Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Writings, one of the 20th Century’s most influential books of poetry completes 50 years in print this year. And while Ginsberg is not around to perform it any more, the poem’s technique and message continues to find new followers and continuous relevance.
Published by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights press in 1956, the poem shot to fame after an article on the
To defend the book, literary experts testified on its merits, both as a literary text and as a social document. In addition to that, the book was strongly supported by the American Civil Liberties Union. Ferlinghetti won the case, and along with Ginsberg, escaped possible imprisonment after the presiding judge ruled in favour of the poem for its “redeeming social importance.” And thus, a legend was born.
The literary world’s introduction to Ginsberg’s first volume of poetry, Howl, especially the title poem, was a revelation. On October 6 1955, Ginsberg organised a group reading at the Six Gallery in
“Anyway I followed the whole gang of howling poets to the reading at Gallery Six (Six Gallery) that night, which was, among other important things, the night of the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Everyone was there. It was a mad night. And I was the one who got things jumping by going around collecting dimes and quarters from the rather stiff audience standing around in the gallery and coming back with three huge gallon jugs of California Burgundy and getting them all piffed so that by eleven o'clock when Alvah Goldbrook (Ginsberg) was reading his, wailing poem "Wail" (Howl) drunk with arms outspread everybody was yelling "Go! Go! Go!" (like a jam session) and old Rheinhold Cacoethes (Kenneth Rexroth) the father of the Frisco poetry scene was wiping tears in gladness.”[1]
Howl began on a note of extremes. The words did not wait to jump up and take the reader deep in to the experiences of the radical Beat generation in the heart of conservative America in the shadow of Senator McCarthy’s witch-hunt of communists, and the ever-present threat of war. Yet, it was as much a personal document as it was a call for social change, “…the first blow for freedom” as Ginsberg himself called it.
“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,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow- eyed and high sat
smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold- water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,”[2]
The rolling, muscular cadences of the long line does not let go, nor does it offer any respite. However, it does vary its pace, allow for a draw of breath, before blowing again, like a jazz saxophonist. The world described by the poem is a blistering vision of intense emotions and turmoil, of movement and of violence. The full prophetic message of the poem follows a process of condensing chaos into a closed space and then making it explode upon the senses and thus altering perception.
This contraction and jumps in space and time are what Ginsberg refers to as “ellipsis”- a way of presenting images as they flash through the mind. Thus you have the densely packed images in vivid cinematic detail that remove the voice of the author from the lines and help create a democratic area of reception where the images get translated according to the perception of the reader,
“…Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of
Thus all action is condensed into one white- hot moment producing and reproducing the same tropes through the repetition of words and lines and themes. This in turn, produces its own unique meanings.
The treatment of homoeroticism in the poem is fairly graphic. To Ginsberg, this was only a matter of taking Walt Whitman’s idea of democratic love to its logical conclusion. Ginsberg was himself homosexual and in Howl he describes the agony and ecstasy of the experience,
“who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may.”[4]
Even in all this self- referential action, strong allusions are constantly made to the terror and tyranny of the totalitarian American dream and its threat to destabilise all that he considers is the natural, the unmediated. Even the unabashed sexuality of many of the experiences are tempered with reminders of the wider social prudery,
“…who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads on the craftsman’s loom…”[5]
The poem goes into the prophetic mode only towards the end when Ginsberg screams of the loss of those madmen angels to the “sphinx of cement and aluminium” which “bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination…” The mad, loveless “Moloch” of repression; whose mind is “pure machinery”, blood of “running money… whose fingers are ten armies”; the spectre is the embodiment of all that is enslaving and castrating. Moloch is the mythical equivalent of Blake’s “Nobodaddy”, a fearful, jealous god, devouring the imagination- and by extension, the organic and political self- of man with his “granite cocks” and “monstrous bombs”. Moloch is Ginsberg’s metaphor of industrial
“…saw it all, the wild eyes!
The holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
Carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!”[6]
Howl continues to be- along with Jack Kerouac’s On The Road- hugely popular with over a million copies in print. The relevance of Ginsberg’s vision has not faded with time, nor has his influence. Whether its Bob Dylan’s lyrics or the rap of New Journalism, Howl’s long line and social comment find echoes even today. Since his death in 1997, history has seen
-Bibek Bhattacharya
13.09.2006
[1] Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums,
[2]Allen Ginsberg, Howl and other Poems.
[3]ibid. pp. 10.
[4]ibid. pp. 13.
[5] ibid. pp 24.
[6]Allen Ginsberg, Howl and other Poems.
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