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I do think unconsciously or consciously some wanted to precipitate an “exemplary” riot. q: Do you ever get tired of being Allen Ginsberg? ginsberg: No, there’s no Allen Ginsberg. It’s just a collection of empty atoms. q: But in several of your latest poems, you seem to be wrestling with immortality. ginsberg: No, I’m not wrestling. I’m saying, “Immortality comes later,” by deWnition . It’s a joke. q: I can understand the need to feel that your life’s work was worthwhile, but to feel the need that people will be reading you when you’re gone I don’t understand. You’re not going to be around to enjoy it, anyhow. What’s the big deal about immortality? ginsberg: There’s no total immortality. “The sun’s not eternal, that’s why there’s the blues,” as I wrote in a previous book. However, it is important if you have the impulse of transmitting dharma or whatever wisdom you’ve got, writing “so that in black ink my love might still shine bright”—Shakespeare. There is a Buddhist reason for fame and for immortality, which is that it gives you the opportunity to turn the wheel of dharma while you’re alive to a larger mass of sentient beings, and after you’re dead that your poetry radio continues broadcasting dharmic understanding so that people pick up on it and the beneWts of it after you’re dead. To the extent that your ambition is to relieve the mass of human su¤erings, that can be accomplished with art. An Interview with Patti Smith, Musician John Nichols december 1997 q: As an artist, did you feel you had to pick up a guitar and form a band to get your message across? patti smith: I’ve always loved the format of rock ’n’ roll. I remember, as a child, watching rock ’n’ roll develop. I grew up with it. I was certainly comforted by it, inspired by it, excited by it. Then in the early 1970s, when I really felt that rock ’n’ roll was losing some of its strength when it just seemed like a format people were visiting for some kind of glamorous lifestyle, or to take a lot of drugs, twist people’s minds, make a lot of money, and then exit—I reacted. I had never had any aspirations toward being a musician. I’m not a musician. I’m not really much of a singer. I wasn’t brought up in a time where females even thought of things like that. In terms of female performers, we had memories of Edith Piaf, Billie Holiday, jazz singers, then you had Janis Joplin coming up, and Tina Turner. But in terms of a singer-songwriter leading a rock band, there really wasn’t anyone I could think of. So I just didn’t think about it. 338 part 17 writers, musicians, & performers To me, rock ’n’ roll is a totally people-oriented, grassroots music. It came up from the people, from the blues. The roots are deep. It came from the earth. It’s our thing. Rock ’n’ roll is great because it’s the people’s art. It’s not an intellectual art. It’s totally accessible. The chords are totally accessible. The format is totally accessible . But it’s not ours anymore. Right now, rock ’n’ roll belongs to business. We don’t even own it. The people have got to wake up and reclaim what belongs to them. The music business should be working for us; artists should not be working for the music business. It’s the same with America. The country belongs to us. The government works for us. But we don’t think of it that way. We’ve gotten all twisted around to a point where we think that we work for the government. q: Almost twenty years ago, you wrote a song called “Citizenship.” Can you describe your sense of the role of the artist as citizen? smith: When I was younger, the last thing I wanted to be was a citizen. I wanted to be an artist and a bum—what Genet would call one of “the sacred bums of art.” That’s pretty much all I wanted to be. I was concerned about certain things—about censorship, about nuclear power, about the Tibetan situation, and the famine in Ethiopia. I did have concerns, but still, as an artist and a human being...

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