Howl

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Howl and Other Poems was published in the fall of 1956 as number four in the Pocket Poets Series from City Lights Books
Howl and Other Poems was published in the fall of 1956 as number four in the Pocket Poets Series from City Lights Books
Bob O. Rosenthal; poet and author; Allen Ginsberg's assistant of 20 years and trustee of the Ginsberg estate; discussing Howl at a 2006 symposium on the work at Bowery Poetry Club, New York City
Bob O. Rosenthal; poet and author; Allen Ginsberg's assistant of 20 years and trustee of the Ginsberg estate; discussing Howl at a 2006 symposium on the work at Bowery Poetry Club, New York City
This article is about the poem by Allen Ginsberg. For other meanings see Howl (disambiguation).

Howl is a poem by poet Allen Ginsberg. It is considered to be one of the principal works of the Beat Generation along with Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959).

Contents

[edit] Background

Howl was first performed on October 7th, 1955, at the famous Six Gallery in San Francisco. Soon afterwards, it was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who ran City Lights Bookstore and the City Lights Press. It is noted for relating stories and experiences of Ginsberg's friends and contemporaries, its tumbling hallucinatory style, and the subsequent obscenity trial that it provoked. It is dedicated to Ginsberg's friend Carl Solomon (1928-1993), whom he met in a mental institution. Carl Solomon is addressed by name throughout the poem, which also includes references to many other Beat figures, including Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Peter Orlovsky, Lucien Carr, and Herbert Huncke.

[edit] Overview and Structure

The poem consists of three parts, with an additional footnote.

[edit] Part I

Part I is the best known, and communicates scenes, characters, and situations drawn from Ginsberg's personal experience as well as from the community of poets, artists, political radicals, jazz-musicians, drug-addicts, and psychiatric patients whom he encountered in the late 1940s and early '50s. These people represent "the best minds of his generation" who were overlooked and not cared about forcing some of them into suicidal behavior. Ginsberg is voicing the words and the experiences of the unheard and outcast.

[edit] Part II

Part II is a rant about the state of industrial civilization, characterized in the poem as 'Moloch'. Ginsberg was inspired to write Part II during a period of peyote-induced visionary consciousness in which he saw a hotel façade as a monstrous and horrible visage which he identified with that of Moloch. Moloch is the biblical idol in Leviticus to whom the Canaanites sacrificed children. Ginsberg intends that the characters he portrays in Part I be understood to have been sacrificed to this idol. Moloch is also the name of an industrial, demon-like figure in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, a film which Ginsberg credits with influencing "Howl, Part II" in his annotations for the poem (see especially Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions).

[edit] Part III

Part III is directly addressed to Carl Solomon, whom Ginsberg met during a brief stay at a psychiatric hospital in 1949. This section is notable for its refrain, "I'm with you in Rockland," and represents something of a turning-point away from the grim tone of the "Moloch"-section.

[edit] Footnote

The closing section of the poem is the "Footnote", characterized by its repetitive 'Holy!' mantra, an ecstatic assertion that everything is holy.

[edit] Rhythm

The frequently quoted (and often parodied) opening lines set the theme and rhythm for the poem:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix;
Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.

Ginsberg's own commentary discusses the work as an experiment with the "long line". For example, Part I of the poem is structured as a single run-on sentence with a repetitive refrain dividing it up into breaths.

[edit] Specific References in "Howl"

Door at the Bowery Poetry Club, a popular haunt for Ginsberg colleagues
Door at the Bowery Poetry Club, a popular haunt for Ginsberg colleagues

"Who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedies among the scholars of war"

  • Ginsberg had an important auditory hallucination in 1948 of William Blake reading his poems "Ah, Sunflower," "The Sick Rose," and "Little Girl Lost." Ginsberg said it revealed to him the interconnectedness of all existence. He said his drug experimentation in many ways was an attempt to recapture that feeling.

"Who were expelled from the academy for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull"

  • Part of the reason Ginsberg was expelled from Columbia University was because he wrote obscenities in his dirty dorm window. He suspected the cleaning woman of being an anti-Semite because she never cleaned his window, and he expressed this feeling in explicit terms on his window and drew an ironic swastika. He also wrote a phrase on the window implying that the president of the university had no testicles.

"... poles of Canada and Paterson ..."

  • Kerouac was from Canada; Ginsberg grew up in Paterson, New Jersey. These two were considered the two poles of the Beat Generation since Kerouac was relatively conservative politically.

"who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoons in desolate Fugazzi's..."

  • Bickford's and Fugazzi's were New York spots where the Beats hung out. Ginsberg worked briefly at Fugazzi's.

"... Tangerian bone-grindings..." "... Tangiers to boys ..."

  • William S. Burroughs lived in Tangier, Morocco at the time Ginsberg wrote "Howl"

"who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas"

  • Mystics and forms of mysticism in which Ginsberg at one time had an interest (the concept of "The Dark Night of the Soul" by St. John of the Cross is especially appropriate for "Howl"). Kansas/Kansas City could be a reference to either Michael McClure or Burroughs, but that is uncertain.

From "who let themselves..." to "flashing buttocks under barn and naked in the lake"

  • Though it could be a reference to anyone's sexual exploits, it's likely a specific reference to Neal Cassady. "Who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N. C. secret hero of these poems" is definitely a reference to Neal Cassady (N.C.) who lived in Denver, Colorado.

"who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the showbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium"

  • A specific reference to Herbert Huncke.

"... and rose to build harpsichords in their lofts..."

  • Friend Bill Keck actually built harpsichords. Ginsberg had a conversation with Bill Keck's wife shortly before writing "Howl."

"who coughed on the six floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology"

  • This is a reference to the apartment in which Ginsberg lived when he had his Blake vision. His roommate was a theology student and kept his books in orange crates.

"who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot with eternity outside of time..."

  • A reference to Ginsberg's Columbia classmate Louis Simpson, an incident that happened during a brief stay in a mental institution for PTSD. Simpson later became a celebrated formalist poet. Since he was a formalist in the 50's he's often presented as being Ginsberg's opposite. But they remained friendly with one another throughout their lives. Simpson, who moved away from formalism later in his career, even occasionally defended Ginsberg's poetry.

"who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits..."

  • Ginsberg worked in several corporate jobs, including advertising firms. Many say it's when he was advised by his psychiatrist to quit his steady job that he was free to write "Howl." This passage also has some prime examples of Ginsberg's "eyeball kicks."

"who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge..."

"who sang out of their windows in despair..."

  • A specific reference to Bill Cannastra who actually did most of these things and died when he "fell out of the subway window."

From "who barreled down the highways of the past" to "& now Denver is lonesome for her heroes"

  • Likely a reference to Neal Cassady.

"who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals ..."

  • Likely a reference to Kerouac in his first revelation of the double meaning of "Beat" (the negative meaning of tired and broke, the positive meaning of beatific) central to the legend of the origins of the "Beat Generation."

"who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave"

  • The first one could have been many of the beats who regularly went to Mexico and cultivated drug habits. The second is likely a reference to Kerouac who regularly went to Rocky Mount, North Carolina (a specific recounting of this can be found in Dharma Bums). As for the third one, as Ginsberg says in "America" "Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister." The fourth is likely a reference to Neal Cassady who was a brakeman for the Southern Pacific.

From "who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism..." to "resting briefly in catatonia"

  • A specific reference to Carl Solomon. Originally this final section went straight into what is now Part III, which is entirely about Carl Solomon.

"Pilgrim's State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls ..."

  • The first and third are mental institutions where his mother was admitted. She was in Pilgrim's State at the time he wrote "Howl." Rockland is the institution where he met Solomon.

"with mother finally ******"

  • Ginsberg admitted that the deletion here was an expletive. He left it purposefully elliptical so the mind will fill in what it wants. In later readings, many years after he was able to distance himself from his difficult history with his mother, he reinserted the expletive.

"obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter (alt: variable measure) & the vibrating plane"

  • This is a recounting of Ginsberg's discovery of his own style and the debt he owed to his strongest influences. He discovered the use of the ellipse from haiku and the shorter poetry of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. "The catalog" is likely a reference to Walt Whitman's long line style which Ginsberg adapted. "The meter"/"variable measure" is likely a reference to Williams' insistence on the necessity of measure. Though "Howl" may seem formless, and this is perhaps a purposeful effect of the style, Ginsberg claimed it was written in a concept of measure adapted from Williams' idea of breath, the measure of lines in a poem being based on the breath in reading. Ginsberg's breath in reading, he said, happened to be longer than Williams'. "The vibrating plane" is a reference to Ginsberg's discovery of the "eyeball kick" in his study of Cezanne.

From "who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space" to "what might be left to say in time come after death"

  • A more detailed recounting of the discovery of his own style: the "eyeball kick", parataxis, the ellipse, etc. "Pater Omnipitens Aeterna Deus"/"omnipotent, eternal father God" was taken directly from Cezanne.

"eli eli lamma lamma sabachthani"

  • One version of the last words of Jesus: "Oh God, why have you forsaken me?" Though Ginsberg grew up in an agnostic household, he was always interested in his Jewish roots and in other concepts of spiritual transcendence. Though later Ginsberg was a devoted Buddhist, at this time Ginsberg was only beginning to study Buddhism along with other forms of spirituality. So one can read this last line as an ironic mockery of one of the dominant values of 1950's America (Christianity). But an essential aspect of Ginsberg's poetry, and Beat writing as a whole, is a genuine search for spiritual enlightenment outside of the traditional strictures of religious dogma (see for example Kerouac's relationship to Catholicism).

From "Footnote to Howl":

"Holy Peter [Orlovsky] holy Allen [Ginsberg] holy [Carl] Solomon holy Lucien [Carr] holy [Jack] Kerouac holy [Herbert] Huncke holy [William S.] Burroughs holy [Neal] Cassady" [1]

(All quotes taken from http://members.tripod.com/~Sprayberry/poems/howl.txt)

[edit] Notoriety

The New York Times sent poet Richard Eberhart to San Francisco in 1956 to report on the poetry scene there. The result of Eberhart's visit was an article published in the September 6, 1956 New York Times Book Review entitled "West Coast Rhythms." Eberhart's piece helped call national attention to Howl as "the most remarkable poem of the young group" of poets who were becoming known as the spokespersons of the Beat generation (Allen Ginsberg, Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Editions, Fully Annotated by Author, with Contemporaneous Correspondence, Account of First Public Reading, Legal Skirmishes, Precursor Texts & Bibliography, edited by Barry Miles [HarperPerennial, 1995], p. 155). But Howl is more than merely notorious. Its ideas have a resonance that cross the decades. The original reading of the poem was on October 7, 1955 at the Six Gallery on Union Street in San Francisco, in a show called Six at Six, featuring Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, Phil Whalen, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and Ginsberg. On October 7, 2005, celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of the first reading of the poem were staged in San Francisco, New York City, and in Leeds in the UK. The British event, Howl for Now, was accompanied by a book of essays of the same name, edited by Simon Warner, reflecting on the piece's enduring power and influence.

[edit] The 1957 obscenity trial

Howl contains many references to illicit drugs and sexual practices, both heterosexual and homosexual. On the basis of one line in particular

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy

customs officials seized 520 copies of the poem on March 25, 1957, being imported from the printer in London.

A subsequent obscenity trial was brought against Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who ran City Lights Bookstore, the poem's new domestic publisher. Nine literary experts testified on the poem's behalf. Supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, Ferlinghetti won the case when Judge Clayton Horn decided that the poem was of "redeeming social importance". The case was widely publicized (articles appeared in both Time and Life magazines) ensuring the wide readership of Howl, which remains one of the most popular poems by an American author.

The trial was published by Ferlinghetti's lead defense attorney Jake Ehrlich in a book called Howl of the Censor.

[edit] Other interpretations of Howl

[edit] Yowl

Writing in the magazine The New Republic in 1986, Christopher Buckley and Paul Slansky published a 1980s re-interpretation of "Howl", entitled "Yowl". The poem was published to commemorate the 30th anniversary of "Howl"'s publication, and was a parody, both of the Ginsberg original and of the Yuppie lifestyle which their version portrayed.

[edit] Howl.com

In 2000, at the height of the dot com boom, Thomas Scoville wrote a parody of Howl, called Howl.com, that was widely circulated via email and the web. It focused on internet technology, the new media business world and the emerging social structures that had accompanied the Internet's rising popularity, such as open source development and technology celebrities.

[edit] Penny Rimbaud's How?

In January 2003 Penny Rimbaud, founder of the anarchist band Crass, performed Ginsberg's "Howl" as part of the first Crass Agenda event at the Vortex Jazz Club in London's Stoke Newington. After the gig, Oliver Weindling, of the jazz-label Babel suggested releasing a recording of the performance. However, Rimbaud was unable to obtain permission from Ginsberg's estate to use the work, and instead rewrote it, updating it as a critique of post September 11, 2001, American culture. Of this work Rimbaud states, "In "How?" I have attempted to confront the innate madness of the 'New World Order': It is, I believe, a madness that even Ginsberg could not have foreseen in his wildest Nightmares". Whilst retaining much of the structure and spirit of the original work, "How?" includes some significant changes, including the substitution of 'Mammon' for 'Moloch', and the word 'wholly' instead of 'holy' in the poem's celebratory 'footnote'. A recording of Rimbaud's "How?", performed live and unrehearsed with a jazz-ensemble at the Vortex Club, was released in 2004.

[edit] References in pop culture

  • Quoted in the song "Machinehead" by Bush, on the album Sixteen Stone The first line serves as the bridge in this song, with Gavin Rossdale saying, "I've seen the best minds of my generation/they are starving, hysterical, and naked..." Gavin Rossdale has often cited Allen Ginsberg as an inspiration.
  • In episode #7F07 of cartoon series The Simpsons, "Bart vs. Thanksgiving", after a nasty incident during the family's Thanksgiving dinner, daughter Lisa writes a poem titled "Howl of the Unappreciated" which begins "I saw the best meals of my generation / destroyed by the madness of my brother. / My soul carved in slices / by spikey-haired demons."
  • In episode #302 of cartoon series Daria, while Daria is volunteering at the nursing home to read to senior citizens, one poem she reads is the first stanza, which results in the elderly people disliking her.
  • Quoted in the song "I Should be Allowed to Think" by They Might Be Giants (on the album John Henry), which opens with the line "I saw the best minds of my generation / destroyed by madness, starving hysterical," and later includes the line "I saw the worst bands of my generation applied by magic marker to dry wall" to the same beat.
  • In the movie Hackers, the protagonist, Dade Murphy, uses the second stanza as a quote that gives him credibility as a member of his high school's Advanced Placement English class.
  • The 2005 album Howl by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club was inspired by the poem[citation needed], mostly due to its ideas behind capitalism, consumerism, and materialism. The album has large overtones that reflect the musical periods of the past when money wasn't a motivation for art, but rather a bonus.
  • Quoted by Warren Zevon in a performance of Werewolves of London at Raul's Roadside Attraction in 1988 (and possible elsewhere). He opens the song with the line "I've seen the best minds of my generation, starving hysterical, naked, and walking through the streets of Portland in the rain."

[edit] References

  1. ^ Jones, Bonesy. Biographical Notes on Allen Ginsberg. Biography Project. Retrieved on 2005-10-20.
  • Charters, Ann (ed.). The Portable Beat Reader. Penguin Books. New York. 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN 0-140-15102-8 (pbk)
  • Ginsberg, Allen. Howl. 1986 critical edition edited by Barry Miles, Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by Author, with Contemporaneous Correspondence, Account of First Public Reading, Legal Skirmishes, Precursor Texts & Bibliography ISBN 0-06-092611-2 (pbk.)
  • Howl of the Censor - Jake Ehrlich, Editor. ISBN 1-11117-504-7

[edit] External links

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