Note (April 2001): This important interview is included in its entirety in Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews: 1958-1996 by Allen Ginsberg, David Carter (Editor), published Spring 2001 by HarperCollins.
For a review of the book in the New York Times, Click here.
For a description of the book at Amazon.com, Select this link.
Ginsberg speaks his mind on:
Tibetan Buddhism, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche,
Rolling Thunder (Bob Dylan & Friends),
politics, poetry, and the future of America.
© By Peter Barry Chowka. All rights reserved.
originally published as the cover story in New Age Journal, April 1976
Introduction
Allen Ginsberg is finally achieving formal recognition as a seminal figure in modern American literature. His influence, especially on young people, has been even more profound than his recent receipt of a prestigious National Book Award would indicate.
It was during the decade of sleepy sameness following the Second World War that Ginsberg and his talented circle of friends -- William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and others -- matured into perceptive, original creative writers. Striking a vivid contrast with the ethics and pastimes dominant in the '40s and '50s, their unconventional, often outrageous, lifestyles quickly earned them notoreity. Twenty years before it became commonplace, Ginsberg and friends experimented with drugs, gay and hetero sex, iconoclastic political outlooks, and mystical longings. The force and color of their personalities and writings assured that eventually these efforts would become widely know, admired and even copied.
Encouraged by literary associates Kerouac and Gary Snyder, Ginsberg was among the first in the U.S. to become aware in the early '50s of the depth and utility of Eastern thought, practice and enlightenment. This orientation of the "Beats," as they were called (in Kerouac's mind the term denoted "beatitude" and conformed to his Buddhist outlook), coincided with their discovery of spontaneous expression, which preserved the flow of natural speech rhythms and was well suited to the communication of their explorations in consciousness. The legacy of their inner journey has been left to us in Kerouac's novels, especially in The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels, and permeates much of Ginsberg's poetry to the present time.
The '60s saw Ginsberg move out front of his "beat" associates. (Kerouac's energy, meanwhile, was being dissipated by alcohol.) Following his trip to India in '62 and '63, Allen traveled throughout the U.S. and Europe, proselytizing against the insanity of the Vietnam War and the accelerating drift of the West towards the mechanical "Moloch" civilization he had prophesied in Howl, his seminal poem published in 1956. At poetry readings he chanted Hare Krishna and other mantras, and began exposing diverse audiences to the practical wisdom of the East. As Theodore Roszak has noted, Allen "has allowed his entire existence to be transformed by the visionary power with which he conjures and has offered it as an example to his generation." Moreover, in his tremendous influence on other artists and thinkers, like Bob Dylan and Timothy Leary, and by his identification with a variety of progressive movements during the '60s, Ginsberg helped to transform the decade into what many have seen as a germinative period for a truly "new age."
The '70s -- a crueler, less active time outwardly, with inward searches now institutionalized -- have seen changes in Ginsberg, too. His patriarchal beard and mustaches have given way to a clean shaven, trimmer appearance, with a jacket and tie occasionally substituted for casual dress at public readings. While continuing to write prolifically and read often in public, he has become more serious and disciplined, studying for the past five years with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Indeed, it may be said that the formal work of classical Buddhist practice has become the core of Ginsberg's life. He periodically devotes weeks to silent meditation and spends three months during the summer teaching at Trungpa's Naropa Institute, which offers an eclectic array of courses in Boulder, Colorado.
The interview with Allen was conducted on several occasions over a three week period in February [1976]. Most of it was recorded during a drive from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore, the morning after a powerful reading by Ginsberg and William Burroughs at the Corcoran Gallery. Ginsberg's unique, uncloying ability to balance genuine indignation and outrage with scholarly meditative detachment was evident at the reading, as he alternated poems which emotionally denounced government / capitalist / intelligence community excesses with quieter poems of reflection, "by-products of meditation."
At the end of February I traveled to Manhattan to attend a reading by Allen, Burroughs, and Trungpa at New York University, and to complete and edit the interview. Allen's pace in the city where he resides was frenetic: doing public readings, planning to attend Trungpa's seminars, re-reading and correcting manuscripts for publication, granting several interviews, responding to phone calls, working with his new secretary in answering his voluminous correspondence, attending to family responsibilities. Although somewhat freer of the groupie-like mob scene which apparently surrounded him ten years ago, Allen and his Lower East Side flat are still a center of incessant activity.
During the weekend in New York there was one more special vignette of the past which gave insight into Allen's present and future. Toward the end of a busy afternoon, he was reunited briefly with an old friend, poet and playwright Michael McClure, who was part of the San Francisco "poetry renaissance" of the '50s. As they traded friendly gossip of mutual acquaintances and West Coast happenings and talked of present projects, they discovered that each had recently begun a reading aloud from Milton's difficult, prodigious work, Paradise Lost. McClure at once remarked how far they'd come: twenty years ago both were attacked for alleged anti-academic, ignorant bias; now they are steeping themselves in the classics (McClure reading Dante, too) as they both prepare to teach. And each, McClure added, has grown increasingly close to his respective family.
Spending the greater part of a day together, Allen and I were able to complete the interview in segments, while traveling crosstown in taxicabs, entering and riding the subway, walking down the street, taking advantage of any spare moment which would allow a question and considered answer. Allen has been the subject of many published interviews. In selecting questions for this one, I tried to concentrate on areas that I hadn't seen him comment directly on before. I was especially interested in the background of his present work with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and in his experience on Dylan's recent Rolling Thunder tour.
--Peter Barry Chowka, March 1976
Peter Barry Chowka is a journalist, photographer, medical-political analyst, lecturer, radio producer and host, musician, and consultant. Much of his work during the past two decades has documented traditional approaches to healing. In this light, Chowka has been a consultant to network television and the U.S. Congress and was appointed to the first advisory panels of the NIH Office of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. He has also worked with leading cultural and political figures like Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Jerry Brown, Dick Gregory, Paul Winter, George McGovern, Bob Dole, and many others on a variety of projects including extensive published and broadcast interviews. From 1978-84 Chowka was National Affairs Editor of New Age Journal. For many years he was a Contributing Editor to East West, Whole Life Times, and many other publications here and abroad.
© 1976, 1997 by Peter Barry Chowka. Any duplication of this document by electronic or other means is strictly prohibited.
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