Allen Ginsberg: An interview by Gary Pacernick

American Poetry Review, The, Jul/Aug 1997 by Pacernick, Gary

On Saturday, February 10,1996, I interviewed Allen Ginsberg by phone via telephone answering machine with tape recorder. Gary Pacernick: The tape is on now; this is the beginning.

Allen Ginsberg: "This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks, bearded with/ moss . . ."

GP: Allen, what have you found the hardest thing about being a poet?

Ginsberg: Nothing particular. I mean-nothing particular. No hard part.

GP: Okay.

Ginsberg: Making a living at it. Making a living.

GP: Well, what about inspiration? Has it always been easy?

Ginsberg: Inspiration comes from the word spiritus. Spiritus means breathing. Inspiration means taking in breath. Expiration means letting breath go out. So inspiration is just a feeling of heightened breath or slightly exalted breath, when the body feels like a hollow reed in the wind of breath. Physical breath comes easily and thoughts come with it. Now that's a state of physical and mental heightening, but it's not absolutely necessary for great poetry. Though you find it's a kind of inspiration, a kind of breathing in Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" or "Adonais" or Hart Crane's "Atlantis," or perhaps the Moloch section of "Howl." But for subject matter, which is what you mean, for ideas, ordinary mind and thoughts that occur every day are sufficient. It's a question of the quality of your attention to your own mind and your own thoughts.

GP: Where does this breath come from that you find in the second part of "Howl," for example?

Ginsberg: Well, it's a more excited breathing, longer breath, that you find in the examples that I cited which build sequentially as a series of breaths until finally there's a kind of conclusive utterance. "Moloch whose name is the Mind."

GP: You talk in the Paris Review interview and other places about being inspired by Blake reciting "Sunflower."

Ginsberg: An auditory hallucination, hearing it, but that's a different kind of breath, completely. That's a quieter breath from the heart area. Like my voice now rather than the stentorian breath of "Atlantis" or "Howl."

GP: So you're not talking about what we usually talk about in terms of prophesy, in terms of some divine voice.

Ginsberg: Now wait a minute. You're switching your words now. We were using the word inspiration and voice. Now what are you talking about? What's your question, really?

GP: What is a breath unit?

Ginsberg: A breath unit as a measure of the verse line? Why, a breath unit as a measure of the verse line is one breath, and then continuing with the sentence is another breath. Or saying "or" is another breath, and then you take another breath and continue. So you arrange the verse line on the page according to where you have your breath stop, and the number of words within one breath, whether it's long or short, as this long breath has just become.

GP: Okay now, you're talking about great poetry-. Ginsberg: No, no, I'm talking about how you arrange the verse lines on the page by the breath.

GP: No, I understand, but when we were talking about inspiration you used the word breath again.

Ginsberg: Because the word inspiration comes from the Latin word spiritus, which means breathing. So I was trying to nail down what the word inspiration means rather than have a vague term that we didn't know what we were talking about.

GP: But to me, and obviously I could be totally off, it sounds like you're talking about poetry as a kind of series of breathing exercises.

Ginsberg: Well it is, in a way, or the vocal part, the oral part, is related to the breath, yes.

GP: What inspires the breath?

Ginsberg: The breath is inspiration itself. Breath is itself, breath is breath. Where there is life, there is breath, remember? Breath is spirit, spiritus.

GP: So every once in awhile this spirit breath visits you and other poets?

Ginsberg: No, you're breathing all the time, it's just that you become aware of your breath. Every once in awhile you become aware that you're alive. Every once in awhile you become aware of your breathing. Or of the whole process of being alive, breathing in the universe, being awake, and so you could say that that's the inspiration or the key, that you become aware of what's already going on.

GP: You probably didn't know this when you were sixteen, eighteen, twenty years old and first writing poetry.

Ginsberg: Oh, well, pretty soon. A sort of latent understanding, yeah. That notion of awareness, conscious awareness.

GP: Did Williams or Pound influence this?

Ginsberg: Pound and Williams specialized in this. They broke the ground for this kind of thinking. Williams trying to write in vernacular speech and dividing it up into pieces, and dividing the verse line into pieces of vernacular speech, sometimes by counting syllables, sometimes by the breath stop, sometimes by running counter to the breath stop. Do you know what I mean by the breath stop?

GP: You were in Dayton years ago and I was there with my wife and child, and I said to you, "What is a breath unit?" and you were sort of showing me with your hand as I spoke. Charles Olson talks about it. But Pound and Williams don't talk about breath, do they?