What are your thoughts on Ginsberg? What is your favorite poem of his? Is there another beat poet/writer whom you like better than Allen Ginsberg?
he's definitely one of my favorite poets ever, in fact one of my favorite people of any art genre, I just love his style. My favorite poem would have to be Transcription of Organ Music, from Howl. I also can never help laughing at his bizarre hunor when I read "America".
I really like him ,sometimes his graffic way of writing distracts me from the flow, but a friend got me a book with a collection of interviews by him called "spontaneious mind". My frist exposure was "howl" and it is still one of my favorites. His reaction to an interviewer's question of "do you believe in love?" I always liked. Reminding us that everything is relative... "Allen: Perhaps it’s a uselessly out-worn four letter word that substitutes for awareness to cover all cruel facts. But you have to first agree with people how you want to use the word. You know, a word doesn’t mean anything by itself, there’s no built-in intrinsic meaning, it’s just how you want to use it. It’s an abstraction like, "What is the truth?" It’s a semantic blind-alley. It doesn’t have a meaning except that which you assign to it, and if people don’t agree on the meaning then you’re going to have endless feuds over nothing, which is what happens all the time. A student and I spent time with Burroughs in 1944. We got into an argument about what is art? If we carved a walking-stick and put in on the moon, where nobody saw it, is that art? Or does art have to be social? So we took the argument to Burroughs and he said, "Art is a three-letter word. If you guys will agree on what you mean and how you want to use it, then you can use it. But to say that it has an absolute inherent meaning one way or an absolute inherent meaning the other way, that’s a semantic problem and ‘tis too too starved an argument for my sword." You ask a large question using a large word which can mean anything, and then expect somebody to give you a sensible answer. Now, if you had said, what do you think of love? or how do you see using the word "love" for the experience of wonder at the sight of a sunset? Then I might be able to find an instance where it was used well, or I might not and I’d have to invent one. If I couldn’t invent an instance and I couldn’t remember any instance where the word was used will, I would say it’s probably not the right word."
i use his "sermon" at the end of that poem as an away message sometimes on AIM. I love that poem too.
