Here's a hint of Ginsberg's very dynamic way of writing poetry.
---
Ekbert Faas:
You spoke of your poems as having a beginning, a middle and an end.
Allen Ginsberg:
Yes, where the thought process begins, where there's a middle, and where
(laughing) I don't know, well, beginning, middle and end. I'm thinking of a
poem I wrote recently, a description of breathing, and I have the breath go
over Grand Teton Mountains to Northern San Francisco into Hawaii and Australia
and Saigon through the Indian Ocean and Africa and Marseilles and on top of the
Eiffel Tower and through the Atlantic to New York to Patterson, N.J. onto the
Mid-west finally arriving back in Teton village where it first began breathing.
So (laughing) it had a beginning, a middle and an end. And that's a pretty
good poem because it had that much clarity. But it's just the beginning of a
series of thoughts and an end of a series of thoughts, a definite emotional end
I guess and conclusive.
EF:
So it's really the beginning and end of a thought process.
AG:
Right.
EF:
William Stafford says that his poems usually come to an end when his powers to
homogenize an experience come to an end.
AG:
I don't know what that means. I don't mind it actually, if I knew what it
meant.
EF:
I think it means to impose some kind of order upon experience or reality, to
make an experience shapely.
AG:
But I don't know what that means either. In other words the experience one has
while writing is the experience of one's own mind and to *put* order to it
wouldn't that mean to rearrange one's normal sequence of thought-reflection?
EF:
Anyway, I didn't mean to defend that statement.
AG:
No, but I don't even know what it means because, well, I'm saying quite
literally, I don't know what it means. I would --- I also put order into my
thoughts if I knew a way of doing that without violating the nature, the
natural structure of the thought. I do feel that thought has a natural order
of its own, so it's a question of transcribing the thought in its own order,
and in that sense a beginning, a middle and an end.
(Ginsberg, Allen, 'Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958-1996',
pp. 356-357)
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