Dorcas Speer Interviews Allen Ginsberg (WOI News Clip 378)

Allen Ginsberg participated in a focus this is the annual Fine Arts Festival and of course he was I think initially contacted because of your work as a poet now as a poet what is the greatest influence on your particular work the revolutionary consciousness of other poets and saints who turned me on to psychedelic experience with drugs and without drugs that have given me the gift to see that our society is completely mad and our governments crazy and is going to destroy the planet unless we regain control of our own bodies and our own consciousness and begin treating each other like human beings again and begin treating the earth like mama nature again now some people express this only in their music some people and there are other kinds of daily work but you particularly find your way of expressing it or one way you express it is in the written word written word also but the spoken word actually the vocalization of the word because like we did we lost track of the poet as prophet as bard as Shemin in the last 50 years although that is our own American tradition with Walt Whitman and it's the ancient tradition of the poet going back to times before for Greece before the Bible before caveman is a tradition going back through Isaiah through the old Hebrew prophets and the tradition that exists even in Central Asia now or among our American Indians people who have contact with their own unconscious were able to see that the rational consciousness of the Pentagon war makers are completely as completely a scam I haven't heard it expressed in this forum but I have heard it expressed in the form of a elderly ecologist who was saying that he hoped that that the answer to the situation would be seen by the poet from the mountaintop and expressed and given the light for the people to follow well it was seen from the mountaintop by William Blake long ago when he spoke about remove that dark satanic Mills remember it was a it was 18th century at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution when Blake first saw that the Industrial Revolution was a satanic plot to besmirch the breasts of Mother Nature now you have put these words into music yeah I've been putting Blake Songs of Innocence and experience into tune and putting out a record of them now right and I have this copy right now but at the same time it perhaps we should say is it just really right off the press and is it available or not uh yeah it's probably available by now I just picked up a copy before I left oh it's like Songs of Innocence and experience all right now let me sing you one that psychologically oriented yes yeah that would make sense rather than talking it's the introduction to experience by Blake which is a poem that many of the students know actually - what that is is an appeal to a Madden money hungry junk addicted bank system to get off it's warm making earth destruction kick and get back on to some kind of peaceful ecological reconstruction back to earth spirit, sex, love, humanity away from a police state that is right now beginning to devour none of the United States but the entire planet and it's more away from a violence as a form of aggression and adaptation yeah a way from a violence proposed by the state promoted by the state set to the citizens by the state from the top down including a so obvious from today's and this week's newspapers the violence and Laos which is a secret violence perpetrated by the CIA working through a supposedly peaceful organization the AID program kept secret from the American public as the Vietnam War had really been kept secret for many years from 56 to 62 violence that spread all over the world that has begun to come home in terms of black things and bombings inside the United States and a violence which has as its source the mad dreams of bureaucrats in Washington who are making money from the war and their friends in industry who are making money from the war and who are like a bunch of junkies addicted to a war economy now is this thing that some of the same thread it's of violence that we have been so proud of throughout our our history as peoples consuming the resources of the world consuming the resources of the world in the sense that yes we do consume what is it forty five percent of the raw materials produced by the world though we have only six percent of the population so that one American is more dangerous to world ecology than twenty Indians the same violence that we were so proud of in terms of the murder of the Indians who were the owners of this land and who took care of it better than we did the same violence that led us to murder the 50 million bison that covered these Great Plains Oh what thread does this carry with the the recent trials in Chicago well the trials in Chicago were a trials of trials of that vision actually I think on the part of violence-prone municipal government with its police as described by official reports the violence Commission report the Walker report as a group of police prone to violence creating a police riot during a Democratic convention there was a trial of the people who came to make a political protest against the encouragement of police state and the affirmation of military tyranny through the Democratic Party in its convention it was a trial of pacifists like David Dellinger who's an exquisite old man with an old Catholic pacifist background there was a trial of comedians and actors playing political roles more brilliantly than the Nixon plays his black magical critical role so actually it was a trial of a new awareness and an ecological awareness and unfortunately that trial was allowed to go on by the good solid citizens of the country because the good solid citizens of the country seemed to me at this point to be so confused about their own relation to nature that they're willing to buy a police state for fear of having to kick their matter habits for figure of having to kick their refrigerator habits and kick their automobile habits their oil burner habits and their gas burning habits and I wanted to ask you how this was affected going to affect you and how you go from here but we've run out of time our guest has been Allen Ginsberg poet and he participated in focus the Spring Fine Arts Festival at Iowa State and thank you Mary Krishna