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it also meant that you had to listen, as he advised, very carefully,
to your own sound, and to other people's talk-sound and talk-rhythms
- and if you listened to "I'll kick yuh eye" or "plunging on a
pissmire, uhh. . . ."! you would arrive at all sorts of new unknown
rhythms. And oddly enough just at this time I was talking with Ker–
ouac quite a bit, who was, by his own nature, doing the same thing,
and leaning for support on the new rhythms he was hearing in
music at the time among the blacks around Minton's - cause Kerouac
at that time had been listening to the early Bird Parker, and Gillespie
and Monk, and earlier a lot of Lester Young, and had been turning
me on to all those musicians: and the key thing that he realized
about them was that they had made the rhythm section into solo
instruments with varying and variable rhythmic bases, just like Wil–
liams had variable rhythmic bases. So there was a parallel break–
through going on in the music and in the poetry-speech.
INT: Could you like sort of work on this in your own head and try
and get into it in your own writing?
GINSBERG: Yeah, immediately. I went over my prose writings, and I
took out little four- or five-line fragments that were absolutely accu–
rate to somebody's speak-talk-thinking and rearranged them in lines,
according to the breath, according to how you'd break it up if you
were actually to talk it out, and then I sent 'em over to Williams. He
sent me back a note, almost immediately, and he said, "These are it!
Do you have any more of these?" So apparently I'd caught on, to
something so simple that the entire English department at Columbia
University couldn't understand it, and never did get to under–
stand it until perhaps two decades later - if at all, cause I don't
think it's still understood. It's just a very simple basic principle that
you listen to speech to hear rhythms and attempt to isolate the
archetypal rhythms of actual speech and then remodel them in the
poems. That's the whole basis, really, of what was later known as pro–
jective verse in Charles Olson and the whole gang of poets, friends
and lovers of his. Black Mountain and elsewhere, San Francisco and
New York. Oddly, you see, Williams influenced all the Black Moun–
tain people, he influenced Gary Snyder and Phillip Whalen and Lew
Welsh out in San Francisco and he influenced Robert Duncan and
Mike McClure in San Francisco, he influenced Frank O'Hara and
Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery here. The influence was that
originality of taking the materials from your own existence rather than
taking on hand-me-down poetic materials, speech units, rhythmic
units and trying to adapt your life to them - you articulate
your
rhythm, your own rhythms. The concept of that led in the forties to
