ALLEN GINSBERG'S HOWL

Mood.

From an essay published in the Houston Chronicle:

In California in 1954 -- the year the United States began to emerge from McCarthyism, the Korean War and legal segregation in the South -- Ginsberg began to shed his New York skin and cast himself as a wild West Coast poet. He wanted to write an explosive, apocalyptic poem befitting the Atomic Age. He would sing of himself and his country, with its "infernal bombs," "industries / of night" and "dreams / of war." Nothing would stop him, not his own "solitary craze" and certainly not the conformity of the times -- the Eisenhower era, the Cold War -- that seemed so antithetical to rebels with or without causes.

The first draft of Howl poured out of him. But for nearly a year afterward, Ginsberg revised, reorganized and reshaped it, section by section, word by word. When he was done, he knew he'd created the great American poem he'd set out to write. It was a personal coming-out, and to the hipsters of the 1950s it announced the liberation of an entire generation.

Howl was overtly antiwar and anti-capitalist. It mocked the FBI, condemned "scholars of war" and, at the dawn of the age of Hugh Hefner's suave playboy, celebrated the male sexual outlaw who made love in "empty lots & diner / backyards." It also challenged the conventional poetry of its day. It was boldly lyrical, intensely personal, ironic, ambiguous -- and very funny.

Click here for more.

I've been meaning to read Howl for some years. So I found it on the internet and read it; it's quite moving, even in 2004, perhaps especially in 2004. As the above linked essay says:

And in the age of the Patriot Act, weapons of mass destruction and U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, Howl is just as subversive, seductive and irreverent as ever.

I would add to that list that we are also in the age of materialism, media dictated reality and conformity, sexual confusion, interpersonal distrust, and mass anxiety about an array of issues including health care, work, terrorism, and the deteriorating environment. Given this context and my obsession with it, Howl pretty much blew me away.

Ginsberg's anger resonates loudly fifty years later--I am angry, too.

Go read it; it's great:

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 up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz...

Click here for the rest.

Thanks to Jazzpromo.com for the mood music.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$