{"id":227062,"date":"2023-01-09T12:00:19","date_gmt":"2023-01-09T12:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=227062"},"modified":"2023-01-09T04:37:31","modified_gmt":"2023-01-09T04:37:31","slug":"allen-ginsbergs-self-recording-sessions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/01\/allen-ginsbergs-self-recording-sessions\/","title":{"rendered":"Allen Ginsberg\u2019s Self-Recording Sessions"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the late sixties, Ginsberg began taping many of his public appearances, as well as his casual and private conversations. He used the recordings to compose his greatest work.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Allen Ginsberg\u2019s poetry often resembles a travel log, attaching particular experiences to particular places.
Photograph by Martyn Goddard \/ Alamy<\/p><\/div>\n

6 Jan 2023 – <\/em>In September, 1965, the poet Allen Ginsberg had a series of vivid, sweaty dreams about literary celebrity. Accompanied by his fellow-poet Gary Snyder and a young woman named Martine Algier, Ginsberg was touring the Pacific Northwest in a Volkswagen camper van he\u2019d bought himself with a Guggenheim grant, stopping to hike, climb, and camp along the way. He slept under the forest canopy in a saffron-colored sleeping bag and recorded his dreams in his journal, published in 2020 as \u201cThe Fall of America Journals<\/a>.\u201d The first dream took place at a friend\u2019s apartment in New York City: lying with Jean Genet on a couch, Ginsberg talked loudly about his personal life as a roomful of people\u2014journalists, former classmates, literati, extended family\u2014looked on, sipping on martinis and hanging on Ginsberg\u2019s every word.<\/p>\n

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In the second dream, Esquire<\/em> wanted to interview Ginsberg \u201cfor a feature article on [his] divine person.\u201d Ginsberg called his friend William S. Burroughs to share the news, but Burroughs disapproved, telling Ginsberg he\u2019d been vain and stupid to accept the invitation. Ginsberg felt \u201cchagrined,\u201d and woke up. Next, he was headed toward San Francisco in the Volkswagen. A poem earnestly titled \u201cBeginning of a Poem of These States\u201d tracks his journey. Ginsberg records the character and color of the landscape, the tinny pandemonium on the radio, the Beach Boys singing tenderly against a backdrop of new industrial farmlands spreading; he suggests that his tennis shoes from Central Europe are not thick enough to keep his feet from getting cold in the early mornings.<\/p>\n

What else do you want to know? Ginsberg\u2019s life has been exhaustively catalogued by multiple encyclopedic biographies. But his experience of the late sixties is knowable in especially fine detail\u2014a consequence of his efforts in those years to make the work of writing and self-documentation as mobile, flexible, and constant as possible. His poetry began to resemble a travel log, attaching particular experiences to particular places. In \u201cBeginning of a Poem of These States,\u201d he describes the morning sun warming his feet, ravens landing on a dead cow at the side of the road, tomato sandwiches, silence. Through California\u2019s Donner Pass, the poem\u2019s speaker feels a surge of giddy freedom; \u201cI have nothing to do,\u201d he says, \u201claughing.\u201d Wildfire smoke forms a purple band at the horizon, and the speaker chants to the Hindu god Shiva\u2014a \u201cnew mantra to manifest Removal of Disaster from my self.\u201d As an unnaturally red sun sets over California, Bob Dylan\u2019s \u201cPositively 4th Street\u201d comes on the radio. \u201cDylan ends his song \/ \u2018You\u2019d see what a drag you are,\u2019 \u201d wrote Ginsberg. The actual line is \u201cYou\u2019d know what a drag it is to see you.\u201d Eventually, as the story goes, Ginsberg would obtain a tape recorder with help from Dylan.<\/p>\n

\u201cBeginning of a Poem of These States,\u201d which appears in the first pages of \u201cThe Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-1971,\u201d demonstrates Ginsber\u2019s growing enthusiasm for highly detailed modes of self-recording. \u201cThe Fall of America\u201d is Ginsberg\u2019s fifth collection of poems (after \u201cHOWL<\/a>,\u201d \u201cKaddish<\/a>,\u201d \u201cReality Sandwiches<\/a>,\u201d and \u201cPlanet News<\/a>\u201d) and his longest and most critically successful standalone work. The original edition, published by City Lights in 1972, is a cult object, a chunky little book with a minimalist black and white cover, title and author intoned in a cool, lightly-serifed font. As the title suggests, its poems convey images of national decline and collapse, which Ginsberg attributes to an interlocking set of causes: racial exploitation and violence; the outsized power of certain depraved politicians and corporate owners; widespread, reality-warping abuses of mass media; and compounding environmental devastations\u2014in short, an evergreen guide to the end of the empire. But virtuosic topicality and overdetermined relevance to our own moment aren\u2019t what make \u201cThe Fall of America\u201d special. To understand its prescience, and experience its enduring appeal, you have to zoom in on its process.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Fall of America\u201d was famously written with the help of a portable tape machine. When Ginsberg began work on it in 1965, amateur recording was a relatively new possibility: magnetic tape technology had just made its way into the U.S. at the end of the Second World War, when reel-to-reel recorders were machines the size of mini-fridges, generally acquired by record labels or entertainment and news outlets. Rapid advancements ensued, and by the nineteen-sixties there were smaller, battery-powered tape machines available to consumers. Ginsberg used an Uher, an upscale German model that was distributed in the United States by Martel. The Uher was easy to carry (weighing only several pounds), plus its special features included a rechargeable battery that could be plugged into any outlet and a microphone that doubled as an electromagnetic remote control, making it possible to start and stop the recorder from a distance.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Fall of America\u201d compresses the hours Ginsberg spent playing with his new toy. When he was composing what he called \u201cauto poesy,\u201d Ginsberg would switch on the machine and spout lines into the air of the Volkswagen. He recorded his reactions to billboards, pop songs, ads, and news reports; confessed intimate feelings; and addressed an eclectic list of higher powers (Hindu saints, yogis, Herman Melville, and Bob Dylan). He would replay the recordings again and again, listening carefully\u2014repeating and re-recording certain lines, refining and building on his rhythms. Then he\u2019d transcribe the tapes\u2019 contents into his journal, editing, formatting, and polishing as he went. His journals suggest that he planned to clear his schedule of commitments, drive back and forth across the continental U.S., and spontaneously record his thoughts about life, friendship, waning youth, and the search for authenticity. Ginsberg himself seems to have acknowledged the conceit as derivative\u2014an aping of \u201cOn the Road<\/a>,\u201d Jack Kerouac\u2019s best-selling novel of the late nineteen-fifties.<\/p>\n

\u201cPray for me, Jackie,\u201d Ginsberg appears to have told his brand-new tape recorder around 1965, addressing it like a telephone receiver in a burst of coy neediness. \u201cAll I can do is think like you, write like you.\u201d The comparison flatters Kerouac<\/a>, who spent the late nineteen-sixties living semi-reclusively and struggling with alcoholism in Florida. But it fairly reflects Ginsberg\u2019s passion for mimesis, and for talking to people who may or may not be listening.<\/p>\n

Like Kerouac\u2019s \u201cspontaneous prose,\u201d auto poesy was a more labor- and time-intensive process than the coinage suggests. Ginsberg began taping many of his public appearances, as well as his casual and private conversations. He carried the Uher with him everywhere\u2014into auditoriums, classrooms, restaurants, train stations. He taped himself on planes and at parties. His use accelerated so quickly that it caused fights with his boyfriend, Peter Orlovsky. By 1966, recordings suggest that Peter felt abandoned for the little machine and the hyper-absorbed moods it could induce. \u201cWork your fucking recorder, man,\u201d Peter once told Ginsberg in the middle of a heated argument. Ginsberg tried to mollify him\u2014\u201cI like you, Peter, everything\u2019s all right.\u201d\u2014Peter snubbed him. \u201cYou like your publicity,\u201d Peter said, suggesting that the recorder appealed as a surrogate audience. \u201cYou keep it.\u201d (This tape now sits in Ginsberg\u2019s enormous tape archive at Stanford University; the tape is labelled \u201cPeter angry in car,\u201d in Ginsberg\u2019s handwriting). Ginsberg would eventually avail himself of Peter\u2019s insult: the long poem \u201cIron Horse\u201d opens with a detailed transcription of the poet literally getting off to the sound of his own voice; he dirty-talks the microphone while masturbating, fully nude, in a train car.<\/p>\n

Ginsberg once wrote in his journal that \u201cthe best antipolice state strategy was total exposure of all secrets.\u201d \u201cUnclassify everybody\u2019s private life,\u201d he suggested. \u201cPresident Johnson\u2019s as well as mine.\u201d The years spanned by \u201cThe Fall of America\u201d roughly coincide with the time that the F.B.I. was compiling a dossier on Ginsberg, focussing primarily on his sexuality, drug use, and psychiatric history. We could see Ginsberg\u2019s obsession with self-recording as strategic, an effort to counteract repressive invasions of privacy by pre\u00ebmptively surrendering everything to the eyes and ears of everyone.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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But Ginsberg also appeared to be motivated by a prodigious appetite for fame and recognition. Bill Morgan\u2019s biography, \u201cI Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg<\/a>,\u201d opens with two juxtaposed anecdotes: in the first, Ginsberg interrupts a violent dispute on a sidewalk in New York City by approaching the person at the center of it, a woman evidently out of her mind on bad drugs, and offering her a Fig Newton, a kindness so incongruous it seemingly diffused the situation. The second takes place at the end of Ginsberg\u2019s life. The last letter he ever wrote, according to Morgan, was addressed to President Clinton: \u201cI have untreatable liver cancer and have 2-5 months to live,\u201d it read. \u201cIf you have some sort of award or medal for service in art or poetry, please send one along.\u201d These two impulses\u2014the reparative and the approval-seeking\u2014converge in Ginsberg\u2019s experiments with recording. The lyric persona of the tape poems strives to be as worthy of our attention as he is desperate for it.<\/p>\n

The most famous and highly regarded poem Ginsberg ever composed on tape is \u201cWichita Vortex Sutra,\u201d completed in 1966. It wasn\u2019t included in \u201cThe Fall of America\u201d; Ginsberg released it early, apparently out of enthusiasm (it appeared in 1968\u2019s \u201cPlanet News\u201d). A symbolic struggle between the individual poet and the U.S. state forms the core of its dramatic action: Ginsberg\u2014who identifies himself in the poem as \u201ca lonesome man in Kansas\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. not afraid to speak my lonesomeness in a car\u201d\u2014declares the ongoing war in Vietnam \u201cover now,\u201d even as body counts come in over the radio. The euphoric climax:<\/p>\n

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I lift my voice aloud,
\nmake Mantra of American language now,
\nI here declare the end of the War!
\nAncient days\u2019 Illusion!\u2014
\nand pronounce words beginning my own millennium.
\nLet the States tremble,
\nlet the Nation weep,
\nlet Congress legislate its own delight
\nlet the President execute his own desire\u2014
\nthis Act done by my own voice
\nnameless Mystery\u2014
\npublished to my own senses,
\nblissfully received by my own form
\napproved with pleasure by my sensations
\nmanifestation of my very thought
\naccomplished in my own imagination
\nall realms within my consciousness fulfilled
\n60 miles from Wichita.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Ginsberg\u2019s autonomously \u201cpublished\u201d voice commands a momentous authority\u2014the suggestion being that his Uher is an instrument of radical democratization, channelling world-making power away from corrupted institutions and toward ordinary people. But this rosy view of technology is undercut by the poem\u2019s conclusion: a racially obscene volta addressed explicitly to white people implies that the poet\u2019s \u201cAct\u201d has excluded Black Americans, for whom nothing has changed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWichita Vortex Sutra\u201d brought Ginsberg\u2019s investment in questions of politics, propaganda, and governance to the surface of his writing. \u201cThe Fall of America\u201d was no longer a poetry version of \u201cOn the Road.\u201d Ginsberg had a new, if still imperfect, point of comparison: \u201cThe Cantos,\u201d Ezra Pound\u2019s unfinished and infamously complicated modernist poem. Politically, Ginsberg and Pound\u2019s differences were profound: Ginsberg was a left-wing activist leader, Pound<\/a> a noted antisemite and Fascist collaborator. Ginsberg had nevertheless dreamed of meeting Pound for a long time\u2014in one dream, Pound turned out to be \u201ca short Jewish fellow\u201d who was interested in the same things Ginsberg was. Ginsberg met Pound in the fall of 1967 in Italy, where Pound had been living a comfortable, increasingly catatonic existence since his 1958 release from St. Elizabeth\u2019s Hospital in Washington, D.C. (he was committed in 1946, after being indicted in absentia for treason for making Italian broadcasts which apparently expressed Fascist views).<\/p>\n

If Ginsberg was at all nervous about visiting Pound, the entries in his journal suggest he didn\u2019t show it. (These entries are extremely detailed; it seems possible that Ginsberg could have recorded some parts of his conversations with Pound.) \u201cHow old are you, old man?\u201d Ginsberg reports asking when they met in Venice. (He also notes that he was \u201cseveral wines and a stick of pot\u201d deep.) Pound, it emerged, was turning eighty-two in a few days. They spoke several times during Ginsberg\u2019s stay in Italy, most often at Pound\u2019s home. Their conversation meandered (Ginsberg had a free-associative style of communicating), but it kept returning to Pound\u2019s depression and self-loathing, his miserable inability to write. Pound complained that \u201cThe Cantos\u201d were structurally \u201ca mess\u201d and Ginsberg offered his earnest reassurances: \u201cI said the Cantos were solid.\u201d At one point Ginsberg asked him \u201cif he was at all familiar with my poetry.\u201d Pound shook his head no. \u201cI said, Well, oddly, it might even please you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ginsberg was invited to spend Pound\u2019s birthday with him. The night of, at 10 P.M.<\/em>, Ginsberg knocked on the door of Pound\u2019s villa, wearing a gold silk shirt and carrying a harmonium and some of his own work\u2014manuscript pages, it appears, from \u201cThe Fall of America.\u201d After fireside cake and champagne, Ginsberg took a chance, reading \u201ca few pages of \u2018Middle Section of Long Poem on These States\u2019\u00a0\u201d to \u201cillustrate [the] effect of his composition on mine.\u201d<\/p>\n

The reading appears to have gone poorly. \u201cOops!,\u201d Ginsberg wrote in his journal. \u201cSilence. Eek! Put that down fast.\u201d He recovered by picking up his harmonium and chanting \u201c50 verses\u201d of a Hindu prayer to Gopala. Before leaving, he made a small demand. \u201cSay Goodnight!\u201d Ginsberg said, waving from the entryway. \u201cHe nodded amiably, said \u2018Goodnight.\u2019 So I left.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unclear what effect this ambivalent encounter had on Ginsberg. The political and personal upheavals of the following year (the Tet offensive began in January, 1968; his friend Neal Cassady<\/a> died that February) must have forced him to move on quickly. The latter half of \u201cThe Fall of America\u201d reflects the chaotic, uneven quality of Ginsberg\u2019s life in those years. But it\u2019s possible to see, in the velocity of Ginsberg\u2019s language, a repudiation of Pound\u2019s terminal obsession with structure, his silent retreat into feelings of artistic failure. To paraphrase the literary critic Hugh Kenner, \u201cThe Cantos\u201d seemed paradoxically ancient to readers of Pound\u2019s era, despite being vehemently topical. Their extreme difficulty, combined with an initially limited availability in print, led readers to construe Pound\u2019s mind as the unapproachable source of an orphic craft. \u201cThe Fall of America\u201d can be described in precisely opposite terms. If the reader can\u2019t approach Ginsberg, it is because he has approached the reader first, and is currently pointing at the sky like a preacher and reading insistent lines at her:<\/p>\n

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\u201cstay silent, ugly teachers,
\nlet me & the Radio yell about Vietnam and mustard gas.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Or, in a tone of itchy despair:<\/p>\n

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\u201cI called in Exterminator Who soaked the Wall floor with
\nbed-bug death oil. Who\u2019ll soak my brain with death oil?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Or, venting stiff outrage at a journalist,<\/p>\n

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\u201cHanson Baldwin is a Military Ass-Kisser.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Or maybe he\u2019d go with something lovely, like an image of himself in landscape, rendered in warm, globular phrases:<\/p>\n

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\u201cSt. John\u2019s Wort nodding yellow bells at the sun! eyes
\nclose in your presence, I
\nlie in your soft green bed, watch light thru red lid-skin,
\nlanguage persistent as birdwarble in my brain.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

However indebted Ginsberg may have felt to Poundian composition, his opus is defined by the way it makes his mind available, moment by moment, to our knowledge, attention, observation, and scrutiny. To read \u201cThe Fall of America\u201d is to follow its author as he continuously converts individual experience into a stream of bright, informationally dense mosaics\u2014a perusable abundance of compelling images, catchy sounds, and sensitive reactions to looming existential threats. Where Ginsberg went and with whom; how he dressed and what he ate; the headlines and articles he read and reacted to; the protests he attended; the hotel rooms he passed through; the meditations he practiced; the drugs he took; the sights, sounds, and smells he enjoyed or endured: all of this is discoverable. Ginsberg\u2019s auto poesy gives us his life not merely as a collection of facts, but as an imminent reality\u2014there for you to judge, worship, reject, envy, study, or imitate as you will.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/p>\n

Kathryn Winner<\/a> is a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – newyorker.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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