[I did not] try to bring [White Shroud] to a triumphant, or untriumphant, ending. It's kind of an anticlimax. But I don't mind. Somebody's got to take on the anticlimax, or else everybody will be doomed to be afraid of the anticlimax....Sometimes I can't come. That's pretty anticlimactic.

"[People] are always trying to make anybody who is dissident sound like a flake or a loser. It's exactly the same psychology they use in Russia. If somebody's a dissident, they call him a troublemaker, a neurotic. They even send him to a psychiatric hospital. It's a Time magazine-CIA-ex-Harvard con, that you're not really `serious' like the businessman is `serious.'

"That psychological consciousness...takes me in, it takes everybody in. Except every once in a while you wake up and realize--What did Walt Whitman say? `I find no fat sweeter than that which sticks to my own bones.' Like, I'm bigger than the government, the government is a loser, the government is a flake, not me."

Has Ginsberg become more political? "It's not really so much political, unless you can call Thoreau political. Thoreau, you know, did sit in jail rather than pay his war tax for exactly the same war we're fighting now [in Nicaragua].

Does Ginsberg pay his war tax? I'm stuck with everybody else with that."

Is poetry the best way for Ginsberg to foment his "world revolution"? "It's the only way. Because ultimately it's a psychological revolution....People are controlled by language, their thought patterns. He who controls language controls minds.

"The government is itself made of our words. So if you get in there with a jiu-jitsu in the language, you have the best chance of altering people's awareness or mind consciousness. It's sort of a psychedelic situation.

"Being vulnerable is being heroic--not being number one. Now we're supposed to be number one? From Nixon onward we're supposed to be number one. Not being number one is heroic. Being number one is cowardly, macho, S & M."