296
ALLEN
GINSBERG
he was trying to adapt his poetry rhythms out of the actual talk–
rhythms he heard in the place that he
was,
rather than metronome
or sing-song archaic literary rhythms he would hear in a place inside
his head from having read other writings. I suddenly realized he was
inventing out of the actual ground of Rutherford, New Jersey, a
different body-speech and that anything he said was absolutely
natural, and didn't violate human being talk, didn't come from an–
other era but came directly from the ground that he stood on. But
I still didn't really understand the poems. I got the general idea–
but then about a half year later I went to the Museum of Modern
Art in New York and I heard him read, and he read one poem
that I immediately understood was just somebody talking and making
sense. And it made absolute sense.
INT:
It
has a rhythmic structure. . . .
GINSBERG: Well, I'll kick yuh eye is a rhythmic twiddle.
INT: It doesn't have the bornp-and-bomp-and....
GINSBERG: It's not the iambic high school rhythmic structure. But it's
the rhythmic structure of someone talking sincerely and earnestly,
with the changes of mind that go on when somebody stops to figure
out the word - and then begins again with another squaggle of
phrasing - or stops in the middle of a sentence to go on to some–
thing else, because the mind changes. I heard him read another
poem called "The Clouds," which is about people getting lost in their
imaginations and forgetting about concrete earth-speech and fact
things - and it was a poem that ended in talking about people's
minds going off into the clouds, "plunging upon a moth, a butterfly,
a pissmire, uhh...."
INT: Yeah.
GINSBERG: Not oh yeah. "Plunging upon a moth, a butterfly, a piss–
mire, uhh, dot, dot, dot." Unquote. And when he read it, he read it
almost impatiently,
(fast)
"Plunging upon a moth, a butterfly, a piss–
mire, hupp...." And then he waved his hands in the air - he
just gave up. So I suddenly realized it was just like somebody talking
in a bar, not finishing the sentence but just giving up with a gesture
of impatience, and that it was a syntactical fact of speech that had
never been written down before in poetry - and so I suddenly re–
alized that his poetry was absolutely identical with speech, the high–
est speech, but absolutely identical, rhythmically and syntactically. And
then I suddenly realized that if you began right where you are, with
your own speech, then obviously you would have to create a whole
new world of speech, that had never been written down before,
which was what he was doing and what anybody could do. But
t
