PARTISAN REVIEW
295
Did he, like when you were growing up in New Jersey, did he look
at your manuscripts?
GINSBERG: Yeah. When I was grown up already.... First time I met
him I was twenty-two. I had read his poetry when I was in college
but college so perverted my brain about poetry that I still expected
some sort of rhyme.
INT: Columbia English Department did that?
GINSBERG: Columbia English Department. And in those days, 1945-46,
they were saying that Whitman was a jerk, that Shelley wasn't a real
poet, that Williams was some kind of awkward crude provincial
from New Jersey. That was sort of like the official doctrine, tne
party line of the English department, not only at Columbia, but at
every university in the United States.
INT: Yeah. But in those days, Columbia was supposed to be more
enlightened.
GINSBERG: No, no. The point was that in those days in the forties, there
was nobody there teaching who wrote poetry, who wrote any kind
of modem poetry.
INT: So you went to Williams, I guess, partly because he did not have
an academic attitude.
GINSBERG: I went to him because he baffled me. I'd picked up some
of his books which were printed by the Cumington Press, which is
like a little home press up in Vermont - and I couldn't understand
why he was writing funny-paged writings, with the words scattered
around on the page, why there were irregular lines, and I couldn't
understand what he was talking about, really. I read it and I didn't
understand it, literally - I didn't understand the literal meaning
of what he was saying, if he was writing about wheelbarrows or
whatever. So I went to interview him for a local labor newspaper
in Paterson, as an excuse. I had the impression that he was some
sort of stainless steel 1920s
modeme
visage out of Brancusi and Ezra
Pound and Alfred Steiglitz's American Place Gallery, where he used
to hang out. Instead I found a creaky-voiced, tender-toned, soft
though sharp-eyed country doc, scratching his head, so I asked him,
"Do you think of
your~elf
as a poet, or as a doctor?" And he said,
"As a doctor." Then I asked, "Why do you write almost-prose lines?"
and he said, "Yesterday I heard a Polish laborer say, "I'll kick yuh
eye." And he wrote it down on his prescription pad. "I'll kick 'y' 'u'
'h' 'e' 'y' 'e'," and he said, "How do you put that into iambic
pentameter?" "I'll kick
yuh
eye -" it's a funny little rhythm all its
own. So I suddenly realized he was hearing with raw ears. The
sound, pure sound and rhythm - as it was spoken around him, and
