Allen Ginsberg Audio Interview, Part 1 (Remastered)
April 15, 1993, St. Louis, Missouri. Interviewers Michael Castro of KDHX’s Poetry Beat, Kenn Thomas of KDHX’s Off the Beaten Path, Susan Waugh of the Riverfront Times, and Andrea Murray of KWMU.
Allen Ginsberg discusses Politics, Ronald Reagan, the end of the Cold War, Ecology, the War on Drugs, Ecstasy, Sex, Meditation and Poetry. Some highlights:
Burroughs is the official beat spokesman
Legalizing grass, extending LSD to the doctors, and rabbis, priests, providing maintenance for the Reagan drugs like Cocaine. Try to figure out what to do with them because they are a threat. There is the fact that America has more people in prison than any other country and most of them are black. So there is a this whole business of reform of justice. And most prisoners are there related to drugs. I would classify them as political prisoners because they are in jail from a wrong-headed political policy on drugs which the experts know is wrong-headed. So the question of taking the 12 billion dollars a year that we give to the narcotics bureaus that are peddling this and put it towards rehabilitation
Gregory Corso remains the top poet
In making a simulacrum of your thoughts and projections in poetry you have to detach yourself from them to give them an objective shape and a form. And in meditation you detach yourself from your projections in order to observe them and switch your attention from day dreaming to following your breath and coming back to yourself.
If people are going to use grass or psychedelics they should first ground themselves in meditation or center themselves so they don’t get entangled in their own projections.
Capitalism is not the answer to social reconstruction in East or West because it has wrecked the planet, actually. So that doesn’t help.
This Allen Ginsberg selection is part of the Lit-Cast remastering project. Please support authors appearing on Lit-cast by donating.
