Ginsberg interviewed by Carroll

Paul Carroll interviewing Allen Ginsberg for Playboy Magazine in 1969 asked about his poem Death to Van Gogh’s Ear. He asked Allen about his comment –“that he would die only for poetry that would save the world.”

“The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That is what poetry does. By poetry I mean there imagining of what has been lost and what can be found. The imagining of who we are and the slow relization of it. First come prophetic images from the unconscious – like the scary image of Moloch “eater of children” in Howl – and then the gradual realization that such an image is not merely an image: but an articulation of what one actually sees and experiences. In a more general sense, Moloch is the military-ward-heeling-IBM police-state we’ve been living in for years without knowing it. What I didn’t realize twenty and even ten years ago was that images from the unconscious that went into my poems, which I thought were visionary and transcendental, were really literal realism, simple common sense.”