U.S. & Canadian Authors - Interviews, 20th Century American Literature - Post WWII - Literary Criticism, Poets - Interviews, Literary Movements - General & Miscellaneous, Poetry Writing

Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958-1996

Name: Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958-1996
Author: Allen Ginsberg
ISBN: 9780060930820

by Allen Ginsberg, David Carter (Editor), Edmund White

Available on Bookshop Write a review

Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.

Overview

From his conversation with the conservative William F. Buckley on PBS to his testimony at the Chicago Seven trial to his passionate riffs on Cezanne, Blake, Whitman, and Pound, the interviews collected in Spontaneous Mind, chronologically arranged and in some cases previously unpublished, were conducted throughout Allen Ginsberg's long career. From the late 1950s to the mid-1990s, Ginsberg speaks frankly about his life, his work, and major events, allowing us to hear once again the impassioned voice of one of the most influential literary and cultural figures of our time.

Synopsis

The interviews collected in this volume—chronologically arranged and is some cases previously unpublished—were conducted throughout Allen Ginsberg's career. Always a witty and engaging subject, Ginsberg considered the interview an art form as well as an opportunity to express his ideas. In these interviews from the late 1950s to the mid-1990s, he speaks candidly about his poetry, his literary influences, his experimentation with drugs, and his personal life—rebvealing details of his sexual affairs with fellow Beats like Jack Kerouac and his longtime relationship with Peter Orlovsky. Offering compelling new insight into this multigenerational icon, Spontaneous Mind is an important addition to the Ginsberg oeuvre.

About the Author:
Allen Ginsberg was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was awarded the medal of Chevalier de l"Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 1993. He died in 1997.

New York Times Book Review - William Deresiewicz

Ginsberg's uniquely frank and vivid voice . . . seems to sound again in its deftly edited pages. . . . The stereotype of Ginsberg as a semiliterate primitive leaves one unprepared for his erudition and intellectual brilliance.

About the Author, Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1926, a son of Naomi and lyric poet Louis Ginsberg. As a student at Columbia College in the 1940s, he began a close friendship with William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac, and he later became associated with the Beat movement and the San Francisco Renaissance in the 1950s. After jobs as a laborer, sailor, and market researcher, Ginsberg published his first volume of poetry, Howl and Other Poems, in 1956. "Howl" defeated censorship trials to become one of the most widely read poems of the century, translated into more than twenty-two languages, from Macedonian to Chinese, a model for younger generations of poets from West to East.

Ginsberg was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was awarded the medal of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French minister of culture, was a winner of the National Book Award (for The Fall of America), and was a cofounder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, the first accredited Buddhist college in the Western world. He died in New York City in 1997.

Reviews

There are no reviews yet. Log in to write one.

Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

Throughout his life, poet Allen Ginsberg adhered to Jack Kerouac's famous dictum, "First thought, best thought." These interviews, collected for the first time in one volume, bring to life one the most influential cultural figures of our time. They demonstrate the bard's deep and passionate engagement with the present moment and his devotion not only to the literary arts but to the more human art of conversation.

Michael Schumacher

" [A] comprehensive, essential volume ..[the] interviews are like keys to the many rooms of [Ginsberg's] expansive consciousness."

Creative Loafing

"Ginsberg's verbal dexterity is such that he never gets hemmed in by people who would rather have him easily pegged."

Charleston Post & Courier

"SPONTANEOUS MIND is an uncensored perspective on Allen Ginsberg's life, work and the events of his time."

New York Times Book Review

"Readers of this collection may find that they are no longer the same after having encountered [Ginsberg] in its pages."

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Spontaneous Mind brings readers closer to Ginsberg the man ... both compelling and entertaining to read."

William Deresiewicz

Publishers Weekly

Ginsberg apparently approached each interviewer "as a future Buddha"; open to any opportunity for conversation, he answered every question, no matter how rude or peculiar. An unpublished 1983 interview here with Steve Foehr consists of one query about the relationship between art and commerce and Ginsberg's seven-page answer ("I simply hung on and tried to get it all written down," says Foehr); others fill only half of a page. The Beat master reiterates that all of his thoughts and expressions emerge from his 1948 auditory hallucination of the voice of William Blake, whose poetic rhythms, childlike innocence, social vision and volatile emotionalism infused Ginsberg's every utterance thereafter. Taken together, these interviews read like an immense jazz oratorio, with rising and falling riffs on prosody, politics, sex, hallucinogens, ecology, jazz, psychoanalysis, Buddhism and his favorite authors Blake, of course, and also Whitman, Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams and Kerouac. Editor Carter, who worked with Ginsberg on one of the first gay cable television shows, provides helpful headnotes for all 30 interviews (culled from some 350), and a "Biographical List" identifies approximately 200 people mentioned in the text. If the 1972 Gay Sunshine interview is the most intimate of these pieces and the excerpt from Ginsberg's testimony in the 1969 Chicago Seven trial the funniest, the strangest entry is surely the 1988 Chronicles interview by John Lofton, who wanted "to confront [Ginsberg] with the Truth of God's Word." As Lofton tries to compel the self-described "excitable visionary Jewish Buddhist" to admit the error of his ways, Ginsberg demonstrates his essential sweet nature and his love of verbal Ping-Pong. Carter captures the best of his witty, generous chatter here. (Apr.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

From The Critics

David Carter edits this compilation of selected interviews with Allen Ginsburg from 1958-96, providing a chronological arrangement of material which in some cases has not appeared elsewhere. The extensive interviews from decades of changing experience result in an excellent survey of Ginsberg's changing life, works and times, and provides a fine commentary on his social and literary life.

Kirkus Reviews

Ginsberg, voluble when not downright loquacious, gave hundreds of interviews over his 40-year career; Carter has chosen generously for this new gathering, including many previously uncollected. The late poet (1926-1997) saw the interview as "a way of teaching," and he discoursed on a kaleidoscopic catalogue of topics, from poetics to gay sex, Buddhism to politics. A firm believer in the dictum "first thought, best thought," he was famous (or notorious) for not editing his verse, and the spontaneity of the interview format was well-suited to his desire for undiluted self-expression, not to mention his free-wheeling, free-associating range of interests. The early interviews in this collection, which is graced with detailed and helpful introductions to each piece by the editor, have that loose-fitting, freefalling energy that makes the great poems of the 1950s such a revelation. But in an interview-often aided and abetted by the giddily foolish counter-cultural amateurism of his alternative-press interlocutor-Ginsberg's occasional wackiness dates badly, looking like mere eccentricity and all but obliterating the intelligence underneath. As his fame grows, he doesn't fare much better when interviewed by uncomprehending mainstream journalists (although a sparring match with William F. Buckley is amusing). The best material in the collection comes from interviews done for the Paris Review, the New York Quarterly (where he can expatiate on his aesthetics for sympathetic and thoughtful questioners) and, ironically, Playboy (where the sheer length and breadth of the dialogue gives him enough room to stretch out his riffing into full-length song). The interview format doesbringout his tendency to absurdly categorical statements and pronouncements with little relationship to reality (as in a spirited but idiotic defense of Ezra Pound's economic theories on the occasion of the older poet's death). But Ginsberg was someone who, although more than capable of being foolish, was incapable of being boring. As a result, this is a book that can be profitably mined for many gems, especially when the subject is poetry. A valuable and extensive collection, intelligently edited.