Lit-Cast

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.

 Allen Ginsberg Interview [49:28m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Music written and performed by M.D. Dublin. Introduction from Mark Cecil:

Colin Dodds is an artist of mixing: mixing tirades and resignations, mixing long ago and incredibly near, mixing profoundly sacred and every day flip, mixing the circus and the street corner. In what you’ll hear next, lines like “It comes through like a requiem over a walkie talkie” and “I’m like a crucifixion in its last minute politely asking for slippers’ evidence.” This is exactly the kind of mixing Dodds does, as if somehow history, jazz, accounts of the Punic wars bought in airports, baseball, barstool rants, girl chasing, Tibetan Buddhism, Moses and one thousand and one other choice ingredients were raked from the collectibles of his mind and thrown in equal portions into his literary food processor. The contents are now poured out for your consumption. But just because the images are as sharp and jumbled as junkyard glass shards, don’t think it’s all random. Dodds can’t avoid lyricis and i’s his singular voice that keeps the listener tuned in as he plunges on a light speed tour past seemingly endless galaxies of knowledge, nuanced observations, half forgotten loves and biting payback to foes real or imagined. Dodds’ poems are at once a big kiss off to those who wronged him and a kind of worn out prayer to those he wronged, all laced on its underbelly with a kind of secret tenderness. Backed on these tracks with guitar, xylophone and his own a capella, let this be a twenty minute introduction to a poet whose work is nothing if not well honed.

Stammering on Shoulders

The Pain of Impotence
A Clitoris, a Sphinx
The Ghost is Loose

32 Oz. Beer
Fun or Failure
Why the Poems in the Bar

The Sermon in the Hole
Summer

Hid in His Own Heart

BIO: Colin Dodds grew up in Central Massachusetts. After a disastrous stint out west, he moved to New York City, where he completed his formal education. Two books of his poems, The Last Man on the Moon and The Blue Blueprint, are available from Medium Rare Publishing. He is also the author of two unpublished novels, The Last Bad Job and Fun’s Monsters, an unpublished children’s book, Maxie MacMillon and The Story of the Stick, as well as the co-author of an unpublished graphic novel, Food for the Moon. Dodds’ work has also appeared in numerous periodicals, including The Wall Street Journal Online, Folio, Copious Magazine, Main Street Rag, Headlight Journal and the tiny. He currently lives in Brooklyn , New York , by the river, where he faces an uncertain future with swaggering optimism.

Please support authors appearing on Lit-cast by donating.

 Colin Dodds - 10 poems [16:14m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download