Spike Magazine

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Interview [published January 1998]
Allen Ginsberg: Cosmopolitan Greetings
Graham Duff meets Allen Ginsberg, the self styled “old auntie of the
Beat Generation”
Allen Ginsberg – poet, Jew, Buddhist and self styled
“old auntie of the Beat Generation” – is 68 years of
age. Forty years on from the publication of Ginsberg’s
infamous ‘Howl’, his latest collection, Cosmopolitan
Greetings: Writings from 1986-92, has just hit the
bookshelves. Sipping tea and talking about his greatest
influences William Blake, Walt Whitman, William Carlos
Williams and Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg is friendly,
assured and (naturally enough) beatific. But perhaps
surprisingly, he’s almost as at ease talking about Sonic
Youth and Gavin Friday as he is fellow beats William
Burroughs and Gary Snyder.
With lyrical incantations, dream notations. calypso
rhythms and haiku, Cosmopolitan Greetings shows a
writer moving in ever increasing circles, the subject
matter ranging from the intensely personal to the passionately
political. I ask if it’s difficult writing under
the weight of his past work.
“My mind is much too fragmented for the solidification
of any single thought like that. Consciousness
itself is discontinuous I think. As a Buddhist, that’s
my take on it. Shakespeare at the end of The Tempest
BUY Allen Ginsberg books online from and
has Prospero say ‘Thence to Genoa where every third
thought shall be my grave’. So every 244th thought:
‘Oh I’m Allen Ginsberg and I have a history.’ The
rest of the time [it’s] ‘there’s the tea, I got to go to the
bathroom, how’s my diabetes? What’s this guy saying
to me?’ So yes, there is the information of being around
for 40 years writing poetry and knowing a lot of people
but then every moment is completely blank and new.”
Despite an enormous body of work which bristles
with positivity, passion and affirmation, Ginsberg
admits, “I got the reputation of being this negative
nay-saying rebel. I don’t know why. But maybe the
purpose is starting to come through now after all
these years. People are beginning to read without the
intervention of the media saying ‘these angry, wrathful,
idiot people smoking dope in dirty flats covered
in flies’. That was the official party line of the media
back in the early 60s.”
At this point Ginsberg goes off to take a phone call
which turns out to be from Salman Rushdie. “I saw him
when he came to New York. We did some meditation
classes together – ’cause he’s got lots of time.”
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