetry of the time. Their highwater mark was, I guess, Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Eros Turannos” was considered, I guess, the great highwater mark of twentieth-century poetry.
NYQ: Where did you first hear long lines in momentum?
AG: The texts I was citing were things my father taught me when I was prepubescent.
NYQ: Did he teach them to you as beautiful words or as the craft of poetry?
AG: I don’t think people used that word “craft” in those days. It’s sort of like a word that has only come into use in the last few decades. There were texts of great poetry around the house, and he would recite from memory. He never sat down and said now I am going to teach you: Capital C-R-A-F-T. Actually I don’t like the use of the word craft applied to poetry, because generally along with it comes a defense of stressed iambic prosody, which I find uncraftsmanly and pedantical in its use. There are very few people in whose mouths that word makes any sense. I think Marianne Moore may have used it a few times. Pound has used it a couple of times in very specific circumstances—more often as a verb than as a general noun. “This or that poet has crafted a sestina.”
NYQ: Would you talk about later influences on your work? William Blake? Walt Whitman?
AG: Later on for open verse I was interested in Kerouac’s poetry. I think that turned me on more than anyone else, I think he is a very great poet and much underrated. He hadn’t been read yet by poets.
NYQ: Most people associate Kerouac with prose, with On the Road, and not so much with Mexico City Blues. Or maybe they differentiate too strictly between prose and poetry.
AG: I think it’s because people are so preoccupied with the use of the word craft and its meaning that they can’t see poetry in front of them on the page. Kerouac’s poetry looks like the most “uncrafted stuff” in the world. He’s got a different idea of craft from most people who use the word craft. I would say Kerouac’s poetry is the craftiest of all. And as far as having the most craft of anyone, though those who talk about craft have not yet discovered it, his craft is spontaneity; his craft is having the instantaneous recall of the unconscious; his craft is the perfect executive conjunction of archetypal memorial images articulating present observation of detail and childhood epiphany fact.
NYQ: In Howl, at the end of Section One, you came close to a definition of poetry, when you wrote:
Who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Omnipotens Aeterna Deus.
AG: I reparaphrased that when I was talking about Kerouac. If you heard the structure of the sentence I was composing, it was about putting present observed detail into epiphany, or catching the archangel of the soul between two visual images. I was thinking then about what Kerouac and I thought about haiku—two visual images, opposite poles, which are connected by a lightning in the mind. In other words “Today’s been a good day; let another fly come on the rice.” Two disparate images, unconnected, which the mind connects.
NYQ: Chinese poets do that. Is this what you are talking about?
AG: This is characteristic of Chinese poetry as Ezra Pound pointed out in his essay “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” nearly fifty years ago. Do you know that work? Well, ’way back when, Ezra Pound proposed Chinese hieroglyphic language as more fit for poetry, considering that it was primarily visual, than generalized language-abstraction English, with visionless words like Truth, Beauty, Craft, etc. Pound then translated some Chinese poetry and translated (from Professor Fenollosa’s papers) this philosophic essay pointing to Chinese language as pictorial. There is no concrete picture in English, and poets could learn from Chinese to present image detail: and out of that Pound hieroglyph rose the whole practice of imagism, the school which is referred to as “Imagism.” So what you are referring to is an old history in twentieth-century poetry. My own thing about two visual images is just from that tradition, actually drawing from Pound’s discovery and interpretation of Chinese as later practiced by Williams and everybody who studied with Pound or who understood Pound. What I’m trying to point out is that this tradition in American poetry in the twentieth century is not something just discovered. It was done by Pound and Williams, precisely the people that are anathema to the PSA mediocrities who were attacking Pound and Williams for not having “craft.”
NYQ: In that same section of Howl, in the next line, you wrote:
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head.
AG: Description of aesthetic method. Key phrases that I picked up around that time and was using when I wrote the book. I meant again that if you place two visual images side by side and let the mind connect them, the gap between the two images, the lightning in the mind illuminates. It is the Sunyata (Buddhist term for blissful empty void) which can only be known by living creatures. So, the emptiness to which the Zen finger classically points—the ellipse—is the unspoken hair-raising awareness in between two mental visual images. I should try to make the answers a little more succinct.
NYQ: Despite your feeling about craft, poets have developed an attitude towards your work, they have discovered certain principles of breath division in your lines—
AG: Primary fact of my writing is that I don’t have any craft and don’t know what I’m doing. There is absolutely no art involved, in the context of the general use of the words art and craft. Such craft or art as there is, is in illuminating mental formations, and trying to observe the naked activity of my own mind. Then transcribing that activity down on paper. So the craft is being shrewd at flashlighting mental activity. Trapping the archangel of the soul, by accident, so to speak. The subject matter is the action of my mind. To put it on the most vulgar level, like on the psychoanalyst’s couch is supposed to be. Now if you are thinking of “form” or even the “well made poem” or a sonnet when you’re lying on the couch, you’ll never say what you have on your mind. You’d be babbling about corset styles or something else all the time instead of saying, “I want to fuck my mother,” or whatever it is you want. So my problem is to get down the fact that I want to fuck my mother or whatever. I’m taking the most hideous image possible, so there will be no misunderstanding about what area of mind you are dealing with: What is socially unspoken, what is prophetic from the unconscious, what is universal to all men, what’s the main subject of poetry, what’s underneath, inside the mind. So, how do you get that out on the page? You observe your own mind during the time of composition and write down whatever goes through the ticker tape of mentality, or whatever you hear in the echo of your inner ear, or what flashes in picture on the eyeball while you’re writing. So the subject is constantly interrupting because the mind is constantly going on vagaries—so whenever it changes I have a dash. The dashes are a function of this method of transcription of unconscious data. Now you can’t write down everything that you’ve got going on—half conscious data. You can’t write down everything, you can only write down what the hand can carry. Your hand can’t carry more than a twentieth of what the mind flashes, and the very fact of writing interrupts the mind’s flashes and redirects attention to writing. So that the observation (for writing) impedes the function of the mind. You might say “Observation impedes Function.” I get down as much as I can of genuine material, interrupting the flow of material as I get it down and when I look I turn to the center of my brain to see the next thought, but it’s probably about thirty thoughts later. So I make a dash to indicate a break, sometimes a dash plus dots. Am I making sense?—
Saying “I want to fuck my mother”—that’s too heavy. It waves a red flag in front of understanding, so we don’t have to use that as the archetypal thought. Like “I want to go heaven” may be the archetypal thought, instead of “I want to fuck my mother.” I just wanted to get it down to some place that everybody knows where it is. If I say “I want to go to heaven” you might think it’s a philosophic conception.
NYQ: How much do you revise your work?
AG: As little revision as possible. The craft, the art consists in paying attention on the actual movie of the mind. Writing it down is like a by-product of that. If you can actually keep track of your own head movie, then the writing it down is just like a secretarial job, and who gets crafty about that? Use dashes instead of semicolons. Knowing the difference between a dash—and a hyphen -. Long lines are useful at certain times, and short lines at other times. But a big notebook with lines is a helpful thing, and three pens—you have to be shrewd about that. The actual materials are important. A book at the nightstand is important—a light you can get at—or a flashlight, as Kerouac had a brakeman’s lantern. That’s the craft. Having the brakeman’s lantern and knowing where to use the ampersand “&” for swiftness in writing. If your attention is focused all the time—as my attention was in writing “Sunflower Sutra,” “TV Baby” poem later, (“Wichita Vortex Sutra” later, in a book called Planet News)—when attention is focused, there is no likelihood there will be much need for blue penciling revision because there’ll be a sensuous continuum in the composition. So when I look over something that I’ve written down, I find that if my attention has lapsed from the subject, I begin to talk about myself writing about the subject or talking about my irrelevant left foot itch instead of about the giant smog factory I’m observing in Linden, New Jersey. Then I’ll have to do some blue penciling, excising whatever is irrelevant: whatever I inserted self-consciously, instead of conscious of the Subject. Where self-consciousness intervenes on attention, blue pencil excision means getting rid of the dross of self-consciousness. Since the subject matter is really the operation of the mind, as in Gertrude Stein, anything that the mind passes through is proper and shouldn’t be revised out, almost anything that passes through mind, anything with the exception of self-consciousness. Anything that occurs to the mind is the proper subject. So if you are making a graph of the movements of the mind, there is no point in revising it. Because then you would obliterate the actual markings of the graph. So if you’re interested in writing as a form of meditation or introspective yoga, which I am, then there’s no revision possible.
NYQ: Your poem about the sunflower shows remarkable powers of concentration.
AG: “Sunflower Sutra,” the original manuscript in pencil’s somewhere at Columbia University Library. In examining it you will see published poem deviates maybe five or ten words from the original penciled text, written in twenty minutes, Kerouac at the door, waiting for me to go off to a party, and I said, “Wait a minute, I got to write myself a note.” I had the Idea Vision and I wanted to write it down before I went off to the party, so I wouldn’t forget.
NYQ: Did it dictate the sense, or did you just do it for yourself?
AG: Observing the flashings on the mind. As somebody said, the craft is observing the mind. Formerly the “craft” used to be an idea of rearranging your package, rearranging. Using the sonnet is like a crystal ball to pull out more and more things from the subconscious (to pack into the sonnet like you pack an ice cream box). Fresher method of getting at that material is to watch mind flow instantaneously, to realize that all that is, is there in the storehouse of the mind within the instant any moment: that’s the Proust of eternal recall, remember, the entire Remembrance of Things Past came to him just as he was dunking that little bit of madeleine cake into his tea. You know, the whole content of that one instant: that epiphanous instant, working with that instant—the mind then and there. That method I learned from Kerouac and I am interested in. That method is related to other “classical” methods of art composition and meditation like Zen Buddhist calligraphic painting, haiku composition also a spontaneous art, supposed to be spontaneous. People don’t sit around revising haikus. They are supposed to be sitting around drinking saki, near a little hibachi (charcoal stove) with fireflies and fans and half moons through the window. And in the summertime you are supposed to say, “Ah, the firefly has just disappeared into the moon . . .” Make it up then and there. It’s got to come from the perception of the moment. You can’t go home the next day and send your friend the haiku and say “I thought of a funny one: the firefly just . . .” That wouldn’t be real.
NYQ: Do you see time used as a unit of structure, as well as a point of view?
AG: Time of composition is the structure of the poem. That is the subject. What is going on in the mind during that moment is the subject. “Time is of the essence,” said Kerouac in a very great little essay on writing poetry, one-page set of advice, Essentials of Spontaneous Prose*, in back of Don Allen’s The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, the section is devoted to composition theory. I learned my theory from Kerouac. The preoccupations I have are Hindu, Buddhist, Hassidic—I spend every morning one hour sitting cross legged, eyes closed, back straight, observing my consciousness and quieting my consciousness, watching processions of mental imagery. Someone who isn’t into that kind of meditation might find it an unknown territory to go into, chaos, and see it as much too chaotic to get involved with.
NYQ: You once wrote, I won’t write my poem until I’m in my right mind.
AG: Yes. Of course, that poem is like a series of one-line jokes, so to speak. At the expense of the body politic, at the expense of the mass media Hallucination of Being entertained by the middle class.
NYQ: Does this refer to an attitude of yours about state of mind?
AG: I’m referring to a nervously comical attitude toward America. It ends “I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.” What I’m saying is, my poetry—this particular poem—my poetry in general—shows as such drivel because the United States is in such a state of apocalyptic drivelhood, that we’re destroying the world, actually, and we’re really destroying ourselves, and so I won’t write my poems until I’m in my right mind. Until America gets out of its silly mood.
NYQ: Would you discuss travel, when you’re in different places do you find yourself affected by the prosody of the place?
AG: I try to learn what I can. I got involved with mantra chanting when I was in India and brought it back to America. I do a lot of mantra chanting here. Just because I was interested in it and it had something to do with poetics, I thought. It also had to do with vocalization in that it did relate to preoccupations that I was familiar with in Pound’s dictum “Pay attention to the tone leading of vowels.” Sanskrit prosody has great ancient rules involving vowels and a great consciousness of vowels or a consciousness of quantitative versification. Like Pound is conscious of that too, tried to bring that to the awareness of poets in the twentieth century, tried to make people more conscious of the tone leading of vowels and renounce hyper attention to accentual rhythm. Pound said that he thought the future America prosody would be “an approximation of classical quantity,” he thought that would be a formal substitute for iambic count, stress count. The whole poetic movement of the century climaxed in what was known as Beat of San Francisco or Hippie or whatever Renaissance movement was finally a realization of a new form of prosody, a new basis for the prosody. Actually I’ve written a great deal about the subject. I don’t know if you’re familiar with much of it, but some poetics is covered in a Paris Review interview. The relationship between Poetics and Mantra is gossiped on in a Playboy interview. A closer analysis of stress prosody, that kind of craft, sits in a preface to my father’s book*—where I referred—(in answer to an earlier question) to one of the books that influenced me when I was young called American Poetry, edited with Introduction, Notes, Questions, and Biographical Sketches by A. B. De Mille, Simmons College, Boston, Secretary of the New England Association of Teachers of English, Boston, Allyn and Bacon, 1923, Academy Classic Series. It was, like the high school anthology, for most older high school teachers who teach now, their education. It was the standard anthology of the early twenties and used around the schools. So, they say in this book . . . I read Dickinson and Poe and Archibald Rutledge and Whittier and Longfellow and Thoreau and Emerson and John Hay Whitney, all the bearded poets of the nineteenth century in that book. This book described accentual prosody as “particularly well adapted to the needs of English poetry . . . definite rules, which have been carefully observed by all great poets from Homer to Tennyson and Longfellow.” They gave as an example of accentual prosody in this book for teachers and students:
Thou tóo/sail ón,/O Shíp/of Státe./
Remember that line? They had it marked: as above. As you notice they had an unaccented mark for “O” and then an accented mark for “Ship.” When you read it you will realize that O is an exclamation, and, by definition, you can’t have an unaccented mark for that and an accented mark for “Ship.” Which means that by the time 1923 had come about teachers of English prosody had so perverted their own ears and everybody else’s ears that they could actually write down “O” as unaccented. See, it was done like that. Well, what it means is that nobody could pronounce the line right. They were teaching people to mispronounce things. It would have to be: Thou too/sail on,/O Ship of State, many long vowels. But when you got up on the elementary or high school lecture platform, they used to say: “Thou tóo/ sail ón,/ O Shíp/ of Státe.” Hear? Another example they had in there was:
Whose héart/ -strings are/ a lúte
when it quite obviously is : Whose héart-stríngs are a lúte. So, in other words, that’s where “craft” degenerated. That’s why I’m talking about how do we get out from under that. Because that was the Poetry Society of America’s standard of poetics. And that’s what Pound was fighting against. And replacing with a much more clear ear. And of course that’s what Williams was working on, and that’s what Creeley, Olson and Kerouac have always been compensating for. That’s why I’m so mean about the use of the word “craft.” Because I really wanted to make it clear that whatever people think craft is supposed to be, that what they’ve been taught at school, it’s not that at all. One had better burn the word than abuse it as it has been abused, to confuse everybody.
NYQ: You have been giving readings with your father.
AG: We’ve done about four a year since 1965. We started at the PSA. But we don’t do it often. It would get to be too much of an act or something. Generally we do it when there’s some sentimental or aesthetically interesting occasion. Like at the PSA, that was interesting aesthetically. At the Y the other night, that was interesting because it is the traditional place for “distinguished poets” to read. I do it because, partly, to live with my father, because he’s not going to be here forever. Nor am I. As a poet I’m interested in living in the same universe with him, and working in the same universe with him. We both learn something from it, get a little bit into each other’s souls, the world soul. A father can learn a son’s soul and a son can learn a father’s soul, it’s pretty much knowing God’s soul, finally. It’s like a confrontation with my own soul which is sometimes difficult. But it usually winds up pleasurable. Sometimes I have to see things in myself or face things in my father that are quite hideous. Confront them. So far this has turned out to reconcile us more and more.
NYQ: You read the “Wales Visitation” poem on the Buckley TV interview?
AG: Yes—“Wales Visitation.”
NYQ: Is this your favorite poem?
AG: Of my most recent poems, this is, like an imitation of a perfect nature poem, and also it’s a poem written on LSD which makes it exemplary for that particular modality of consciousness. It’s probably useful to people as a guidance, mental guideline for people having bum trips because if they’ll check through the poem they’ll see an area which is a good trip. An ecologically attuned pantheistic nature trip. Also it’s an example of the fact that art work can be done with the much maligned celebrated psychedelic substances.
NYQ: Didn’t T. S. Eliot say that he didn’t believe in that?
AG: Yeah, but Eliot was not a very experienced writer, he didn’t write very much, he didn’t write very much poetry. Anyhow there’s a tremendous amount of evidence that good work can be done in all states of consciousness including drugs. Not that drugs are necessary. It’s just that it’s part of the police mythology that nothing can be done, that LSD leads only to confusion and chaos. That’s nonsense.
NYQ: In nondrug states, do you ever work half asleep?
AG: Yes, as I said I keep a notebook at my bedside for half-conscious, preconscious, quasi-sleep notations. And I have a book out now called Indian Journals which has such writing in it, including poems emerged out of dreams and remembered in half waking, long prose-poetry paragraphs, using double talk from a half sleep state.
NYQ: That seems a very relaxed and vulnerable kind of writing, as opposed to what you spoke of before, where you tried to get everything into the mind.
AG: They’re both related to consciousness study. Take it as part of a tradition going back to Gertrude Stein who was a student of William James at Harvard, whose subjects were varieties of religious experience and alterations of consciousness. That was James’ big subject—the pragmatic study of consciousness, the modalities of consciousness. She applied her Jamesian studies and her medical studies to the practice of composition and saw composition as an extension of her investigations into consciousness. That’s the tradition that I would like to classify myself within, and I think that’s a main legit tradition of poetics, the articulation of different modalities of consciousness, almost, you can’t say scientific, but the artful investigation or articulation of extraordinary states of consciousness. All that rises out of my own preoccupation with higher states of consciousness on account of, as I said over and over, when I was young, twenty-four or so, some poems of Blake like “The Sunflower,” “The Sick Rose” and “The Little Girl Lost” catalyzed in me an extraordinary state of mystical consciousness as well as auditory hallucinations of Blake’s voice. I heard Blake’s voice and also saw epiphanous illuminative visions of the rooftops of New York. While hearing Blake’s voice. While reading the text of “The Sunflower,” “The Sick Rose” and “The Little Girl Lost.” This was described at great lengths in other occasions. But I want to go back to that just to reiterate that I see the function of poetry as a catalyst to visionary states of being and I use the word visionary only in these times of base materialistic media consciousness when we are so totally cut off from our own nature and nature around us that anything that teaches nature seems visionary.
NYQ: You once said you were a worry wart. Yet you have such a sense of joy and freedom, in reading, and in writing, too.
AG: Ideally, the ambition, my childhood desire, is to write during a prophetic illuminative seizure. That’s the idea: to be in a state of such complete blissful consciousness that any language emanating from that state will strike a responsive chord of blissful consciousness from any other body into which the words enter and vibrate. So I try to write during those “naked moments” of epiphany the illumination that comes every day a little bit. Some moment every day, in the bathroom, in bed, in the middle of sex, in the middle of walking down the street, in my head, or not at all. So if it doesn’t come at all, then that’s the illumination. So then I try to write in that too. So that’s like a rabbinical Jewish Hassidic trick that way. So I try to pay attention all the time. The writing itself, the sacred act of writing, when you do anything of this nature, is like prayer. The act of writing being done sacramentally, if pursued over a few minutes, becomes like a meditation exercise which brings on a recall of detailed consciousness that is an approximation of high consciousness. High epiphanous mind. So, in other words, writing is a yoga that invokes Lord mind. And if you get into a writing thing that will take you all day, you get deeper and deeper into your own central consciousness.
NYQ: And does this lead you to a greater reality?
AG: A greater attention. Not attention, more feeling emerging out of that. So you walk down the city streets in New York for a few blocks, you get this gargantuan feeling of buildings. You walk all day you’ll be at the verge of tears. More detail, more attention to the significance of all that robotic detail that impinges on the mind and you realize through your own body’s fears that you are surrounded by a giant robot machine which is crushing and separating people, removing them from nature and removing them from living and dying. But it takes walking around all day to get into that state. What I mean is if you write all day you will get into it, into your body, into your feelings, into your consciousness. I don’t write enough, actually, in that way. Howl, Kaddish and other things were written in that way: all-day-long attention.