I decided to create an album of photos on FaceBook for pix of my garden. Having recently learned to use the camera we bought last year (only took me 8 months to get around to reading the doc), I'm now determined to take lots and lots of pix outside. I'm really psyched for spring this year, especially since I added about 300 new bulbs to the garden in the last month.
Was hoping that -- since I designated it as open to everyone -- that you might be able to get there via google, and without having to join FB, but alas, no. I googled "Gloria Brame Garden" and instead came up with these surprises: excerpts/reprints of some interviews I did in the 1990s with poets. Very odd. Maybe I should've typed "Gloria Brame poetry" to find the FaceBook garden album.
People who only know me since I've been out in the BDSM in the mid-1980s don't know I had a whole other life as a poet and literary writer. I wrote and published poetry, I taught poetry (at Hofstra and York-CUNY colleges), I edited some poetry magazines. Somewhere along the poetry line, I also did a series of interviews with poets. People liked them so much they got reprinted quite a bit. Still, it was a surprise to see them pop up yesterday -- especially the first one, on a pro-Iran political site (!). They excerpted some comments from a two-part interview I conducted with Allen Ginsberg. The first one at his tiny little office on E. 14th Street, where he was incredibly charming and warm, in 1990. SPIN magazine was going to publish it but backed out at the last minute, so it was gathering dust in my files when ELF (a small literary magazine where I was Editorial Advisor) asked if I'd do a follow-up so they could publish the whole piece. Allen was very ill when I spoke with him in 1996 but generous enough to grant me some time. According to his official biographer, it was the last interview he granted before he died. The excerpt below actually comes from Allen's 1990 interview. Still relevant, though, isn't it?
Interview with Gloria Brame (1996)
In one of his last interviews, with Dr. Gloria G. Brame in the summer of 1996, Allen Ginsberg proposed that the U.S. apologize for the overthrow of Mossadegh, among other crimes.
Q: Going back to poetry--will you write another "Howl"?
Allen Ginsberg: Well, it would be impossible. But I'd like to write something that addressed the increasing strangulation of liberty in America, and the corruptions of the government in violating the soul.
Q: By violating individual rights?
Allen Ginsberg: There's the national soul, the national spirit. It has been violated by our government's actions. I think we, as a nation, need to apologize. One of the things we would have to apologize for, which would be included in such a poem, would be the overthrow in Iran, which led to the Shah and then the Ayatollah. That's CIA business. Or the destabilization of Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, which led to the killing fields. There's the destabilization of Chile, in the early Seventies. We have to apologize for not signing the Geneva Treaty ending the French Indochina War. We have to apologize for maintaining the death squads military in Salvador. We have to apologize for violating international law in mining the harbors of Nicaragua, which was judged by the World Court to be in violation of law. We have to apologize for loosing hyper-industrialization on the world, which is destroying the environment. We have to apologize for the murder of the Native Americans. We have to apologize for maintaining slavery for several hundred years, then denying African-Americans the vote until my lifetime, a hundred years after the Civil War, and for still maintaining a racist outlook and laws. There is a lot we have to apologize for.
Q: You wish to make those apologies in your poem?
Allen Ginsberg: That's a good way of beginning it. "I, America, hereby apologize for..." You gave me a great idea! It would have to be a poem that was full of grief, because I think that's the heart of America at the moment. Not the bravado, and the chauvinism, and the violence--these things are the mask of grief for what we've done to ourselves and to the world.
Allen Ginsberg: Iran Was OUR Hostage For 25 Years, Jack!
Ironically, the very same google searched turned up an interview I did with a poet from the opposite end of the political spectrum, Dana Gioia was who appointed head of the National Endowment for the Arts by the younger George Bush. Long before he got to Washington, Dana and I were friends, and he kindly gave me an intensive 2-part interview. It too was published by ELF. You can read the Dana Gioia piece HERE
(Oh yeah: and if you're on Facebook, please feel free to Friend me -- just remember I am a "for adults only" kinda woman so let your discretion, and your lifestyle, be your guide.)
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