Ginsberg talks Dylan: Fond thoughts on a long friendship

First English airing for poet's exchange about singer

IN APRIL 1995, Nina Živančević, the Serbian-born artist and writer, playwright, translator and performer, curator and critic, conducted an interview in Christina’s, a Lower East Side restaurant in New York City, with her mentor and previous employer Allen Ginsberg. Bob Dylan, the poet’s friend and some time collaborator, was at the heart of their conversation.

Says Živančević: ‘The theme of our conversation took on a prophetic dimension as he spoke mainly of his friendship and a long artistic association with Dylan. I worked closely with Allen for almost ten years prior to this interview and he often used to call me his “Eastern European intellectual cousin”.

‘However,’ she continues, ‘I often felt as if I were standing on fragile ground while talking to him and discussing literary issues. Yet there were occasions when I felt safe to ask him specific questions which other people dared not raise. He was simply my great American uncle and my parental coach who was guiding me through the troubled waters of the American underground culture. In this exchange we shared one of those memorable, intimate moments.’

Pictured above: Nina Živančević, Ginsberg aide and friend

The mutual admiration of Ginsberg and Dylan is well-known but this wide-ranging interchange covers a great deal of ground – from first meetings through to shared studio projects, the Rolling Thunder Revue and, crucially perhaps, the two artists’ divergent approaches to matters political.

Živančević, who was teaching assistant and secretary to her subject in the early 1980s, published her Ginsberg interview in the Italian newspaper L’Unita in 1998. But it is only now we share the first English language transcript of the account.

Today, Ginsberg’s interlocutor is Paris-based with over 20 published volumes to her name, a scribe and scholar of experimental, underground and avant-garde literature. We are delighted to present her engaging and insightful to-and-fro in the pages of Rock and the Beat Generation…

NZ: Can you tell us something about your relationship with music: was it initiated by your long-lasting friendship with Bob Dylan?

AG: No, it was not initiated by Dylan; it was rather inspired by Jack Kerouac and his capacity to hear the rhythm of the spoken words, as testified by his Mexico City Blues, also by his innate knowledge of the vocals, his clear hearing of the consonants. Bob Dylan used to say that Mexico City Blues was the first literary work which inspired him to read poetry.

NZ: So, would you say that Dylan is a product of an era which combined jazz with poetry, the way Kerouac used to combine them in his work?

AG: No, I did not say that, I’ve only said that Dylan’s poetics is greatly related to a period in which Kerouac used to write…

NZ: How did you and Dylan meet?

AG: It happened after I returned from India in 1963. I was in San Francisco and a journalist, a friend of mine, who was writing about the Beat Generation in 1959 decided to organize a party for both of us. I was accompanied with Kerouac and Michael McClure and Dylan had just arrived fresh from a meeting of the Social Liberty Committee where he’d got an award for his overall social endeavors.* However, in his acceptance speech, while thanking the Committee for the Award, Dylan did not fail to mention  that as an individual artist he refused the responsibility which his role might have imposed on him.

NZ: Would that mean, in fact, that he was unwilling to fight for any social cause?

AG: Yes, in fact, in a certain manner of speaking. See, he did not like other people to tell him for which cause he was supposed to fight.

Pictured above: Nina Živančević with Allen Ginsberg, image by Ira Cohen

NZ: Had Dylan already known of you and your own work at the time when you met at the party?

AG: Oh yes, but I think at that time at that particular party it was our real meeting of two minds, it was the moment of our real bonding as we chatted for hours and got to know one another quite well.

NZ: Have you ever tried to work together in the realm(s) of poetry and music? 

AG: Yes, on various occasions and in various ways. In 1971 we met in a recording studio and he had simply told me ‘Hey, let us improvise something’. He really liked the spirit of improvisation. We recorded a demo album and we also made a song together, ‘Holy Soul, Jelly Roll’ which later figured on my first album First Blues, produced by John Hammond. He was the man who discovered Dylan and who took him to the CBS. At that time I took a bunch of books to Bob so that he could read William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Rimbaud, all the books which are worth reading in a lifetime…

NZ:  And what sort of gift would you give him for his birthday today?

AG: Oh, I would give him lots of those precious books today, a bunch of books to read.

NZ: You two have always had a lot of things in common, it’s just that you’ve been paying more attention to words and Dylan has been paying more attention to music or, say, sounds.

AG: It seems that Bob Dylan is, above all other things, a poet.

Pictured above: Dylan and Ginsberg at Kerouac’s grave, 1975

NZ: Many years ago you were saying at the Naropa Institute that ‘Bob Dylan is one of the best twentieth century poets’, and your students were really impressed with your statement. But some of them did not believe your words.

AG: I don’t think that they reacted to my statement in a negative way; I’d rather say that they liked my idea.

NZ: Mixing poetry with music, then considering Dylan above all ‘a poet’ – all these actions have opened a new field in arts, the field of so-called performance poetry. That expressive mode of poetry became really popular during the 1970s and 1980s, exemplified by the respective work of John Giorno or Laurie Anderson. Would it be too bold to say that you chose this specific path much earlier that the rest of your colleagues?

AG: In fact I started performing poetry in the middle of 1950s and mainly during longer readings of my work.

NZ: What were these readings like? Would you just jump on stage and start reading your poetry against tonal, musical background?

AG: Oh no, not at all!! In those days we did not perform in theatres or on stage, we read only in private places, in the apartments, galleries, cafes…

NZ: The scene is very different today. Poets like to perform in theatres and they expect to be paid for their readings.

AG: I don’t believe it entirely. There are a lot of places in New York where many poets read their work but they know that they will never become famous. In earlier epochs,  it did not happen that a poet would just jump up the stage and improvise his work in a cool and relaxed manner, had he mustered courage to even read his work in public. At any rate, the poetry was being written in a classical manner.

Unlike those poets, Kerouac wrote in an intimate idiom which he used in describing daily ordinary situations. The rhythm here was of great importance to him: he was working on developing new poetic language, the idiom which was extremely important for the American poetry.

In those days the American poets were largely influenced by the European Dadaist and Surrealist poetry, also by the nineteenth century Romantics. Before the arrival of the Beat Generation, our scene shared the experience of Robert Duncan’s work and the poetic experience of the group San Francisco Renaissance. All these influences nourished the anarcho-Buddhist approach to writing.

NZ: And how did Bob Dylan fit into this whole experience?

AG: I happened to organize poetry readings in the mid-50s together with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Jack Kerouac. All of us got closer to music – we used to combine it with poetry, especially jazz music; we also included poets such as Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen and Ferlinghetti.

There also came a moment when we included the traditional music in our experiment, namely Afro-American blues and folk music as performed by Woody Guthrie. We added the experience of the radical left to it, notions of social justice, pacifism, sometimes also the ideas of anticommunism (laughter).

These things were quite new and essential to Bob. He got greatly inspired by an anthology of folk music which came out in 1952, the anthology in which Harry Smith classified all folk poets. Dylan got even interested in a literary and psychedelic experience advertised by the Beat Generation, their free improvisation and their love of blues.

I’d often used to say ‘first thought – best thought’, so Dylan would rush to a recording studio where he would land with a fixed idea of a composition and would then come out of it with a totally different product. He used to compose music on the spot. This was the reason that we started working together in ’71.

NZ: When did you actually start working with music and musicians?

AG: In the late 1950s I felt very shy, but as I was also working with my spiritual teacher, the Tibetan Lama Chögyam Trungpa, at that time, and, in the end, I was able to overcome my timidity. I started chanting  mantras aloud and in the 1960s I set William Blake’s verse to music. I made some attempts at writing folk music scores. However, Dylan has turned me onto blues. That’s how I started paying attention to blues and its basic structure. I really dug that genre.

NZ: What can you tell us about your various collaborations with different bands?

AG: In 1975 I was touring with Dylan’s legendary Rolling Thunder Revue. I was reading poetry and getting highly amused. I liked it. However, the truth is that I’m really very shy… I don’t know how to present myself to large public; I don’t know how to modulate my voice. Dylan helped me a great deal with my general public appearance.

I worked on my album The Lion for Real almost for the entire last year and it came out via John Giorno’s Poetry Systems. And more recently  an album came out with Blake’s poetry, then The First Blues, Howl and Kaddish. Last year I also worked on a poetry and jazz album with the musicians from the Knitting Factory and I also performed with the musicians from Tom Waits’ band and with Marianne Faithfull as well.

I’ve often collaborated with Don Cherry, Elvin Jones and David Amram. I recited mantras even for Charles Mingus for his birthday! Finally, I have worked with Philip Glass for his opera [Hydrogen Jukebox], which was performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last week.

NZ: In what ways has Dylan influenced American popular culture?

AG: He was inviting people to open up and study themselves. He made them think about  words; he also  made them study and appreciate language in an entirely new, crazy manner as exemplified by his famous line ‘If you wanna live outside the law you’ve got to be honest’.

In 1969 I asked Dylan which line of his, according to him, he considered being the best, and he answered that it was the one that I’ve just quoted. Once I spoke about poetry with Robert Creeley  who told me, ‘You see a sign of genius in a single phrase, a verse that only that particular poet could have written, the line which has an ending, the line with a riddle and a surprise’, and this rule can be applied to the majority of poets.

* Bob Dylan received the Tom Paine Award at Emergency Civil Liberties Union’s annual Bill of Rights dinner in New York City on December 14th, 1963, when the singer, thought to be the worse for drink, made a series of controversial comments about the Civil Rights campaign. It is widely believed that Dylan and Ginsberg met for the first time at an 8th Street Bookshop gathering, also in Manhattan, on December 26th, 1963.

Editor’s note: This interview was  originally published in Italian newspaper L’Unita in 1998. This translation is by Nina Živančević herself. We will share further conversations, in which she speaks to other key Beat individuals, in the coming months

Clarification: We would like to draw attention to a message from the Allen Ginsberg Estate pointing out that it did publish an English version of Nina Živančević’s interview in 2021. Rock and the Beat Generation is happy to set the record straight.