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    Howl

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    Howl

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    Anonymous Ia9LPz
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    Poem

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    25 views5 pages

    Howl

    Uploaded by

    Anonymous Ia9LPz
    Poem

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 5
    ‘The Birds for Jane and Stan Brakhage TIL miss the small birds that come forthe sugar you put out and the bread crumbs, They've ‘made the edge ofthe sea domestic and, as Tam, Twelcome that Nights my head seemed twisted with dreams and the sea wash, Tet it all come quiet, waking, counting familiar thoughts and objects. Here to rest, lke they say, I best liked walking along the beach past the town till one reached the other one, around the corner of rack and small tres. It was clear, and often empty, and peaceful. Those lovely ungain'y Pelicans fished there, dropping Tike rocks, with grace, from the ar, headfirst, then sat on the water, letting the pouch oftheir beaks grow thin again, then swallowing whatever they'd caught. The birds, no matter they're not of our kind, seem most like us here, I want to.go where they go, in a way, if 4 sinll ond comaion one. Toast to ride that air which makes the sea seem down there, not the element in which one thrashes to come up. Tove water, [ove water— but [also love air, and fe. Fathers Scattered, aslant faded faces a column 1972 ‘ALLEN Guster avi a tse f the packed peculize place toa modes! height makes 5 a view of common lots in winter then, a ground of battered snow crusted atthe edges under itall, there under my fathers their faded vomen, fiends, the family all echoed, names trees more tangible physical place more tangible " the atrof this place the road going past to Watertown! or down to my mother's grave, ny father’s grave, not now this resonance of » cach olher one wat his, his survival only, his curious reticence, his dead sate, his emotiness, his acerbic edge cuts the hands to B hold him, hold on, wants the ground, wants this frozen ground, 1986 1. Town ie Masachats, jut net Boson, ALLEN GINSBERG b. 1926 Hold hack the ears af yur grams. ates, we ar ging theragh hell” Wiliarn Carlos Williams's introduction to Allen Ginsber’s How (1956) was probably the ‘most auspicious public welsome ftom one poet to another since Emerson had hailed the unknown Whitman in a leer that Whitman preficed to the second edition of Leaves of Grass one hundred years before. Howl combined apocalyptic criticism ofthe dull, prosperous Eisenhower yeats with exuberant celebration of| a cuteging wountcveulne. 1 wap the besl Aiwa aid ual widely eculated book of poems ofits time, and with is appearance Ginsberg became part of the history of publicity as wel a the history of poetry. How! and Jack Kerouac’ novel (On the Road were the pocket Bibles ofthe generation whose name Kerouac had coined—"Beat,” with is purning overtones of "beaten down” and “beatified.” Allen Ginsberg was born in 1926, son of Louis Ginsberg, a schoolteacher in New Jersey, himsell a poet, and of Naomi Ginsberg, 4 Kusian emigre, whose ‘madness and eventual death her son memorialized in Kaddih 1959). His ofeal education took place at Columbia University, but fr him as for Jack Kerouac the presence of William Burroughs in New York was equally infuential. Burroughs (b. 1914) later the author of Naked Lunch, one of the most inventive experiments 2558 ALLEN Grvsoene in American prose, was at that time a drug addict abott to embatk on an expatriate life in Mexico and Tangier. He helped Ginsberg discover modern writers: Kafka, Yeats, Gsline, Rimbaud. Ginsberg responded to Burtough's liberated kind of ie, to his comic-apocalyptic view of American society, and to his bod literary use of autobiography, as when writing about his own experience with addicts and addie- tion in Junkie, whose chapters Ginsberg was reading in manuscript form in 1950, Ginshera’s New York career has passed into mythology fora generation of pots and readers. In 1945, his sophomore year, he was expelled from Columbia: he had sketched some obscene drawings and phrases in the dust of his dormitory window to draw the attention ofa neglectfl cleaning woman tothe grimy state of his room, ‘Then, living periodically with Burroughs and Kerouac, he shipped out for short, trips as a messman on merchant tankers and worked in addition as a welder, a night porte, and a dishwasher. ‘One stmimer, in a Harlem apartment, Ginsberg urderwent what he was always te represent as the central conversion experience of Fis life, He had an “auditory vision” of the English post William Blake reciting his poers: first Ak! Sunflower, and then a few minutes later the same oracular voice intoning The Sick Rose. Tt ‘vas like hearing the doom of the whole universe, and atthe same tim the inevits ble beauty of that doom.” Ginsberg as convinced that the presence of “this big god overall... and that the whole purpose of being Lorn was to wake up to Him ‘Ginsberg eventually finished Columbia in 1948 with high grades but under a legal cloud, Herbert Huncke, a colorful but iresponvible addict friend, had been using Ginsberg’s apartment as 4 storage depot forthe goods he stole to support his drug habit, To avoid prosecution as an accomplice, Ginsberg had to plead insanity and spent eight months in the Columbia Psychiatric Insitute. "After more odd jobs and a considerable success as 2 market researcher ity San Francisco, Ginsberg left the straight, nine-o-five world for good. He was drawn Wy Sant Peascincoy he said, by its “long honorable... dion of Bohemian BuddhistWabbly [the I.W.W., an early radial la2or movement}—mystical— anarchist social involvement.” Inthe years after 1954he met San Francisco poets such as Robert Duncan, Kenneth Rexroth, Cary Snrder (who was studying Chi- nese and Japanese at Berkeles), and Lawtence Ferlingheti, whose City Lights Bookshop became the publisher of Howl. The night Ginsberg read the new poem aloud at the Six Gallery has been called “the bith trauma of the Beat Generation.” How's spontaneity of surface conceal but grows out of Ginsberg care and self consciousness about shythm and meter. Under the fluence of William Carlos Williams, who had befriended him in Paterson after he left the mental hospital, Ginsberg had started carying around 2 notebook to record the shythms of voices round him Keroutae's On the Road cave him fuser examoles of “frank talk” and, in addition. of an “oceanic” prose “sometimes as sublime as epic line.” Under Kerouac’ influence Cinsberg began the long tumbling lines that were to become his trademark, He carefully explained that all of How! and Other Poems was an experiment in awhat could be done with the long line, the longer unit of breath that seemed natural for him, “My feeling is for a big long clanky statement,” one that accommodates "not the wey vou would say ity a thought, but the way vou would think it—i.e.. we think rapid, in visual images as well as words, and if tach successive thought were transeribed in its confision ... you get a slightly different prosody than if you were talking sloly “The long line is something Ginsberg learned 25 well from biblical chetori, from the eighteenth-century English poet Christopher Smart, and above all rom Whit- ‘man and Blake. His hist Book pays tribute to both thee latter poets. A Supermarket in California, with its movement from exclamation: to sad questioning, is Gins- bere’s melancholy reminder of what has become, ater a century, of Whitman's vision of American plenty. In Sunflower Sutra he celebrates the batered nobility beneath our industrial "skin of grime,” Ginsberg at nis best gives a sense of both Howe 2559 inthe catalog of suffering Kaddh Hs dgconncted pss ov secomus Ginsberg himself had lived for vears with the poet Peter Orlovsky: and wrote frankly Sing ee’ ROP hee ey fl a ca inhabiting the human form.” eae a bead RED neat a ows ofl rn Ure Se iii panei te otra bo entre thr ei seers Mg apd ere Cine Serguei eae From Howl for Carl Solomon* 1 1 saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, stain sagen tae, are ee ragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fs, anglherded hips burn ng forthe ancient hestenly connection: tothe starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollos-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of coldsater fats floating acos the top fies contemplating jaz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the EP and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement rf illuminated, : ‘who pased through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas veh Blak ight! tagely among the scholars of wa who were expelled from the academies for erary & publishing ulsene ules om the windows of the sku, nes " ‘who cowered in unshaver rooms in underwear, burning their money in wwastebaskts and listening tothe Terror Uvough the wall, 1 img met il Slo 1 hi hte Basing cide rig nd Th Sakae him an re Bos Das nd” se apo wh cn apt de repeat Mande Howl ame om tr 3 Theses alayn New Wok Cty a He Secale tat Soman Wo Cong incu nw ka Gol 189" oe Nap 158, Salomon aims 3 Rolen ete’ aoe so f the Ex thee aber ware “componde uy ot gh Wy Ske ST tet the mo neni, eno 2560 ALLEN GinseRe who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of ‘marijuana for New York 7 who ate fie in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, oF ingatoried ther torsos night afer night "0 with dreams, with dug, ith waking nightmares, aleohol and cock and end less balls, incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud nd lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson,” illuminating all the motionless world of Time between, os um Peyote soliitis of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunken- ees over the roftps, soefiont boughs of ahead jyrde neon Blink: ing traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter

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