First Thought: Conversations with Allen Ginsberg

by Michael Schumacher (Editor)

The way to point to the existence of the universe is to see one thing directly and clearly and describe it. . . . If you see something as a symbol of something else, then you don't experience the object itself, but you're always referring it to something else in your mind. It's like making out with one person and thinking about another. Ginsberg speaking to his writing class at Naropa Institute, 1985

With Howl Allen Ginsberg became the voice of the Beat Generation. It was a voice heard in some of the best-known poetry of our time but also in Ginsberg s eloquent and extensive commentary on literature, consciousness, and politics, as well as his own work. Much of what he had to say, he said in interviews, and many of the best of these are collected for the first time in this book. Here we encounter Ginsberg elaborating on how speech, as much as writing and reading, and even poetry, is an act of art.

Testifying before a Senate subcommittee on LSD in 1966; gently pressing an emotionally broken Ezra Pound in a Venice pensione in 1967; taking questions in a U.C. Davis dormitory lobby after a visit to Vacaville State Prison in 1974; speaking at length on poetics, and in detail about his Blake Visions, with his father Louis (also a poet); engaging William Burroughs and Norman Mailer during a writing class: Ginsberg speaks with remarkable candor, insight, and erudition about reading and writing, music and fame, literary friendships and influences, and, of course, the culture (or counterculture) and politics of his generation. Revealing, enlightening, and often just plain entertaining, Allen Ginsberg in conversation is the quintessential twentieth-century American poet as we have never before encountered him: fully present, in pitch-perfect detail.

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264 pages, Paperback

Published March 14, 2017

About the author

A lifelong resident of the Great Lakes region, Michael Schumacher is the author of twelve books, including biographies of Allen Ginsberg, Phil Ochs, and Eric Clapton, and the award-winning book Wreck of the Carl D. He has also written twenty-five documentaries on Great Lakes shipwrecks and lighthouses.

Reviews

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting selection of interviews and conversations with Allen Ginsberg from 1960 to not long before he passed in 1997.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read Allen Ginsberg’s City Lights paperback Howl and Other Poems late one autumn night 1980 with friends at the White Castle at the corner of Bardstown Road and Eastern Parkway. A few months after Mev Puleo died, I read most of Ginsberg’s work over a couple of months. And here it is, 2017, and I recently finished with appreciation the latest publication from the American bard (who died in 1997), interviews selected by Ginsberg biographer Michael Schumacher. This volume, First Thought: Conversations with Allen Ginsberg, is not as large and jewel-saturated as David Carter’s Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews 1958-1996, but I still found helpful reminders, avuncular advice, and serene encouragement.

Here are a few of the ways interviewers and others saw Allen Ginsberg: “poet, prophet, teacher”; “surrealist folk-hero”; “lobbyist for tenderness”; a man with a “friendly intermingling of smile and solemnity”; a lifelong learner with “a curiosity without boundaries”; a person “seemingness fearless of the consequences of exposing his mind.” What follows are a few samples of Ginsberg’s candor to his various interviewers over nearly four decades…

Acknowledging his anger fuel in his early years in the public eye, Ginsberg admitted decades later he’d become less combative and not so reactive to those who might press his buttons: “I try and treat them with a kind of Buddhist gentility, gentleness, even if I feel that they’re neurotic or incompetent. I try not to pin them wriggling to the wall, but try and help ‘em get out of that space, or make their situation workable rather than challenging them. Trying to enrich them rather than challenge them.”

In a 1995 interview, he was asked if he had advice for the boomer generation, and he replied, “Don’t get intimidated, read great literature, learn to meditate in order to become conscious of [your] own minds and purify [your] own aggression, realizing that any gesture you take in anger creates more anger. Any gesture you take in equanimity creates equanimity. Make peace with yourself and see what you can do to relieve the sufferings of others. That’s the main compass.”

These days people may ask one another with urgent anxiety, “Do you think there is hope, do you feel hopeful?” Ginsberg’s take on this question: “I don’t think hope or fear are important. I think the main thing is a continuous generous activity, exuberant activity, no matter what’s happening. Even if the ship is sinking, you can relieve suffering in any situation. Death is not—well okay, my meditation teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, visited William Burroughs’s son when he was waiting for a liver transplant. He was not sure he’d survive and he said to the young man, ‘You will live or you will die, both are good.’ That’s my attitude. Both are good. That attitude of a little non-attachment and, at the same time, compassion and affection are sufficient. “

Ginsberg was a lifelong servant of Poetry, with thousands of lines learned by heart, thousands of actions taken to promote unknown poets, thousands of hours spent expounding upon poetry. But what can poetry accomplish in these days? In the mid-1990s, Ginsberg seemed assured, with a Gramscian “optimism of the will,” that “poetry is an individual thing that gets around by word of mouth. It’s an oral tradition, as well as a written, printed tradition, as well as a spoken tradition. So it’ll get around. Anything really good will get around.”

So, share one of your own poems with a friend. Send one of your favorite Szymborska poems to someone who might need a lift. Take the still unread Canto General off your shelf and give it your ardent mindfulness. Recite in public with gusto di Prima’s “Life Chant” for the sake of your soul and the the soul of the USA.

Chris Wallach, may we be the continuation of Allen Ginsberg…

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

First Thought: Conversations with Allen Ginsberg, edited by Michael Schumacher, is not the first collection of interviews with Allen Ginsberg, but it is in some respect the best. It is a slim edition, carefully selected from the inconceivably vast archive of interviews, to show Allen at his very best. As Schumacher points out in his introduction (and as a great many others have observed) Allen viewed the interview as an art form, just like his poems. He was generous with his interviewers, yet firm. He pushed them to give their best, and he always gave his. (Throughout the book, there are weak interviewers but Ginsberg is never off-form.) Mistakes rankled him, and he made efforts to ensure every interview he gave went to print without misrepresenting his ideas.

Schumacher has successfully gathered a series of interviews which, compiled chronologically, more or less cover Ginsberg’s interests without too much repetition. A previous collection, Spontaneous Mind, edited by David Carter, is far more comprehensive, but grows tedious for casual reading due to its repetitive nature. First Thought works far better as a readable, enjoyable guide to Ginsberg’s world. He covers the meaning and history of the Beat Generation in depth and gets into deep explanations of his own poetry, while also talking about politics, travel, and drugs. There is little that mattered to Ginsberg which doesn’t make its way into these collected interviews.

The collection includes not just straight-forward interviews with Allen, but also his own grilling of Ezra Pound, a joint interview with his father, Louis, and a class discussion at Naropa that was interrupted by William S. Burroughs and Norman Mailer. A particular highlight is an interview Ginsberg gave to the book’s editor several decades ago, in which he discusses his dreams – something that was of importance to his Beat contemporaries, Burroughs and Kerouac.

First Thought: Conversations with Allen Ginsberg is an essential part of any good Beat book collection, and will certainly be invaluable to anyone conducting research on Ginsberg.

From: http://www.beatdom.com/review-first-t...

[A YOGAM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dieses Buch fängt Allen Ginsberg (1926 - 1997), den bärtigen Buddha der Beat-Generation, in seiner natürlichsten Form ein: als unermüdlichen Poesie-Guru in gedanklicher Dauerschleife. Der Band zeigt, dass Ginsberg das Konzept, Poesie sei ein Akt der Kunst, so ernst nahm, dass er selbst alltägliche Kommunikation – das Reden, Schreiben und einfache Antworten – in eine Form philosophischer Performance verwandelte.
Die wahre Botschaft formuliert er gegenüber seinen Schreibschülern: Man solle die Dinge direkt und klar beschreiben – denn wer ein Objekt zum Symbol macht, betreibt gedankliches Fremdgehen („making out with one person and thinking about another“).
Man folgt Ginsberg von seiner sanften Befragung des emotional gebrochenen Ezra Pound (1967) über seine Blake Visions bis hin zu seinen Auftritten vor Senatsausschüssen. Es ist der überzeugende Beweis, dass Poesie nicht nur mit Blütenblättern zurückschreibt, sondern dass Ginsberg selbst die lebendige Metapher der Gegenkultur war: stets voll präsent und in präziser, fast musikalisch abgestimmter philosophischer Detailverliebtheit.