PARTISAN REVIEW
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article. He said the insights were psychological and not deep psychic.
lnt:
I felt Burroughs's influence in your last book,
The Fall of America.
Ginsberg:
Thematically, yes. But technically, Bunting, saying to con–
dense more, that I had "too many words," getting rid of extra syntac–
tical fat allows more perfume to verbs and nouns.
lnt:
How come you chose as your Preface to
Fall of America
that selec–
tion from Whitman's
Democratic Vistas
on adhesiveness? It seemed so
ironic?
Ginsberg:
Except that it does point to a goal and an ideal and a human
potentiality that America was supposed to fulfill because that was the
prophecy, the need, and the psychological condition of American
democracy, and Whitman named it and particularized it very clearly in
that passage. Also it gives credence, histori cal background, and tradi–
tional justification to my own adhesive poems.
Solomon:
I was interested when I read
Fall
mainly in the sex, being a
Bronx boy.
Int:
In the tender obscenity of poems like "Please Master"?
Solomon:
And "Graffiti."
lnt:
"Jessore Road" is especially Blakean, its metric, rhyme scheme, and
the whole feeling of the poem like a long extended "London."
Ginsberg:
The consequence of three years working on Blake songs.
It
was
the first poem I wrote to music with chords, intended to be chanted
and sung. I had finished two albums of Blake's
Innocence and Ex–
perience.
Int:
I think I saw you singing the poem on television last year with a
whole room of people?
Ginsberg:
Yeah. With Dylan and Happy Traum. I wrote "Jessore Road"
to have something really sublime to present to Dylan to record. So the
performance that you saw on TV was a first performance without any
rehearsal because I had finished typing the poem that afternoon, and I
had written it the day before.
Int:
You have written a number of poems in a very short period of time,
haven't you? Didn't you write "Sunflower Sutra" while Kerouac was
impatiently standing at your door waiting for you?
Ginsberg:
Also poems like "A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley" and
"Supermarket in California" which incidentally were part of one com–
position, and later cut apart.
lnt:
How were you affected by Kerouac's notion of no revision?
Ginsberg:
"Sunflower Sutra" is almost completely untouched from the
original.
It
took me a long time to get on to Kerouac's idea of writing
without revision. I did it by going to his house where he sat me down
with typewriter and said, "Just write a poem!" So I did about the
