Allen Ginsberg on poetry

Ginsberg, Allen. & Clark, Thomas. (1966). "Interview with Allen
Ginseberg, The art of poetry no.8." Paris Review, 37. Retrieved
from: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4389/the-art-of-poetry-no-8-allen-ginsberg

The problem is, where it gets to literature, is this. We all talk
among ourselves and we have common understandings, and we say anything
we want to say, and we talk about our assholes, and we talk about our
cocks, and we talk about who we fucked last night, or who we're gonna
fuck tomorrow, or what kinda love affair we have, or when we got
drunk, or when we stuck a broom in our ass in the Hotel Ambassador in
Prague—anybody tells one's friends about that. So then—what happens if
you make a distinction between what you tell your friends and what you
tell your Muse? The problem is to break down that distinction: When
you approach the Muse to talk as frankly as you would talk with
yourself or with your friends. So I began finding, in conversations
with Burroughs and Kerouac and Gregory Corso, in conversations with
people whom I knew well, whose souls I respected, that the things we
were telling each other for real were totally different from what was
already in literature. And that was Kerouac's great discovery in On
the Road. The kinds of things that he and Neal Cassady were talking
about, he finally discovered were the subject matter for what he wanted
to write down. That meant, at that minute, a complete revision of what
literature was supposed to be, in his mind, and actually in the minds
of the people that first read the book.
***
It's the ability to commit to writing, to write, the same way that you
. . . are! Anyway! You have many writers who have preconceived ideas
about what literature is supposed to be, and their ideas seem to
exclude that which makes them most charming in private conversation.
Their faggishness, or their campiness, or their neurasthenia, or their
solitude, or their goofiness, or their—even—masculinity, at times.
Because they think that they're gonna write something that sounds like
something else that they've read before, instead of sounds like them.
Or comes from their own life. In other words, there's no distinction,
there should be no distinction between what we write down, and what we
really know, to begin with. As we know it every day, with each other.
And the hypocrisy of literature has been . . . you know like there's
supposed to be formal literature, which is supposed to be different
from—in subject, in diction and even in organization, from our
quotidian inspired lives.
It's also like in Whitman, "I find no fat sweeter than that which
sticks to my own bones," that is to say the self-confidence of someone
who knows that he's really alive, and that his existence is just as
good as any other subject matter.
***
The poetry generally is like a rhythmic articulation of feeling. The
feeling is like an impulse that rises within—just like sexual
impulses, say; it's almost as definite as that. It's a feeling that
begins somewhere in the pit of the stomach and rises up forward in the
breast and then comes out through the mouth and ears, and comes forth
a croon or a groan or a sigh. Which, if you put words to it by looking
around and seeing and trying to describe what's making you sigh—and
sigh in words—you simply articulate what you're feeling. As simple as
that. Or actually what happens is, at best what happens, is there's a
definite body rhythm that has no definite words, or may have one or two
words attached to it, one or two key words attached to it. And then,
in writing it down, it's simply by a process of association that I find
what the rest of the statement is—what can be collected around that
word, what that word is connected to.
...
Usually during the composition, step by step, word by word and
adjective by adjective, if it's at all spontaneous, I don't know
whether it even makes sense sometimes. Sometimes I do know it makes
complete sense, and I start crying. Because I realize I'm hitting some
area which is absolutely true. And in that sense applicable
universally, or understandable universally. In that sense able to
survive through time—in that sense to be read by somebody and wept to,
maybe, centuries later. In that sense prophecy, because it touches a
common key . . . What prophecy actually is is not that you actually
know that the bomb will fall in 1942. It's that you know and feel
something that somebody knows and feels in a hundred years. And maybe
articulate it in a hint—a concrete way that they can pick up on in a
hundred years.