A Quote by Allen Ginsberg
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
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Poetry is creative expression; Prose is constructive expression... by creative I mean original. In Poetry the words are born or reborn in the act of thinking... There is no time interval between the words and the thought when a real poet writes, both of them happen together, and both the thought and the word are Poetry.
My goals as an artist have nothing to do with speaking to an audience. I love to have a good time, but when it comes to poetry I'm not really interested in writing poetry that seeks to entertain or operate safely within the mainstream and, to be clear, I'm not disparaging the really phenomenal work that does - it's just not my interest as a poet.
Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry. When someone intrudes into the poet's life (and any sudden personal contact, whether in the bed or in the heart, is an intrusion) the poet loses his or her balance for a moment, slips into being what he or she is, uses his or her poetry as one would use money or sympathy. The person who writes the poetry emerges, tentatively, like a hermit crab from a conch shell. The poet, for that instant, ceases to be a dead person.
The public, as a whole, does not demand or appreciate the pure expression of beauty. Its cultured members expect to find in poetry, if anything, repose from material and nervous anxiety; an apt or chiselled phrase strokes the appetites and tickles the imagination. The more general public merely enjoys its platitudes and truisms jerked on to the understanding in line and rhyme; truth put into metre sounds overwhelmingly true.
What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry - but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own skeptical mind, is doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, as long as he wrote Good poetry.
You know that the nucleus of a time is not
The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind
Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed
As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins
Nor stand there making orotund consolations.
He shares the confusions of intelligence.
Lying in bed just before going to sleep is the worst time for organized thinking; it is the best time for free thinking. Ideas drift like clouds in an undecided breeze, taking first this direction and then that.
Poetry, for me, is the answer to, 'How does one stay sane when private lives are being ransacked by public events?' It's something that hangs over your head all the time.
My biggest hobby is playing golf, which I really enjoy. Now when I am lying in bed at night, unable to sleep, I find myself thinking about my golf swing. I'm also involved in the Tampa Bay chapter of First Tee.
I can remember thinking, at the age of 3, that I invented the concept of lying. By a brilliant thought process, I figured that I could fib and avoid the repercussions for something I had done, because lying meant that it never happened. However, by the time I was 5, I came to hate lying and to think of it as the worst thing in the world. That's my earliest memory. Weird, but true!
My sense of the poet is classical - the poet is one who makes poems. In each book, I develop and repeat certain general themes - time, place, memory, God, history, class, race, beauty, love, poetry, identity. The core identity is the poet making the poems.
When I'm lying in bed I think about the next collection. That makes me sound insane, doesn't it? That I'm getting into bed with David Beckham and thinking about clothes.
The first day I start shooting, I start having a recurring nightmare that every single night that I am lying in bed, and there is a film crew surrounding the bed, waiting for me to tell them what to do, and I don't quite know what movie I am supposed to be making.
I often have trouble falling asleep at night, so when I'm lying in bed I think up stories. That's where I do a lot of my thinking. I also get a lot of ideas while I'm reading - sometimes reading someone else's stories will make me think of one of my own.
To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy.
I suppose every poet has his own private mythology. Maybe he's unaware of it. People tell me that I have evolved a private mythology of tigers, of blades, of labyrinths, and I"m unaware of the fact this is so. My readers are finding it all the time. But I think perhaps that is the duty of poet.
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