Interviewing Allen Ginsberg

American Poetry Review, The, Jul/Aug 1997 by Meyer, Lisa

Allen Ginsberg, gaunt and tired, sat slightly hunched over a wooden table at the KK Restaurant in the East Village. I handed him an interview contract. He read it carefully and then tossed it back. "Fuck you," he said. "Let's just do the interview." He looked away and then back at me. "Send it through my office," he added softly. "They take care of that stuff." This was the second diner we had tried. The first did not have an electrical outlet where I could plug in my recorder. Before we settled in this one, Allen Ginsberg, poet with no patience for contracts, made sure I had access to a wall socket.

Last spring, I had approached Allen Ginsberg in a crowded lecture hall at Princeton University. He had just finished reading portions of "Howl" and "Kaddish" to an audience of more than seven hundred. They rose and applauded. Carefully, he stepped off the stage, and the crowd swarmed around him. I finally reached him standing just inside the door, greeting fans. I told him that I was compiling a collection of interviews with wellknown writers.

He glanced at me. "What about the little-known writers?" he snapped. I said that I was working on that. He looked straight at me. Behind his thick-lensed glasses, one eye was slightly squinted. A teary-eyed young woman stepped in front of me and asked if she could hold his hand. He let her. A couple of days later, I approached him again, after a classroom discussion at Princeton. I repeated my request for an interview. He coughed for several moments, uncontrollably, and then, as he turned away, he said, "Call my office."

The next day, I did and asked for his secretary, Bob Rosenthal, who told me to send some examples of my work and an interview contract. Allen was not well, he added. He was giving very few interviews. "But call back," he told me. "That's the only way you get to the top of, our stack."

Over several months, the people who worked for Allen Ginsberg said that I should keep calling back. At first, I called every two weeks, then every month. He was going to Europe, then Colorado. They told me to call back at the beginning of fall and then again in a couple of weeks. One Thursday morning last October, they gave me a choice: next Monday or Tuesday. I picked Tuesday, and they gave me his new address. Allen Ginsberg had just moved out of his small walk up flat on the Lower East Side.

The door to his new apartment building in the East Village was a scuffed maroon metal panel that held a two-way mirror and a black sign that informed me in white letters that the entry was monitored by closed circuit TV. I rang him and, through his intercom, he told me his apartment number. Then he pressed a buzzer to unlock the metal door, and I walked down a long gray hallway to a large elevator. It took me up to the fifth floor. Its door slid open to a small foyer that held a varnished wooden bench. Under the bench were rows of cubby holes. Buddhists have them. In the holes, he put his shoes.

I found him barefoot at the far end of a spacious loft that was being built around him. Construction workers were scattered about, measuring, drilling, and hammering. He sat on the edge of a twin bed in a pair of worn light blue pants. He had brought the bed with him from his old flat. He also brought his tiny wooden desk. Like Allen Ginsberg, the furniture appeared out of place. The white brick walls were freshly painted. The wooden floor was newly lacquered. The ceiling was lined with gray painted pipes and ceiling fans. The kitchen looked as if it had been hardly used. The counters were bare and shiny.

He stood to greet me.

"So tell me," he said, "what is this about?" Puzzled, I explained that his office had set up an interview.

"Yes. Yes," he said, agitated, looking down and shaking his head. "But what is it about?"

I told him that I wanted to investigate with him the various ways in which his work was subversive.

He thought about this for a moment, then nodded.

It was late afternoon and he had just awakened. He wanted breakfast. We set out for a nearby restaurant. At the second diner-the one with the wall socket-he marveled at my recorder, which uses digital audio tape.

"How much did that cost?" he asked, with a touch of envy. "More than I have," I answered. He smiled and raised his hand, flagging a waitress.

"Could you turn down the music?" he asked. Pop tunes were piped through ceiling speakers. "We are going to do an interview."

The waitress, who hardly spoke English, stared at him, deadpan, then walked off. The music did not soften. She brought his order: two fried eggs, sunny side up, toast, and a large glass of orange juice.

He did not like my first question. "You have been called the `Sidewalk Bard of America,"' I said.

"I haven't heard that one before," he retorted.

"What do you think about the title?"

"I don't live on the sidewalk. It comes from street poetry, I believe, and then the category has evolved to the sidewalk. But I rarely read poetry on the streets. So the title seems a little bit off center."