PARTISAN REVIEW
307
body'll be able to use is what they can remember - and so maybe
just what can be remembered in tune will survive.
INT: Start the second modern oral tradition, I guess.
GINSBERG: Yes. This is specifically what we've been doing - the whole
poetry revolution. Williams's whole point was to return to the oral
tradition to actual speech, to make it possible to talk again,
for real.
And that led into chanting, in my poetry, and to some extent that led
into the minstrel tradition returned, as with Dylan, or that was one
of the influences, in that direction -like there's a whole wave of
return to individual voice and soul-song, on account of all the
mechanical reproduction of dead rhythms and dead images surround–
ing us.
MILES:l What about the Lennon interview? In
Stone?
GINSBERG: Yeah. I thought that was pretty
raw
and naked-disillu–
sioning - which is what he wanted, and pointing attention back to
"concrete particulars." ... He was too harsh on ... everybody except
his immediate circle that he felt safe with, cause he was generalizing
too much about
me,
I felt - there was one little tiny mention–
he was talking about himself and Dylan in London, wearing shades
and being on dope and about how chaotic a scene it was with Gins–
berg and all those other freaks running around....
(Laughter)
You
know, I'm sensitive, I don't like to be classed as one of those
type
of outerpeople in the hideous universe of archetypal . . . busybody
nudnicks....
ANDERSON:
1
Well, he didn't come off as one of the most wonderful
people in the world.
GINSBERG: He came off as real, except that the
anger
is
not real, ul–
timately that anger isn't real because it isn't observant of what's im–
mediately around. It's still an anger which generalizes and egotizes
a little bit - I mean all anger is egotism in a way. Except that he's
obviously moved further -and further ahead, phase by phase, that it's
terrific and enlightening and refreshing to read him. I found myself
swept off the table, with the rest of the foreign universe....
INT: You were mentioned in there ... and in this week's
Voice
too–
did you see that article "Outside: Algiers"? What did you think of
the way you were handled there, by Cleaver?
GINSBERG: Well, I don't know. I used
to
turn on to hash with Cleaver
years ago.
(Laughter)
I don't know what he's complaining about
me
for. Though he didn't put down hash, he's just putting down
1.
Interviewer's note: Also present were Miles, rock editor of
International Times,
a London underground paper, and Jim Anderson, a photographer.
