Crimson: What sort of cultural implication does this have?

Ginsberg: An enormous amount. Many word sociologists like McClure and Pound say that when words get separated from direct conversation when they are just on the page without the physical component of sound, then the head gets cut off from the bod. And people will tend to go into generalizations and hyper-abstraction of the language. Words have to refer to something real, and when we begin to take words as having eternal abstract essence without any physical reference, the human content is removed from the language. As Pound points out, when the words in poetry get cut off from the song and dance they have lost their muscularity, their physical presence.

Crimson: In the last poem of your new book. "Capitol Air," you condemn the political left and the right, Marxists and capitalists. Do you fall on either side of the political spectrum?

Ginsberg: The problems are hierarchical authoritarian control, replication of everyday household artifacts and automatic replication of poetry, film and television. All of these things can happen under a communist bureaucracy or a capitalist bureaucracy. Disasters can result like Mao's great leap forward where millions starved or Union Carbide's Bhopal where hundreds of thousands were injured. When a society's hyper-mechanization moves out of the people's notice they suffer from depersonalization.

Crimson: In your writings on the Vietnam war it seemed that you were writing about the media that presented the war rather than the war itself.

Ginsberg: Yes. That's because I wasn't in the actual war--I was in the media war. So I was just reporting what I could contact with my own senses, which I think was wise. I didn't have to fake going into the war because I was interested in the war's affect on my own and America's consciousness. I stopped with what I was actually experiencing through my senses and maybe only once or twice imagined what it would be like to be a thin-bodied Vietnamese kid blown up by, napalm. I wrote about my experiences while driving through America in a car, reading newspapers, thinking my thoughts, and having my sexual desires. It makes a good time capsule of the mid-60s and it doesn't fake experience I didn't have.

Crimson: You have written about William Blake in earlier works and said he influenced you then. Does he still have that affect on you?

Ginsberg: Blake is always an inspiration. I once made a recording of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. Blake turned me on to the voice in poetry. I once had an interesting psychedelic experience, without drugs, while reading Blake. It was an auditory hallucination of his voice pronouncing "the sunflower and the sick rose." Years later I began working with that to extrapolate tunes and melodies from those tones. I tried to reconstruct what it sounded like when Black orignally sand those words.

Crimson: How do you react to today's pop culture?

Ginsberg: I like to sing with the Clash, I was on their last album. I've also made some movies with Bob Dylan. I'm supposed to be doing some work with "X" sooner or later. I like the Dead Kennedys and Sting. I ran into Sting at a birthday party for [William] Burroughs last year. Burroughs has had an enormous effect on new wave pop music. There are a lot of bands that use his terms like "soft machine." He's talking on a Laurie Anderson record now. I think that is natural because the poetry runs back to music, and the musicians after Dylan went back to poetry.