From The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later Author(s): Allen Ginsberg, Jason Shinder, Vivian Gornick, Mark Doty and Amiri Baraka Source: The American Poetry Review , MARCH/APRIL 2006, Vol. 35, No. 2 (MARCH/APRIL 2006), pp. 3-10 Published by: Old City Publishing, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/20683131
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This content downloaded from 153.9.109.4 on Sun, 08 Nov 2020 21:31:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The American Poetry Review and The Honickman Foundation are pleased to announce the winner of the 2006 APR/Honickman First Book Prize David Roderick for Blue Colonial Judge: Robert Pinsky
The APR/Honickman First Book Prize is an award of $3,000 and publication of a volume of poetry. David Roderick's Blue Colonial, with an introduction by Robert Pinsky, will be published in the fall of 2006 with distribution by Copper Canyon Press through Consortium. This prize is made possible by a partnership between APR and The Honickman Foundation.
From The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later Allen Ginsberg with commentary by Jason Shinder, Vivian Cornick, Mark Doty, Amiri Baraka, and others
What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, the best qualities of human nature, and afterwards gays and lesbians, and other "outsiders," and still what howls restrained by decorum ... ?Walt Whitman offers the possibility of imperfect fulfillment in periodically silenced by the FCC and local public the search of friendship and love ("I am with you schools, the poem forces us to understand, as the FIFTY YEARS AGO, ClTY LIGHTS, A SMALL Carl Solomon."). The call of the poet ends with poet Paul Zweig wrote, that "nothing is safe from San Francisco paperback bookstore co-founded the declaration that in spite of (and because of) poetry." by the magazine publisher Rick Martin and what is lost everything is/must be holy. ("Holy the Indeed, the "howl" Ginsberg brought forth was the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, published Allen super-natural extra brilliant intelligent kindness unruly, powerful enough to upset traditions and Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems. With its trade of the soul!") values?and, further, incite action on its behalf. mark black and white cover, it was the fourth vol The poem, along with several other literary People changed their professions, moved, or cre ume in the City Lights "pocket poet's series." It achievements, including Diane di Prima's This ated alternative lifestyles as a direct impact of cost 75 cents. Kind of Bird Flies, Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Coney Is having read the poem. Perhaps like other major It's an anniversary worth noting: the book has land of the Mind, Jack Kerouac's On The Road, in visionary poems, "Howl" inspires its readers to sold more than i,000,000 copies, its signature spired the worldwide literary, cultural and politi raise the stakes in their work, and in their lives. poem has been translated into two dozen lan cal movement that became known as the Beat guages and is anthologized in high school and stan Generation. The form-breaking social and cultural As a young poet, I sent a handwritten note to dard anthologies worldwide as a literary classic. power of "Howl" amounted to more, however, than Allen Ginsberg asking if I could study with him Celebrated by many writers at the time of its a collective, thrilling scream. It changed (and con at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poet publication, including Jack Kerouac, Denise Lev tinues to change) the potential and vision of the ics at Naropa Institute, a Buddhist liberal arts col ertov, and William Carlos Williams (and dismissed lives and work of its readers, including those of lege he co-founded with the poet Anne Waldman. by many critics including Lionel Trilling and Mark our most distinguished artists and authors. On a postcard with a picture of himself and Van Doren), the poem gained national recognition Bob Dylan sitting cross-legged at the graveside of when it became the focus of proceedings brought Why is it that the poem continues to fascinate us? Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg quickly responded. "Come against it by the San Francisco Juvenile Depart In part, of course, there is the undeniable epic and when you can," he scribbled. There was something ment for obscenity in 1957. Although the presid legendary arc (chronicled and nurtured, in part, in him, always curious, interested, and generous ing Judge Horn dismissed the charges by quoting by Allen Ginsberg himself) in both the poem's that surfaced when he was in touch with another the motto, "evil to him who thinks evil," the trial history and in the Beat Generation it helped to human being. And a short time later, after looking was the beginning of one of the most public and foster. at my poems, he said, "Why not make some noise?" influential poetic journeys of any single poem. The Certainly, too, the poem demonstrated (in a seis "Howl" made some noise. How many poems stir trial, and the publicity it garnered, helped confirm mic way) that literary and social change could em such literary and social tumult? It helped shake up not only the poem's literary and social significance. anate from the shared spirit of a highly charged the order of things. Reading it today appeals to, and It also helped to root the poem's opening line (one language. Robust, rough, rude, and tender, with resuscitates, the young rebel in us. of the most famous lines of poetry in world liter provocatively rhythmic music, the poem's long ?Jason Shinder ature) in our collective consciousness: lined construct of visual imagery and repetitive altering phrases was born out of the various influ The following selections are reprintedfrom the recently I have seen the best minds of my generation ences of American jazz, blues and rock n' roll, for published, The Poem That Changed America: destroyed by madness, starving, naked, malism and free verse, French surrealism and Eng hysterical... "Howl" Fifty Years Later, edited by Jason Shinder, lish romanticism, and Judaism and Buddhism, to and published by Farrar, Straus ei Giroux. The facsim The line, and the poem's four sections that fol name a few. ile of Section One of "Howl" isjrom a 1956 mimeo low, are Whitman's call in the midst of the crowd. The open form provided the appropriate forum graphed version of the poem, typed by Robert Creeley The poet's call first descends into a nightmare for Ginsberg to speak of seemingly unspeakable and mimeographed by Ginsberg in a set of 25 copies. world in which the "best minds" are destroyed. He personal, political and sexual matters?specially The first "public printing" of "Howl," this version is then indicts those elements ("Moloch the loveless perhaps that of his struggle and celebration as a printed for the first time in its entirety in The Poem ... Moloch the heavy judger of men.") that destroy gay, Jewish man. Still a source of support for many That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later.
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Vivian Gornick working journalist. Here is the scene as I remem remember Ginsberg standing there, his glasses Wild at Heart ber it: shining, nodding in all directions, urging people At the head of the viewing room stood the cas toward compassionate reason. He never raised his In 1947 Saul Bellow published a novel called The ket with Kerouac, hideously made up, lying in it. voice, never spoke with heat or animosity, never Victim, in which a derelict character named Kirby In the mourners' seats sat Kerouac's middle-class stopped sounding thoughtful and judicious while Allbee haunts another named Asa Leventhal, claim French-Canadian relatives?eyes narrowed, faces all about him were losing their heads. When he ing that Leventhal is responsible for his downfall. florid, arms crossed on their disapproving breasts. stepped from the microphone and was making his Kirby, one of Bellow's fabled fast talkers?all fever Around the casket?dipping, weaving, chanting way through the crowd, I pressed his hand as he ish self-abasement and joking insult?repeatedly Ora?were Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and passed me and thanked him for the excellence of baits Leventhal, and at one point, when Leventhal Gregory Corso. Then there was Kerouac's final, the letter's prose. He stopped, closed his other murmurs something about Walt Whitman, says to caretaker wife, a woman old enough to be his hand over mine, and looking directly into my him, "Whitman? You people like Whitman? What mother, weeping bitterly and looking strangely iso eyes, said softly, "I know you. Don't I know you? I does Whitman mean to you people?" Who could lated. I sat mesmerized, staring in all directions. know you." ever have dreamed that less than a decade after the Suddenly Ginsberg was sitting beside me. "And Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jer publication of The Victim not only would "you peo who are you?" he asked quietly. I told him who I sey, in 1926 to Louis and Naomi Ginsberg; the ple" be announcing out loud that they liked Whit was. He nodded and wondered if I was talking to father was a published poet, a high school teacher, man but it would appear that they themselves had people. Especially the wife. I must be sure to talk and a socialist; the mother, an enchanting free reincarnated him. The day after Allen Ginsberg's to her. "Oh, no," I said quickly. "I couldn't do that." spirit, a passionate communist, and a woman who celebrated 1955 reading of "Howl" in San Fran Ginsberg nodded into space for a moment. "You lost her mental stability in her thirties (ultimately, cisco, Lawrence Ferlinghetti sent Ginsberg a tele must," he murmured. Then he looked directly into she was placed in an institution and lobotomized). gram that read, "1 greet you at the beginning of a my eyes. "It's your job," he said softly. "You must Allen and his brother grew up inside a chaotic mix great career"?the sentence Emerson had used do your job." ture of striving respectability, left-wing bohemian writing to Whitman upon the publication, exactly The second time we met, nearly twenty years ism, and certifiable madness in the living room. It a hundred years earlier, of Leaves of Grass. later, was at an infamous meeting of the PEN all felt large to the complicated, oversensitive boy Fifty years later, I think it can safely be agreed board called to debate a letter (drafted by Ginsberg) who, discovering that he lusted after boys, began that Allen Ginsberg is the poet who, within living that the Freedom-to-Write Committee had sent to to feel mad himself and, like his paranoid parents, memory, most legitimately resembles Whitman. Israel's premier, taking his government to task for threatened by, yet defiant of, the America beyond He, like Whitman, wrote an emblematic Ameri censoring Palestinian and Israeli journalists. I sat the front door. can poem that became world famous; was experi in my seat, listening to Ginsberg read his letter None of this accounts for Allen Ginsberg; it only enced preeminently as a poet of the people, at aloud to a packed room. He was now in his sixties, describes the raw material that, when the time was home among the democratic masses; developed a his head bald, his beard trim, wearing an ill-fitting right, would convert into a poetic vision of mythic public persona to match the one in his writing? black suit, the voice as gentle as I remembered it proportion that merged brilliantly with its mo hugely free-spirited and self-promoting, an open and twice as dignified. Although the letter had ment: the complicated aftermath of the Second hearted exhibitionist. And he, again like Whitman, been signed by Susan Sontag, William Styron, and World War, characterized by anxiety about the is remembered as a man in possession of an ex Grace Paley among others, it was Ginsberg him atomic bomb, a manipulated terror of godless traordinary sweetness that, throughout his life, self who drew fire from the opposition. In a com Communism, the strange pathos of the Man in the welled up repeatedly to astonish the hearts of all muniqu? that had been sent earlier to the commit Gray Flannel Suit, and the subterranean currents who encountered him. tee, Cynthia Ozick had practically accused him of of romanticized lawlessness into which the men I met Ginsberg only twice, the first time at Jack being an agent for the PLO; and now, the essence and women ultimately known as the Beats would Kerouac's funeral in 1969.1 was there for The Vil of the charge coming from the floor seemed to be funnel an old American devotion to the idea of lage Voice. It was my very first assignment as a "It's people like you who are destroying Israel." I revolutionary individualism.
4 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW
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When Ginsberg entered Columbia University in all worldly rejection and self-dramatizing desper and Corso dancing about him), here and now, in 1942, he was already possessed of a presentation ation. the American city experienced as most open (that of self, shall we say, that would make it impossible In 1949, now twenty-three years old, depressed, is, farthest from the seats of eastern power), he for him to gain the love of the teachers he most and at loose ends, Ginsberg let Herbert Huncke? wrote his great poem, read it aloud one night in admired, namely, Lionel Trilling and Mark Van a true criminal?crash at his apartment, where October 1955?and awoke to find himself famous. Doren. (Trilling memorialized Ginsberg in his Huncke proceeded to stash an ever-increasing While thousands of young people responded to short story "Of This Time, of That Place" as the bril amount of stolen goods. Inevitably, the police ap "Howl" as though they'd been waiting years to hear liant student whom the narrating academic can peared at the door, and everyone was arrested. Res this voice speaking these words, the literary estab experience only as mad.) Emulating these men cued from a prison sentence by friends, family, lishment promptly vilified it. Lionel Trilling hated would mean going into a kind of internal exile that and his Columbia teachers, Ginsberg was sent to the poem, John Hollander hated it, James Dickey Allen, even then, knew he could not sustain. His the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where he hated it, and Norman Podhoretz hated it. Pod dilemma seemed profound. Then he met Jack Ker spent eight months that did, indeed, change his horetz hated it so much that he wrote about it ouac, also a student at Columbia. Through Kerouac life. Here he met the man to whom he would ded twice, once in The New Republic and then again in he met William Burroughs; together they picked icate "Howl." Partisan Review. By the time these pieces were be up a Times Square junkie poet named Herbert Carl Solomon was Allen's double?a Bronx-born ing written, On the Road had been published, as Huncke; and after that Neal Cassady, the wild man bisexual self-dramatizing left-wing intellectual. well as Naked Lunch, and for Podhoretz the Amer of all their dreams: a handsome, grown-up delin They saw themselves in each other almost imme ican sky was falling. The Beats, he said, were the quent who drank, stole, read Nietzsche, fucked like diately. Solomon held out his hand and said, "I'm barbarians at the gate, rabble-rousers who "em a machine, and drove great distances at great Kirilov" (a character in Dostoevsky's The Possessed). braced homosexuality, jazz, dope-addiction and va speeds for the sake of movement itself. As Bur Allen responded, "I'm Myshkin" (Dostoevsky's grancy" (he got that part right), at one with "the roughs put it, "Wife and child may starve, friends fabled idiot). There was, however, one important young savages in leather jackets who have been exist only to exploit for gas money . . . Neal must difference between them. Solomon had lived in running amuck in the last few years with their move." (Cassady became Dean Moriarty in On the Paris, was soaked in existentialist politics and lit switch-blades and zip guns." Jack Kerouac was cut Road and the Adonis of Denver in "Howl.") erature; and here, at New York State Psychiatric, to the quick and wrote to complain that the Beats For Ginsberg, these friends came to constitute he introduced Allen to the work of Genet, Artaud, were about beatitude, not criminalism; they were a sacred company of inspired madmen destined and C?line, the mad writers with whom he in here to rescue America (from corporate death and to convert the poisoned atmosphere of America's stantly felt at one. Ginsberg marveled at Solomon's atomic bomb politics), not destroy her. Cold War politics into one of restored beauty? melancholy brilliance and proceeded to mythicize In the summer of 1957, "Howl" was brought to through their writing. The conviction among them it. If Carl was mad, it could only be that Amerika trial in San Francisco on charges of obscenity, with of literary destiny was powerful. And why not? had driven him mad. When Ginsberg emerged a wealth of writers testifying on behalf of the People like Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Cassady are from the institution, he had his metaphor in place: poem's literary value. In retrospect, the trial can born every hour on the hour: how often do their be seen as an opening shot in a culture war des I saw the best minds of my generation lives intersect with a political moment that endows tined to throw long shadows across American life. destroyed by madness, starving hysterical And indeed, throughout the sixties, both the poem their timeless hungers with the echoing response naked, of millions, thereby persuading them that they and its author were celebrated, the former as a dragging themselves through the negro streets are, indeed, emissaries of social salvation? What manifesto of the counterculture, the latter as one at dawn looking for an angry fix. is remarkable among this bunch?considering of its emblematic figures. how much they drank, got stoned, and flung them For the next few years he wandered, all over the Today, nearly fifty years after it was written, selves across the country in search of heavenly country and halfway around the world, becoming "Howl" is never out of print, is read all over the despair?is how well they sustained one another a practicing Buddhist along the way. Arrived at last world (it's been translated into more than two throughout their faltering twenties, when life was in San Francisco in 1954 (with Kerouac, Cassady, dozen languages), and by most standards is con
MARCH/APRIL 2006 5
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sidered a literary classic. Like Leaves of Grass, it is one, "I'll be home in a week, babe, ten days at the able as he squeezed the harmonium and sang an ingenious experiment with the American lan latest." Kerouac, except for the books, was not so Blake, and hopped a little, and spoke rhythmically guage that did what Ezra Pound said a great poem very different. Neither of these men could inhabit and passionately into the mie. I don't know that I've should do: make the language new. Its staccato the space he actually occupied at any given mo heard a more responsive audience at a poetry read phrasing, its mad juxtapositions and compacted ment. Each had a leak somewhere in the middle ing since; people clapped and laughed and shouted images, its remarkable combining of the vernac of himself that made experience drain exhaustingly approval. When Allen Ginsberg mentioned "one ular with the formal?obscene, slangy, religious, away (both were dead in their forties). sugarcube of lysergic acid diethylamide smuggled" transcendent, speaking now in the voice of the Ginsberg, by contrast, was remarkably heart across some border, the crowd sent up a wave of poet, now in that of the hipster?is simply an as whole: it made all the difference. His experience cheers; when he read the line "It'll be a relief when tonishment. The effect of all this on the reader? nourished him, gave him the strength to com the Red Chinese take over Texas," there was a huge "Even today," as Jonah Raskin, one of Ginsberg's plete the self-transformation he had been bent outcry of delight. The next day, at a bookstore called biographers, says, "reading the poem yields a feel on from the beginning. I don't think it an exag The Hungry Eye, I went to hear him again?this ing of intoxication. The words produce an electri geration to say that when he died at seventy his time Allen and Peter chanting together, making the cal charge that is exhilarating." life had given new meaning to the word "self narrow room of bodies reverberate. It was 1969, That charge is actually the discharge of a man created." For the formal poets and critics of his and a sort of heaven. and a time well met. There is a feverish hunger own generation, Ginsberg would remain only an I didn't hear Ginsberg again for a decade. In In for poetry and glory in Ginsberg as he moves original: the gifted, problematic amateur (in 1963 dianola, Iowa, at Simpson College, his reading was through the late forties that is absolutely at one Robert Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Bishop "the beats sponsored, who knows why, by one of the school's with his political and cultural moment. Prowling have blown away, the professionals have returned"). fraternities. It couldn't have been a more differ the streets of New York as if it were Dostoevsky's For the American culture, however, Ginsberg (in ent scene: the audience was tastefully respectful; Petersburg; rising in an English class at Columbia deed, like Walt Whitman) had become an inspir the poet read some of the short, sonorous, sorrow to terrify students and teachers alike with some ited incarnation: the authentic made-in-America ful lyrics about his father's illness, and afterward brilliant, unpunctuated rant; looking for sex in holy fool. there was a party at the fraternity house. I was Times Square; seeing Blake in a vision in his own both looking forward to and feeling a bit shy about kitchen; nodding wordlessly when the cops ask Mark Doty meeting this legendary presence, but I needn't him if he is a homosexual?we have a vivid figure have worried. A good twenty minutes into the standing squarely in the foreground of significant Human Seraphim: party, Allen disappeared upstairs with a young disconnect. "Howl," Sex, and Holiness fraternity member who wanted to show him some Yet, we also see why Ginsberg could survive his poems, and he never came back the rest of the own youth to become an emblematic figure of The university in my town was a place of cultural evening. growth and change while Kerouac and Cassady and political foment, and three thousand people Flash-forward twenty years, to the Geraldine R. could not. Neal Cassady was a drifter through and packed the auditorium?the biggest one at the Dodge Poetry Festival in Waterloo Village, New Jer through. To read his letters?although the ones to University of Arizona?to hear chants and rants sey, a pastoral extravaganza of verse and good spir his writer friends are richly literate?is to see a and ecstatic outpourings. I was still in high school; its. The second day of the festival is largely given man perpetually on the run from himself. It was everyone I knew who wrote poetry or was passion over to teachers, and there are thousands of New all drugs, drink, women, and motion without a ate about social change?that is, everyone cool Jersey high school teachers in attendance when stop. He is forever in the car hurtling toward New from Rinc?n High?was there, and we weren't dis Allen arrives on the stage of the big tent, his voice York, Denver, or California. If he stops, it's to get appointed. The small figure on the huge stage carried out to the back rows by a splendid audio one woman pregnant, marry a second, start an seemed to loom larger, not in a threatening or system. It's maybe six months before his death, affair with a third, all in what feels like the space puffed-up way but in an intimate one, as if he were but Allen's in fine and sweetly energetic form, of a month; then it's back in the car, writing to each a grand, available personality becoming more avail reading/chanting his late, playful chants?"don't
6 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW
This content downloaded from 153.9.109.4 on Sun, 08 Nov 2020 21:31:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms the longing to be part of a questing (albeit erratic) company. It's a chronicle of friends seeking?take your pick, satori, godhead, enlightenment, tran 7) scendence, the permanent ecstatic?through what ever means they find at hand: Buddhist teaching, the ?adasa ben ;md angsl beat In Une, unknown, yet putting down harc *?hat & % be left to say drugs, sex, and a sort of self-abuse, to use a rough In tine cone after death, ?ad rose reincarnate in the ghastly clothes of jasa term for it, involving staying up all night, travel, in the goldfcorn shadow of the band ?od ble? the suffering of Asterie?** naked aind for lovo drinking, and cigarettes, scraping the self raw, as into an ali eli laissa lame ?abecthsoi sax it were, to open every pore. aphone cry that shiverthe citiea down to the last radio Such longing, and such hammering of the in with the absolute heart of the poca of life butchered out of their own bodias good to eat a thousand dividual in quest of the whole, takes place against years. a particularly unyielding background: the con xx servative, pragmatic, industrial, down-to-earth
Wiat sphinx of cernant and alussinom bashed open their America of the late forties and early fifties, a cul skulle snd ?te up their brains and inagiaation? ture that wants none of its sons' quest for the tran ?loloch S Solitude: Filth? Ugliasea! Ashcana and unob tainable dollars I Children screaming under the stair scendent (and they are sons?this is a guys' vision ways! Boye sobbing in aresiea! Cid man weeping in the parkei of a juggernaut for holiness). America actively Moloch! Moloch! Kiutasra of Moloch? Holoch the love less! Mantel Holocbi Molech the heavy Jadear seeks to resist, tame, jail, medicate, or hospitalize of nani them. What is not of the mainstream seems illicit Holoch the inconpr^hanaible prison! Holoch the oro?a~ bona soullass ??ilhouee and Congress of ?errows? Holoch whose buUdiage are judgaaentl Moloch or sick, as if their longing for firsthand experi the vast stone of vari Moloch the stunned ence of the divine is itself criminal, a subversive governs ente! Holoch whose aind is pura aacMnery? Holoch whose deviance. blood la running moneyJ Holoch whose fingere ?re ten areles! Moloch whose breast is a This pose?transcendent wild boys versus spirit cannibal dynanoJ Holoch whose ear la a sacking tosh* crushing monolithic Moloch?is an affecting one, Moloch whose
MARCH/APRIL 2006 7
This content downloaded from 153.9.109.4 on Sun, 08 Nov 2020 21:31:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms despite the rants and big claims the poem makes his work may be, it usually tends upward and out ing mailed, The New Yorker's poetry actually made all along the way?one foot planted firmly in a ward, away from gravity, moving through the fact we weep, at the deep nothingness they touted as sense of the absurd. of flesh toward other arenas. Amazingly, his most feeling, yeh, but only of deep disgust. famous poem invented a new cultural category? So HOWL?the language. The stance. The Sex, in "Howl," seems simply one more in the neither homo nor straight, quite, but the "angel sense of someone being in the same world, the de chain of experiences pursued for their potential in headed hipster," the beat whose transcendent sex fiance. Yeh?to the dead and to somebody else's revealing the divine, but it's just as capable of of uality lifts him out of the familiar categories, version of Bohemian Intelligentsia there was here fering the ridiculous as it is the transcendent. This knocking the binary off its high horse, setting him this HOWL. So I wrote Allen on a piece of toilet is decidedly not a middle-class position toward the self loose to sing. paper to Git Le Coeur asking was he for real. He ecstatic. It isn't, I think, a stance that could easily answered on French toilet paper, which is better be incorporated into a broader culture, or a politi Amiri Baraka for writing, that he was tired of being Allen Gins cal platform. Can you imagine gay liberation as a berg. And sent a broad registration of poetry for religious juggernaut, exactly? Probably not. Whit "Howl" and Hail the new magazine YUGEN. And that began some man might be said to have attempted something forty years of hookup. of the sort, proclaiming the love of comrades as "Howl" reached Puerto Rico, late '55, whenever the Allen was finally what I thought was everywhere the foundation of a social order, but his interest is early Village Voice did. I was there disguised as a in the Village, a genuine book-stuffed intellectual, in a divinity apprehended entirely through its hu colored Airman second-class, lower left gunner and, as well, a publicist, perhaps the best we knew man embodiments, and he's completely earnest and weatherman on a B36. Reading at nights and of poetry itself. There were so many bullshitters about the project. 12 hrs every day under the Latino sun, while guard and tasters and energetic imitating Marlon Bran Try to add a sense of humor to that religious ing somebody else's airplanes, and scoffing every dos. Except Jack Micheline wasn't imitating, in impulse, it becomes unthinkable as a social move stationery word in English Literature, all the best those jazz sessions he was who Marlon Brando ment. After Stonewall, gay activists would seek lib sellers in The NY Times and with 7 or so comrades was imitating. erty and equality for their own sake; Ginsberg's in an underground airman professional killer And we remained friends, Allen and I, for 40 platform calls for liberty in the service of the tran salon learning the history of western music and years. His takes on Williams, and the variable foot, scendent. And?in contrast to the earnest stance literature as night librarian at Ramey Air Force American speech, the breath phase, the existence of gay liberation?he never loses sight of himself Base, Strategic Air Command, Aguadilla, Puerto of an American language and literature, which the as a potentially comic figure. Does this make him Rico. At least two of these guys, both photogra colleges still deny, was what was most important a quintessential^ Jewish Buddhist? phers, lurk somewhere even now in NYC, to tell to me. The anti Moloch heavy anti-imperialist line In a strange way, obscene and scandalous as the tale. James Lucas and Phil Perkis! that wove through HOWL "AMERICA Go FUCK "Howl" may have been, Ginsberg's complex posi We read and kicked Hardy, Proust, Kafka, Hey, YR SELF WITH YR ATOM BOMB!" Now that was tion makes its sexual frankness acceptable. We What's a Kafka, we yelled? I dunno ... Hey Roi or poetry! Plus talking to Allen about Western poetry have a tradition of sacred erotic literature. Admit der it. And the night librarian did, plus a fifth of was always part of a course. On Blake, Smart, Rim tedly, it's a ways from the poems of St. John of the Rum. Motets, Gregorian Chants, Bach, Ulysses, baud, the troubadours, we visited Pound and he Cross to that sword-bearing naked blond in the Tess Durberville. I mean some under the earth dull apologized for being anti-Semitic, at least Allen baths, but if you remember the poem where Christ as shit, but Ulysses, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Satie. heard that, that crazy motherfucker. William Car wounds his earthly beloved's throat?well, there is We were getting our under over graduate readiness los Wms funeral, we trooped over for, before that a precedent. Eros has been spiritualized in the: preparation to return to Civilization, we thought, to Weequahic high school to do a reading, in West ever since the Song of Songs. And if you can after roaming the sky scaring the world with nu Newark, where we were both borned. Howard U, even go on to laugh at that celestial messenger clear frustration, American ignorance, and young that historic trek, reading on the campus, refused who's about to spear you?well, you're immedi arrogance, wandering what the big world wd be. from all buildings. ately in a far less confrontational position with the For me, the Voice was just more confirmation Allen was a font of ideas, and publicity for the reader. that like my High School hero Allen Polite, who I new word, a new generation, on prosody, America This particular position?lusty spiritual come first was turned on to The Writer, him still a great and intros to the whole united front against dead dian, let's call it?is why, ultimately, gay writers unpublished poet. HE said, we thought, the VIL people "they don't like the way we live" was the way of the generations beyond Allen would think of LAGE, YEH, that's where everything was at! OH AG summed it up. And for this, that we cd bring him as a forefather but not exactly an influence. He yeh. That's where the world-class intellectuals and the San Francisco School, the Beats, the Black feels like a cultural totem less of gay American his knowers wd reside. Oh Yeh. Mountain, OHara and the New Yorkers together tory and culture than of "alternative" American life, And finally, 1957, they booted me out of the serv to do battle against the zombies of Euroformalism, a pioneer of psychic frontiers whose work proba ice as undesirable, you bet, I had already got booted neo colonial death verse was where our deepest bly has less to do with how I experience the world out of College as likewise, but now as a fucking comradeship was formed. than does that of his East Coast contemporary commie Buddhist colored guy, busted for books Allen and I argued relentlessly, soon as he and Frank O'Hara. It's an interesting comparison. The and an alarming hostility to dumbness. You ever me, we went our separate ideological practical day O'Hara poem with the most direct engagement dig Curtis LeMay on his stomach on a go-cart to day paths. Malcolm's murder shot me out of the with the transcendent, "A True Account of Talk speeding across the flight line Saturday mornings. village for good, and our greetings and meeting ing to the Sun at Fire Island," is also very funny, Wd instruct the hell out of you. With both stripes became measure less frequent. The gap between though inflected with a camp sensibility of a very now ripped off along with secret clearance, Gone, Black nationalism and Tibetan Buddhism. I wanted different sort. The pratfalls and swooning exclama Gone, and so we shot off in ecstasy to the City, the to make War, Allen to make peace. For all our end tions in "Howl" serve to resist the heightened qual Apple, New York, Bohemia, The Village, to try out less contention, often loud and accompanied by ity of the holy quest at their core. O'Hara doesn't our vicious learning on those we were sure wd dig contrasting histrionics, we remained, in many believe in sacred quests, probably wouldn't even how heavy we had got. ways, comrades in and of the word, partisans of entertain such a notion, yet he seems visited one And it was Howl again. Plus Allen Polite and his consciousness! day by something broaching upon mystery anyway, cohorts, Cunningham, Cage, Charlip, Czernovitch, The day before he split Allen called and sd he a talking heavenly body with allegiances beyond RhBlythe, Suzuki, Zen, gals in black stockings, had to see me. Very important he sd. Can you the plane of earth. He brings the same sensibil Yeats, Poetry Poetry Poetry, that brought us pant come. Yeh, what's up ... Well... he paused, then ity, the same open-eyed gaze to an encounter with ing into the Village, ist crib 104 E. 3rd St, 28$ a as usual, matter of fact?I'm gonna die ... OH a heavenly body that he'd bring to anything else. month 3 rms no heat, my mother wept. But hey bullshit. Allen Why're you saying that? No?It's Of course he jokes, but there's a different tenor wasn't this the joint? true. I just got out of the hospital. Maybe a couple to his humor, and the irony in his voice gives way, But Alas! And Alas and Alack. IT was not that of months ... not long. Hey don't say dumb shit at last, to?or at least coexists with?an unmistak what that was in my head. Not the GV of PR. The like that. No. No. it's true ... Anyway you need any ably genuine sense of awe. west village was full of poseurs and empty bags of money? Money? Naw Naw I don't need no money I think Allen could sing to those assembled old pretense, where was Poetry? Where was heavy ... and you aint gonna die. Well, you still gonna teachers about his usually-not-discussed-in-com intellectual outness after all? But Howl was emerg come Monday, it's important. Yeah, I'll be there pany body parts with such ?lan, and be accepted ing full then. Being talked about Given Ink emerg ... but nix on that death shit. OK, see you ... we so freely, because everybody understood that on ing full and clear. What struck me (and does still) exchanged our outs ... the phone hit. Then the some level it wasn't really his ass he was talking ... an Audaciousness I needed ... in that McCar next day, the newspapers carried their stuff. A big about anyway. It was an attitude toward the world thy Eisenhower 7 Types of Ambiguity 50s. That drag ... Man, a big big drag you know. Because and toward the body, a sweet-natured, laughing ac oatmeal lying world. In Puerto Rico I'd sent my the fundamental struggle for American poetry. For ceptance of earthliness that existed, for Ginsberg, stuff to Kenyon, Sewanee, Hudson, Partisan, and all our speech and consciousness as part of the en as a means to get off the earth plane. As bodily as the cemeteries, and it came back almost before be ergy and power of the United States against the
8 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW
This content downloaded from 153.9.109.4 on Sun, 08 Nov 2020 21:31:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms dead and their Ghosts. The anti-imperialist revo I do not believe that "Howl" is without even the Blocked by appearances, love comes through in lutionary democratic struggle itself is still running slightest redeeming social importance. The first the free play of the imagination, a world of art, the again at Page Pt. part of "Howl" presents a picture of a nightmare field of space where Appearance?natural recog But then a last word for Allen, gone now, turned world; the second part is an indictment of those nition of social tragedy & world failure?shows completely into spirit on us. What we uphold is elements in modern society destructive of the best less sentience than original compassionate expan the defiance and resistance to "Moloch," in the col qualities of human nature; such elements are pre siveness of heart. lective speech of the multinational multi cultural dominantly identified as materialism, conformity, It is in the poem, as WCW says, that we recon American tongue and voice. What it was I first dug and mechanization leading toward war. The third struct the world lost. The end verses of Part I hy in Howl. And the great line from America. "Amer part presents a picture of an individual who is a pothesize various arts that reconstruct our origi ica go fuck yrself with yr atom Bomb." Now that's specific representation of what the author con nal "petite sensation" of "Pater Omnipotens Aeterna poetry! That still rings and will ring true. And for ceives as a general condition. "Footnote to Howl" Deus." The classic art tactics cataloged there sug this sentiment, and stance, and revolutionary dem seems to be a declamation that everything in the gest a shrewd humor that protects our unob ocratic practice, part of revolutionary art for cul world is holy, including parts of the body by name . structed sympathy from chaos. The matter is in tural revolution, we say Hail and Farewell my man, It ends in a plea for holy living. In considering ma objective acknowledgement of emotion. Hail and Farewell. terial claimed to be obscene it is well to remember the motto: Honi soit qui mal pense (Evil to him "Howl" was written in a furnished room at ioio who thinks evil). Montgomery, a few houses up from where the Talking "Howl" 1 ?Judge Clayton Horn, street meets Broadway, in North Beach, and con tinues down a few steep blocks into San Francisco's Your "Howl" for Carl Solomon is very powerful, judgment, October 3,1957 financial district. I had weeks earlier quit work as but I don't want it arbitrarily negated by second a minor market research executive, had moved in ary recommendations made in time's reconsider with new-met friend Peter Orlovsky, but as he re ing backstep?I want your Lingual Spontaneity or Allen Ginsberg turned to Long Island to visit his family over the Nothing. I've Lived With and Enjoyed "Howl" summer, I was alone. I had the leisure of unem ?Jack Kerouac, letter to ployment compensation for six months ahead, had Tve lived with and enjoyed "Howl" for three Allen Ginsberg, August 19,1955 concluded a longish period of psychotherapeutic decades, it has become a social and poetical land mark, notorious at worst, illuminative at best, more consultation,^ enjoyed occasional visits from Neal "Howl" is a wild, volcanic, troubled, extravagant, Cassady, decade old friend, now brakeman on recently translated for understanding hitherto for turbulent, boisterous, unbridled outpouring, in Southern Pacific Railroad, and maintained ener bidden to the public in Eastern Europe, the Soviet termingling gems and flashes of picturesque in getic correspondence with Jack Kerouac in Long Union and China. It seems helpful in this fourth sight with slag and debris of scoriae matter. It has Island and William Burroughs in Tangier. decade of the poem's use to clarify its literary back violence; it has life; it has vitality. In my opinion, I had recently dreamt of the late Joan Burroughs, ground and historical implications as well as its au it is a one-side neurotic view of life; it has not a sympathetic encounter with her spirit. She in thor's intentions. Few poets have enjoyed the op enough glad, Whitmanian affirmations. quired the living fate of our friends. I wrote the portunity to expound their celebrated texts. Usually ?Louis Ginsberg, letter to dream as a poem ("Dream Record: June 8,1955") it is the lamplit study of an academic scholar, as Allen Ginsberg, May 27,1956 about which in a few days Kenneth Rexroth, an with Mr. J Livingston Lowe's hard interesting work elder in his literary city, wrote me he thought was on Coleridge's "Rime." Wordsworth essayed expla It is a howl of defeat. Not defeat at all for he has stilted & somewhat academic. A week later, I sat nations of his editions. Whitman early and appre idly at my desk by the first floor window facing gone through defeat as if it were an ordinary ex ciatively critiqued his own Leaves with modest Montgomery Street's slope to gay Broadway?only perience, a trivial experience . . . This poet sees anonymity for a generally hostile or indifferent lit a few blocks from City Lights literary paperback through all the horrors he partakes of in the very erary society. Later, for a more sympathetic public, bookshop. I had a secondhand typewriter, some intimate details of his poem. He avoids nothing he expounded its purport through several prefaces cheap scratch paper. I began typing, not with the but experiences it to the hilt. He contains it. Claims unique in comprehension of his own appointments idea of writing a formal poem, but stating my it as his own?and, we believe, laughs at it and has and disappointments. Still I've ventured my intel imaginative sympathies, whatever they were worth. the time and affrontery to love a fellow of his choice ligence, neither modest nor immodest, for the gen As my loves were impractical and my thoughts rel and record that love in a well-made poem. Hold eral public, poetry lovers, scholars, breakthrough atively unworldly, I had nothing to gain, only the back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are go artists and future generations of inspired youths. pleasure of enjoying on paper those sympathies ing through hell. The appeal in "Howl" is to the secret or hermetic most intimate to myself and most awkward to the ?William Carlos Williams, tradition of art "justifying" or "making up for" de Introduction to Howl and Other Poems, great world of family, formal education, business, feat in worldly life, to the acknowledgement of an and current literature. October 1956 Unworldly love that has no hope What I wrote that afternoon was not conceived as "Howl" is the most significant single long poem of the world a poem to publish. It stands now as the first sec to be published in this country since World War tion of "Howl." Later parts were written in San. II, perhaps since Eliot's Four Quartets ... "Howl" and that Francisco, and in ? garden cottage in Berkeley over commits many poetic sins, but it was time. cannot change the world to its delight? the next few months, with the idea of completing ?Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a poem. "Horn on Howl," Evergreen Review, after desolation In publishing "Howl," I was curious to leave be Winter 1957 as if the earth were our feet hind after my generation an emotional time bomb were that would continue exploding in U.S. conscious We have had smoking attacks on the civilization before, ironic or murderous or suicidal. We have an excrement of some sky tEditor's note: Ginsberg began seeing the therapist, Dr. not had this particular variety of anguished anath and we degraded prisoners Philip Hicks, at the Langley-Porter Institute. According to ema-hurling in which the poet's revulsion is ex destined Allen, at one point in the treatment, the following dialogue occurred: "What would you like to do?" the doctor asked. pressed with the single-minded frenzy of a raving to hunger and we eat filth* madwoman ... He has brought a terrible psycho "What is your desire really?" I said, "Doctor, I don't think logical reality to the surface with enough original Thus William Carlos Williams appealed to the you're going to find this very healthy and clear, but I really would like to stop working forever?never work again, "imagination" of art to reveal our deepest natural ity to blast American verse a hairsbreadth forward never do anything like the kind of work I'm doing now? in the process. ground: love, hopeless yet permanently present in and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend ?M. L. Rosenthal, the heart, unalterable. ("Love is not love/Which the days outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And "Review of Howl and Other Poems," alters when it alteration finds.") The worldly love I'd like to keep living with someone?maybe even a man? hypostatized through thick and thin with Carl and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my per The Nation, February 23,1957 ceptions, the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quite Solomon rose out of primordial filial loyalty to my city-hermit existence." Then he said, "Well, why don't you?" mother, then in distress. Where mother love con "Howl" proclaims, in a hopped up and improvised Ginsberg discusses this encounter as the Great Break tone, that nothing seems to be worth saying save flicts with social fa?ade, the die is cast from antiq through. The doctor's acceptance of Ginsberg's untradi in a hopped up and improvised tone. uity in favor of sympathy. tional desires encouraged his own self-acceptance and his misguided attempts to please his teachers and father, the ?John Hollander, ^William Carlos Williams, "Rain" in Collected Poems: ?gog poet Louis Ginsberg?all of which in turn generated the Partisan Review, Spring 1957 *939> Volume 1,1938. time and space for "Howl" to be written.
MARCH/APRIL 2006 9
This content downloaded from 153.9.109.4 on Sun, 08 Nov 2020 21:31:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ness in case our military-industrial-nationalist complex solidified into a repressive police bureau cracy. As a sidelight, I thought to disseminate a Available in bookstores poem so strong that a clean Saxon four-letter word Ne 800.621.2736 vwwv.upress.pitt.edu might enter high school anthologies permanently and deflate tendencies toward authoritarian strong 5B5?5TH arming (evident in later-^o's neoconservative at tacks on Kerouac's heartfelt prose and Burroughs's Interrogation Palace poetic humor). New and Selected Poems 1982-2004 Please with this Howl, I remain your yet living servant, etc. The author. < by David Wojahn
Credits $14.00 Paper "Interrogation Palace shows that David Wojahn has From The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later, edited by Jason Shinder, to be published in April been faithful to his vision. Never afraid of the arcane by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright ? 2006 by and experimental, he somehow keeps both feet in Jason Shinder. All rights reserved. "I've Lived With and Enjoyed 'Howl'" by Allen Ginsberg, this world and propels us through an inner sanctum reprinted with permission from The Allen Ginsberg Trust. of angels and rock music, soothsayers and popular Mimeograph 1956 version of "Howl" (Section One) re produced by permission of the Rare Books and Manu history, and philosophers and postmodern mystery." scripts Library at Columbia University and The Allen Gins berg Trust. ?Yusef Komunyakaa
ftOTfftft Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) is the author of more than If CtTTIIt? AlMffl? 40 books of poetry, prose, letters, and photographs. His books of poetry include Howl and Other Poems (1956); 'A My Brother is Getting Kaddish and Other Poems (1961); Reality Sandwiches (1963); Planet News (1968); The Fall of America (1973); Arrested Again Mind Breaths (1978); Plutonian Ode (1982); Collected by Daisy Fried Poems (1984); White Shroud (1985); and Cosmopolitan Greetings (1994). His many honors included The National $14.00 Paper Book Award for The Fall of America and election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1966 Ginsberg "Daisy Fried's poetry is fluid and quicksilver as founded the Committee on Poetry in New York City to support artists and play a role in politics; and in 1974 life sem close up. Here is an original voice: Ginsberg co-founded (with poet Anne Waldman) the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Col provocative, poignant, and often very funny " orado. A member of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Review, ?Joyce Carol Oates and a performer with the Clash, Ginsberg released several recordings of poems and original songs, including First Blues, a double album produced in 1983 by John Ham mond, and HolySoulJelly Roll, a 1994 four-CD set featur ing the best recordings of his career. A Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, Ginsberg taught, lectured, and read, however, in every state and in over The Contracted World twenty-five countries. The majority of his archives are at Stanford University. Following his death The Allen New & More Selected Poems Ginsberg Trust was established to "manage Ginsberg's tangible and non-tangible assets in a manner consistent by Peter Meinke with Ginsberg's world-view, sensibilities and artistic and $14.00 Paper literary values. For more information, contact www. allenginsberg.org. "Each poem is striking, and many are immediate favorites, all composed of vigor, sentiment, the Am ri Baraka was named 2002 New Jersey Poet Laure ate by the New Jersey Commission on Humanities, and high idealism and the self humor that are particu Newark Schools' Poet Laureate by the Newark Board of larly ours, and dished up in the twang and slang Education. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, IIP WOKI l> prose, and plays, including his most recent book of of American plainsong. " poetry, Un Poco Low Coup (I Reed Publishers). Since 1990 he and his wife, Amina Baraka, have operated the ?Publishers Weekly on arts space, Kimako's Blues People, in Newark, New Jersey. The Night Train and the Golden Bird
Mark Doty's seventh book of poems is School of the Arts (HarperCollins, 2005). He is also the author of three books of non-fiction, and the recipient of the National Astoria Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, and the T. S. Eliot Prize (UK). He teaches in the graduate writing program at the University by Malena M?rling of Houston, and lives in New York City. $14.00 Paper
Vivian Gornick is the author of eight books, including "A truly wondrous book. People and places make the memoir Fierce Attachments and the essay collections bridges to each other. The reader is turned to him Approaching Eye Level and The End of the Novel of Love. or-her-selfi The poems are constant enthusiasms, at work with intuitions from the heart and the Jason Shinder's recent poetry books include Among Women (Graywolf) and the forthcoming chapbook Uncer mind and the world.n tain Hours (Arrowsmith). His other recent books include ?Michael Burkard The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later, the forthcoming Hollywood Poets: Movie Makers and Their Favorite Poems, and True Minds: The Letters of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Director of the YMCA National Writer's Voice and Sundance Institute's Arts Writing Pro gram, he teaches in the graduate writing seminars at Ben Pittsburgh]university of Pittsburgh press nington College. He lives in New York and Massachusetts and is currently Poet Laureate of Provincetown, MA.
10 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW
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