Allen Ginsberg, ca. 1979. Photograph by Michiel Hendryckx

Allen Ginsberg was elected King of the May by Czech students in Prague on May Day, 1965. Soon afterward, he was expelled by the Czech government. He had been traveling for several months—in Cuba, Russia, and Poland—and from Prague he flew to London to negotiate the English publication of his poems. I didn’t know he was in the country, but one night in Bristol before a poetry reading I saw him in a bar. He read that night; I hadn’t heard him read before and was struck that evening by the way he seemed to enter each of his poems emotionally while reading them, the performance was much a discovery for him as for his audience.

Ginsberg and I left Bristol the day after the reading and hitchhiked to Wells Cathedral and then to Glastonbury, where he picked a flower from King Arthur’s grave to send, he said, to his lifelong companion, Peter Orlovsky. He carefully studied the exhibit of tools and weapons under the huge conical chimney of the ancient king’s kitchen, as later in Cambridge he was to study the Fitzwilliam Museum’s store of Blake manuscripts; Ginsberg’s idea of a Jerusalemic Britain occurring now in the day of long hair and new music meant equally the fulfillment of Blake’s predictions of Albion. As we came out of a tea shop in Glastonbury (where customers had glanced cautiously at the bearded, prophetic—and unfazed—stranger), Allen spoke of Life’s simulacrum of a report of his Oxford encounter with Dame Edith Sitwell. (“Dope makes me come out all over in spots,” she’s supposed to have said.)

Leaving the town, we were caught in a rainstorm and took a bus to Bath. Then, hitchhiking toward London, we were unsuccessful until Ginsberg tried using Buddhist hand signals instead of thumbing; half a minute later a car stopped. Riding through Somerset he talked about notation, the mode he says he learned from Kerouac and has used in composing his enormous journals; he read from an account he’d made of a recent meeting with the poets Yevtushenko and Voznesensky in Moscow, and then, looking up at a knot in a withered oak by the road, said, “The tree has cancer of the breast ... that’s what I mean ...”

Two weeks later he was in Cambridge for a reading and I asked him to submit to this interview. He was still busy with Blake, roaming and musing around the university and countryside in his spare moments; it took two days to get him to sit still long enough to turn on the tape recorder. He spoke slowly and thoughtfully, tiring after two hours. We stopped for a meal when guests came—when Ginsberg learned one of them was a biochemist he questioned him about viruses and DNA for an hour—then we returned to record the other half of the tape.

INTERVIEWER

I think Diana Trilling, speaking about your reading at Columbia, remarked that your poetry, like all poetry in English when dealing with a serious subject, naturally takes on the iambic pentameter rhythm. Do you agree?

GINSBERG

Well, it really isn’t an accurate thing, I don’t think. I’ve never actually sat down and made a technical analysis of the rhythms that I write. They’re probably more near choriambic—Greek meters, dithyrambic meters—and tending toward de DA de de DA de de ... what is that? Tending toward dactylic, probably. Williams once remarked that American speech tends toward dactylic. But it’s more complicated than dactyl because dactyl is a three—three units, a foot consisting of three parts—whereas the actual rhythm is probably a rhythm which consists of five, six, or seven, like DA de de DA de de DA de de DA DA. Which is more toward the line of Greek dance rhythms—that’s why they call them choriambic. So actually, probably it’s not really technically correct, what she said. But—and that applies to certain poems, like certain passages of Howl and certain passages of Kaddish—there are definite rhythms that could be analyzed as corresponding to classical rhythms, though not necessarily English classical rhythms; they might correspond to Greek classical rhythms, or Sanskrit prosody. But probably most of the other poetry, like Aether or Laughing Gas or a lot of those poems, they simply don’t fit into that. I think she felt very comfy, to think that that would be so. I really felt quite hurt about that, because it seemed to me that she ignored the main prosodic technical achievements that I had proffered forth to the academy, and they didn’t even recognize it. I mean, not that I want to stick her with being the academy.

INTERVIEWER

And in Howl and Kaddish you were working with a kind of classical unit? Is that an accurate description?

GINSBERG

Yeah, but it doesn’t do very much good, because I wasn’t really working with a classical unit, I was working with my own neural impulses and writing impulses. See, the difference is between someone sitting down to write a poem in a definite preconceived metrical pattern and filling in that pattern, and someone working with his physiological movements and arriving at a pattern, and perhaps even arriving at a pattern that might even have a name, or might even have a classical usage, but arriving at it organically rather than synthetically. Nobody’s got any objection to even iambic pentameter if it comes from a source deeper than the mind, that is to say if it comes from the breathing and the belly and the lungs.

INTERVIEWER

American poets have been able to break away from a kind of English specified rhythm earlier than English poets have been able to do. Do you think this has anything to do with a peculiarity in English spoken tradition?

GINSBERG

No, I don’t really think so, because the English don’t speak in iambic pentameter either; they don’t speak in the recognizable pattern that they write in. The dimness of their speech and the lack of emotional variation is parallel to the kind of dim diction and literary usage in the poetry now. But you can hear all sorts of Liverpudlian or Gordian—that’s Newcastle—you can hear all sorts of variants aside from an upper-tone accent—a highclass accent—that don’t fit into the tone of poetry being written right now. It’s not being used like in America—I think it’s just that British poets are more cowardly.

INTERVIEWER

Do you find any exception to this?

GINSBERG

It’s pretty general, even the supposedly avant-garde poets. They write, you know, in a very toned-down manner.

INTERVIEWER

How about a poet like Basil Bunting?

GINSBERG

Well, he was working with a whole bunch of wild men from an earlier era, who were all breaking through, I guess. And so he had that experience—also he knew Persian, he knew Persian prosody. He was better educated than most English poets.

INTERVIEWER

The kind of organization you use in Howl, a recurrent kind of syntax—you don’t think this is relevant any longer to what you want to do?

GINSBERG

No, but it was relevant to what I wanted to do then; it wasn’t even a conscious decision.

INTERVIEWER

Was this related in any way to a kind of music or jazz that you were interested in at the time?

GINSBERG

Mmm ... the myth of Lester Young as described by Kerouac, blowing eighty-nine choruses of Lady Be Good, say, in one night, or my own hearing of Illinois Jacciuet’s Jazz at the Philharmonic, Volume 2; I think Can’t Get Started was the title.

INTERVIEWER

And you’ve also mentioned poets like Christopher Smart, for instance, as providing an analogy—is this something you discovered later on?

GINSBERG

When I looked into it, yeah. Actually, I keep reading, or earlier I kept reading, that I was influenced by Kenneth Fearing and Carl Sandburg, whereas actually I was more conscious of Christopher Smart, and Blake’s Prophetic Books, and Whitman, and some aspects of biblical rhetoric. And a lot of specific prose things like Genet—Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers and the rhetoric in that—and Céline; Kerouac, most of all, was the biggest influence I think—Kerouac’s prose.