8 April (1956): Allen Ginsberg to Louis Ginsberg | The American Reader

My teaching technique could shock you undoubtedly and certainly get me kicked out of anywhere else or not be countenanced, I bring in bums from North Beach andtalk about marijuana and Whitman, precipitate great emotional outbreaks and howls of protest over irrational spontaneous behavior—but it does actually succeed in communicating some of the electricity & fire of poetry and cuts through the miasmic quibbling about form vs. content and does this phrase “work” and is that line “successful” and are all those “p & f” sounds too intense, etc. The woman who runs this program is a Prof. Ruth Witt-Diamant who has dug my work—there appears to be, according to Rexroth, a semi major renaissance around the west coast due to Jack and my presence—and Rexroth’s wife said he’d been waiting all his life hoping for a situation like this to develop. The thing I do in class is get them personally involved in what they’re writing and lambaste anything which sounds at all like they’re writing “literature” and try to get them to actually express secret life in whatever form it comes out. I practically take off my clothes in class to do it.