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ALLEN GINSBERG
Abstract Expressionist pamtmg and DeKooning and Kline, it led
in
music to Ornette Coleman and uh, who was a teacher there? The
guy who died two years ago. Coltrane. It was the same
American
rediscovery of individual soul's impulse that led into Coltrane.
It
also
influenced LeRoi Jones by
quite
a bit, Williams's practice. It brought
Jones back to Newark, in a sense.
If
any literary influence had
tended in that direction, Williams's influence tended
to
bring Jones
back home to his own speech and
to
his own soul and to his own
body and to his own color and to his own town.
INT: Yeah. You said "prose sentences." Have you published that much
prose, other than
Indian Journals?
GINSBERG: Yeah. Actually, I've published what would be a big thick
volume of prose essays, manifestos, interviews, blurbs and prefaces,
and reviews and exclamatory paragraphs over a long period of
time - which are all put in one drawer, so I've got to edit them.
I was supposed to have done that five years ago, but I keep adding
to it, and I haven't had time to collect it and edit it.
INT: The thing I noticed -
Indian Journals
I gathered was taken
from notebooks you had written at the time.
GINSBERG: Yeah. They're taken almost unchanged from those books.
The editing of that involved just cutting out a bunch of dreams that
were so private and long-winded that they were boring.
INT: Yeah. You see, I read that and then I read the poems that had
come from that. It's kind of a work in progress to see how the poems
were written first longer and some not included at all in the book,
published at that time, which I think. ... What is it,
Planet News?
GINSBERG: Yeah. I only used three or four poems from
Planet News.
I
just took the ones that were complete, with a beginning, a middle
and an end, and put them in
Planet News.
You could say they were
poems - there's no difference, it's just all writing, is the point. Some
of them, for convenience's sake, I'd isolate, and I still do, take them
out as poems, cause they stand on four legs and they can be read by
themselves, but most of the things that are in verse don't stand on
four legs in
Indian Journals,
they depend on the previous context.
INT: But it was illustrative of a compositional method which I thought
was very good to read.
GINSBERG: You see that the point is that those journals are just what
was written down on the spot, not changed, so that it gives you the
quality of the writing at the time, the quality of the mind at the
time.
INT: I was interested in it also as a prose writer, to see how it devel.
oped.
I.
