(Translated by Adam Lizakowski, with Brian Mornar)
Pietrasz: Have you met Allen Ginsberg in person? If
so, when and how often have you encountered him? What impression did you have?
Lizakowski: I met the poet several times but did not
talk to him. I met Allen Ginsberg in person—I even have a picture with him—but
I do not know what happened to it. The picture was published in Poetry Flash,
a magazine issued free of charge on the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay,
in Berkeley. The magazine advertises local literary events, publishes poems,
and features interviews with local poets and reviews of the latest poetry
books. You could find Poetry Flash in bookstores and cafes across the
Bay Area. An issue of the magazine announced my poem “American Poets,” which
caused quite a stir among local poets.
I met Ginsberg during a poetry reading San Francisco
in the late autumn of 1986 at City Lights Books. If I'm not mistaken, it was
for the promotion of a book called White Shroud Poems. Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, the bookstore owner and publisher of City Lights Books,
introduced me to him. Ferlinghetti knew my face because I submitted my
manuscript to him during vacation once, and then every other week after that.
The poems were eventually translated by my friend and employer Richard Rehl, a
veteran of the Vietnam War who left Poland as a teenager in 1956 to live with
his father in New York.
I talked to Ginsberg for two, maybe three minutes. I
was introduced to him as “the Polish poet.” Ginsberg began a conversation in
Russian. I do not know why, but I did not want to talk to him in that language.
And so, I answered in French, pretending not to know Russian. I think he believed
me, and I acted surprised. He was firmly convinced that every Pole must speak
Russian. The conversation ended in English. He wished me good luck and success
with my writing in America. When I told him I was waiting for a response from
Ferlinghetti regarding my manuscript, he firmly shook my hand and again wished
me good luck. His good luck unfortunately did not help me because a few weeks
later I received a letter signed by Nancy Peters, and not by Ferlinghetti,
which surprised me because I thought that he was responsible for the
publication operation as the chief editor of the press and owner of the
bookstore. In a form rejection letter, Peters informed me that she had read my
poems with great interest, but due to financial difficulties and the fact that
I had previously self-published these poems, she could not publish my work.
Finally, in a very polite way, she thanked me for my interest in their press
and wished me good luck elsewhere. At first, I wanted to destroy this letter as
it symbolized my defeat. Those “stupid Americans” do not understand my poetry,
and these letters are standard among publishers. But fortunately I kept the letter,
and to this day I keep it as a nice souvenir of San Francisco.
Pietrasz: When did you first read Ginsberg's poetry,
and what made him become so important for you?
Lizakowski: I encountered Ginsberg's poetry at random
in the late 1970s. Where
was I reading it? Today I cannot tell you exactly, as
I do not remember—it was almost 40 years ago. I remember when I read Literatura
na Swiecie, Odra, Nowy Wyraz and
others. [1] Ginsberg's poems appeared in a Polish magazine, but which I cannot
say. The first poem I read that left a lasting impression was “America,” with
its long and short lines. I can still remember a few lines of the poem: “Go fuck
yourself with your atom bomb.” Or this line: “I smoke marijuana every chance I
get.” This made a big impression on a twenty-year-old boy brought up on the
Polish Romanticism of the great Adam Mickiewicz, whose “The Great Improvisation,”
200 years old, can be compared with the poetry of Ginsberg. [2]
Anyway, I suspect that Ginsberg made an impression on
not only me. At first, I could not understand why he wrote about himself in the
first person so openly and honestly. For me, it was pure literary
exhibitionism. I wrote poems, but I did not open my life to my readers. I was
ashamed to write something bad about myself. Never would I say that I drink or
have sex—I could not imagine doing so. His openness, blunt vocabulary, and
occasional vulgarity left me very impressed. In short, I admired him.
Pietrasz: Why do you so often refer to Ginsberg’s
poetry?
Lizakowski: I was fascinated by his honesty and
openness, as well as the philosophy and culture of the hippie generation, which
for me carried a number of associations--the Far East, Hinduism, long hair,
thick beards, loud music. I liked their philosophy of life and understanding of
the world, and I joined. I was wearing shoulder-length hair, which was seen in
Poland as a sign of being pro-Western, and I thought of myself a pacifist. I
was looking for my own place in the world, and I did not agree with Communism
and I did not understand capitalism. This all came together in Ginsberg's
poetry. The poet called for anarchy, religious and sexual freedom, and I loved
it. I remember the slogan, “make love, not war.” I was born in a small town in
the central Sudeten Mountains in the southwest corner of Poland, close to the
Czech border, and it all seemed surreal. I loved it, and Salvador Dali was my
favorite painter. I named my first book published in San Francisco,
“Cannibalism Poetry,” after reading Dali's biography. Ginsberg borrowed from
French surrealism, and it inspired him to work; but it was not only surrealism
from which he drew influence.
Pietrasz: Let me mention a few poems of yours where
the name Ginsberg appears: “Visit Mr. and Mrs. Apollinaire,” “Allen Ginsberg,”
“The Fall of America,” “The Thirty-Fifth Letter,” and “Write, if America is
Still a Haven for Immigrants.” In your diary “Notes from the San Francisco Bay”
you write that Ginsberg is your favorite poet. For a time he was probably one
of the major poets who exerted influence on you.
Lizakowski: I have many more poems in Polish and in
English about him and San Francisco. One of the poems where I mention both his
name and San Francisco appears in my latest book, Pieszyckie Meadows,
published in 2010. The poem is titled “Conversation over a bowl of pierogi.” I
have many Beat-inspired poems written in San Francisco, which I brought to
Chicago and published (50 copies) as a chapbook titled, “On the Californian
Coast,” in 1996. Some of these poems were published in the Polish edition of Cherry
Bandits, in 2000, issued by Adam Marszalek, a publisher in Torun. However,
I did not include all of these poems in that book, as well as those describing
the Italian North Beach neighborhood, the home of many Beat Generation poets in
San Francisco. They did not fit the theme of the volume.
Those poems that deal with the important places where Beat
poets socialized in the second half of the twentieth century are still in my
drawer awaiting publication. Poems such as “Cafe Triest,” “Cafe Greco,” “Bar
Vesuvio” (which was located literally five steps away from City Lights Books)
are waiting for the right moment to see the light of day. In Vesuvio, I drank
only local beer (which was delicious) in barrel-shaped bottles, from a San
Franciscan brewery called Anchor, with a label depicting an anchor. I remember
when these labels gently peeled off, and I sent them along with letters to
Poland to friends who collect beer labels from around the world. Perhaps as a
curiosity it is worth noting that the founder of Cafe Trieste was an Italian,
Papa "Giotto" Gianni, who came from Rovigo, which is also the name of
a Zbigniew Herbert book. [3]
These cafes as well as many others, which remain vital
today, played a huge role in promoting not only poetry but also jazz during the
1950s and 60s. There, one could find good coffee, beer, wine, and Italian
sandwiches with salami, cheese, and tomato, and pastas. American bread for the
Pole is inedible. This “cotton” cannot be eaten, and nor can one spread
anything on it, except for coconut butter--nothing else.
That I return to these memories of the Ginsberg and
the Beat Generation shows that I was really under their spell for a very long
period of my life. The first ten years I spent in America in San Francisco are
unforgettable and always come back to me. In addition to being a poet in San
Francisco who could not help but be influenced by Beat poetry, I found other
forms of culture and major tourist attractions, some of which featured Beat-era
places.
In Chicago, I did not forget or break from the Beat
poets and Ginsberg. Many years later, I enrolled at Columbia College and took a
course called "Contemporary American Poetry" with Jaswinder Bolina,
and I worked with my advisor, Professor Tony Trigilio, who is a Buddhist and
Zen practitioner. He studies the philosophy of the Beat Generation, and his
scholarly work is devoted to the work of Ginsberg. He wrote two books, Allen
Ginsberg's Buddhist Poetics (Southern Illinois University Press, 2007) and Strange
Prophecies Anew: Rereading the Apocalypse in Blake, H.D., and Ginsberg (Farleigh
Dickinson University Press, 2001). I studied Creative Writing-Poetry, so it was
not possible to rediscover the Beats and Ginsberg. During a course that
Trigilio offered devoted to American and British poetry (“Modern British and
American Poetry”), I wrote a poem about Ginsberg, which you can find below (it
can also be found among my English language poems at
http://www.poemhunter.com). So it appears that Ginsberg's influence remained with
me. However, this influence lost its power as I got older.
A poem about
Allen Ginsberg
bald, unshaven revolutionist of ink
slightly stooped, nervously reading
his poems to the avid few
who were thirsty for his words
listening with open mouths, eyes, hearts
The sound is a word even in a dream
Allen Ginsberg, the petulant child
of immigrants raised by wolves
The maniac who insisted
he threw stones of accusation
into the cultivated garden of American poetry
The phenomenal poet of reality,
chanting his poetry -
useful as a phone book which list only
disconnected numbers -
genuine cursing of life and America
an angel clinging black phoenix feathers
in his hand howling about oppressors,
Buddhism, Zen, the FBI,
The Dust that covers books in libraries
and about you and me.
It was strange to hear the professor lecture on the
work of the Beat poets, who I personally had the pleasure to meet in bars,
cafes, bookstores, and during evenings and poetry readings in San Francisco.
Then the indescribable feeling of longing returned, and I wanted to fly to San
Francisco to once again meet Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, Allen Ginsberg, many of whom by this time had
grown quite old or had died. I remembered that I stood next to them not long
before, I talked to them, asked “How are you?” I saw their eyes, I saw unshaved
faces and listened to their poems, I watched their mouths move as they drank
beer, wine and smoked cigarettes, and excitedly talked with friends about
poetry, art, and what to eat for dinner in the evening, and the drunks that
demanded signatures on paper napkins. They dressed like Americans, except for
Robert Duncan, who always wore a suit and polished shoes. He dressed like an
English gentleman.
Pietrasz: What kind of poems by Ginsberg and other
Beat poets influenced you? What was the influence on your poetry and poetics, and
your view of the world? How would you assess this influence?
Lizakowski: All the poems from Ginsberg's first book,
which was the most popular at that time in Poland, influenced me greatly.
American poetry has had a much greater impact on my work than Polish poetry.
During my youth, I read Edward Stachura, Rafal Wojaczek, Andrzej Bursa, Richard
Milczewski-Bruno. [4] I was 23 years old when the legendary bard Stachura took
his life. Where I lived, this was a shock. Boys and girls cried while reciting
his poetry at bonfires in the mountains. They read in rounds and sung his songs
with guitar accompaniment. The libraries queued his book. In Poland, many
friends were younger than me, 15, 16, 17 year old kids. Neither Stachura nor
the other poets I mentioned appeal to me as Walt Whitman, Sylvia Plath, W.B.
Yeats, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, or the Beat Generation poets. (The New York
School poets were hardly known in Poland at that time.)
My first book of poems in Polish and English,
published in exile in San Francisco, was titled “Cannibalism Poetry,” as it was
inspired by a painting by Salvador Dali. A portrait of his wife Gala is on the
cover. It was released in 1984. In the same year, Krakow Literary Publishers
released a book of Ginsberg's poems. It was a bilingual edition, translated by
Bogdan Baran. It was then that many of my friends copied Ginsberg's poetry and
sent individual lines from these poems in letters. It was nice.
To be fair, I was also very much impressed by
Ginsberg's Howl and Kaddish, which were unlike any European poems
that I had read up to that point. I did not know that these long poems, more prose than poetry,
were hugely influenced by Walt Whitman. Ginsberg, a student of Whitman, is a
neo-Romantic poet who also informed postmodernism. Like any good student, I at
first imitated Ginsberg's poems, and for many years he was a model for me. But
after a while I realized that this was not the way to go. Today, Allen Ginsberg
and his poetry, as well as my other favorite poets from that generation, are a
closed book for me. But I cannot say that the work is entirely irrelevant to
me, since I still think about them today. This can be clearly seen in my
chapbook “Modern Primitivism,” published in 1992, in Chicago.
Ginsberg cast a big shadow on my work. But his way of
writing, which was called a stream of consciousness, or, as others often say,
interior monologue, does not appeal to me. I was impressed, but this style
worked for Ginsberg—the long firstperson narrative, written in long lines that
conveyed extended thoughts, feelings, memories, reminiscences, etc. Today it
seems that this isn't the best poetry. Ginsberg wrote freely, published early,
and his debut gave him fame and made him a legend. Crafty publishers could
always count on profits from the sales of his new works, but many of his later
poems were overshadowed by his earlier work. I have translated many of
Ginsberg's poems into Polish and published these translations, and I have
written poems devoted to Ginsberg. But, as I said, this is a closed book for
me.
Ginsberg died in 1997, and his death ended a large
chapter in American literary history. As the Beat Generation’s writers fade
away, so do its readers. Ginsberg's work was largely based on his own life
experiences, and this is his great merit—that he was able to turn his life into
poetry, literature. Since it is so difficult to separate his life from his
work, Ginsberg's death is definitely the end of the Beat Generation.
Pietrasz: Did you ever think that you would personally
meet Ginsberg and like his “America”?
Lizakowski: In the summer of 1981 I was living in
Vienna, Austria, and the December declaration of martial law in Poland closed
to door to me in Poland. But as that door closed, another opened, as I received
political asylum from the United States and was able to move to San Francisco,
California. While in Poland, I never in my life could have imagined that I
would be walking the same streets that Ginsberg walked, and that I would visit
the same bars he frequented and be served the same beer by the same bartenders
that Ginsberg liked. I saw his pictures on the wall of the pub along with the
local celebrities and his poetry friends. I shook hands with the same people
who greeted him. It was hard to believe all this, but these experiences did not
make as big of an impression on me as when I first read Ginsberg in Poland. I
drank beer in Golden Gate Park and kissed girls on the benches, smoked grass,
but like President Bill Clinton, I did not inhale. In the second hand stores at
Haight and Ashbury Street or along Golden Gate Park, $1.99 records, which were
at a premium in Poland, could be purchased: The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Janis
Joplin, Bob Dylan, Nazareth, Led Zepplin, Frank Zappa, The Doors, Joan Baez,
The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Tom Jones. I found books by poets who I dearly
admired scattered in 99 cent boxes. Some were even autographed copies:
Ginsberg, Cassady, Burroughs, Joyce, Kerouac, Corso, poems about Vietnam, Zen
Buddhism, the great mystics Rumi and Hafiz. Finding all of these discarded and
resold items symbolized the mobility of American culture. At the time, it
surprised me that people would just move and leave behind their books.
The district, which became famous throughout the world
as a sacred place for hippies during the Vietnam years, had become a tourist
attraction with a million coffee shops, pubs and stores with secondhand
clothes, shoes, records, books, hippie jewelry. Flower children had become
businessmen, and instead of putting the flowers in their hair, they started
savings accounts at the Bank of America. “San Francisco,” the hippie anthem by
Scott McKenzie, beginning, “If you're going to San Francisco be sure to wear
some flowers in your hair,” was out of date by then. Beats and hippies had
disappeared from the face of the earth, and San Francisco became one of the
most expensive cities to live in in America and also in the world.
The word “beat” has several meanings in English, so it
can be variously translated into Polish. For me, the Beat Generation is a group
of poets whose lives weren't easy, who were off the beaten track, or who had
been troubled throughout life by their families, parents, alcoholic fathers,
the law, and society in general. None of the poets of the Beat Generation had a
happy youth, and this is another way of understanding the “beat” in the Beat
Generation. Neal Cassady, Peter Orlovsky, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and
Allen Ginsberg are people who had nothing to lose. They were hedonists who
rejected materialism and lived a life among post-World War II American bohemia.
Their voice is the voice of a generation that was born during the economic
crisis of the Depression. They entered adulthood after World War II, when
America was richer than ever before. Their voice is important because they not
only advocated the freedom of drugs and sex, in particular for homosexuals, but
also for equal rights for blacks, social equality in general, and they
protested against the American aggression in Vietnam. The Beat Generation poets
were looking for their own God, religion, a better life, one's own place on earth,
happiness, and eternity. Their work pointed to many of the wrongs in the world
and opened the eyes of many readers. The poetry of the Beat Generation was much
needed as it challenged the poetry of the great Modernists of America, who for
two or three decades had dominated American literature. Williams Carlos Williams,
the father of American Modernism, wrote the forward to Ginsberg's neoromantic work.
This might seem odd, since William's aesthetic is so different that Ginsberg's.
Many people believe that the common place where they both grew up, Paterson, a
hole for emigrant workers in New Jersey on the outskirts of New York, unites
these two different though revolutionary American poets. Ginsberg's Howl
showed that one can write a different kind of poetry than Pound, Eliot,
Marianne Moore, Williams, ee cummings, Wallace Stevens, and also Robert Frost.
Thanks to Ginsberg, ideas about American poetry changed during the second half
of the twentieth century. America had changed. He proved that anyone can write,
those who had good sides but also those who had bad sides. Though he opened the
gates for the talentless, he increased the possibilities for poetry as well.
When he explained that his long lines were inspired by Walt Whitman and
Williams, the critics did not believe him. He explained that the long lines are
based on the length of the breath, so that he could fit many words in a line.
When critics challenged his theory, he explained that he speaks quickly and can
say so many words in a line. Ginsberg rejected the impersonal and cold
intellectualism of Modernist poetry, but he also drew from it a lot, putting
feeling and heart into his neoromantic poems.
1. These literary magazines were popular in Poland in
the 1960s and 70s. Some of them survived the Communist era and still are
published today.
2. Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855) is the father of Polish
Romanticism. "The Great Improvisation" is part of his poetic drama Dziady
(1834) in which he compares God to the Russian Tsar and blames God for
Poland's loss of independence. Mickiewicz's address to God was considered
blasphemous and this controversy can be compared to that spurred by the
publication of Howl.
3. Zbigniew Herbert (1924-98), the best known Polish
poet in the second half of the twentieth century, wrote poetry, essays, and
plays.
4. Edward Stachura (1937-79) was a Polish poet and
writer; Rafal Wojaczek (1945-71) was also a Polish poet who wrote during the
turbulent post-war years; Andrzej Bursa (1932-57) was a poet and journalist;
and Richard Milczewski-Bruno (1940-79) was a poet and writer. Each of these
poets, popular in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, committed suicide and became iconic
after their death.