Howl and Other Poems

In October 1955, there was a low-key event at the 6 Gallery on Fillmore Street in San Francisco, with the promise of a "remarkable collection of angels on one stage reading their poetry." Jack Kerouac went around with the collection bowl, whilst Allen Ginsberg whipped the audience into excitement by reading Part I of his work-in-progress, Howl. When Lawrence Ferlinghetti published the completed poem the following year as the fourth in his Pocket Poets series, it soon became a runaway bestseller (partly thanks to a high-profile obscenity trial) and one of the defining works of what came to be called Beat literature.

The poem itself is in three parts: Part I is a grand, Whitmanesque celebration of the lives of his poetic heroes and of his show more own struggle against the modern world, with copious amounts of (gay) sex, drugs, bumming around and political subversion thrown in; the incantation of Part II confronts the destructive forces of the child-eating Moloch directly, and in Part III he addresses the dedicatee of the poem, Carl Solomon, whom he met while they were both patients in the same psychiatric institution. Then there's a "Footnote to Howl", which is another incantation, a kind of Beat Sanctus.

As in Whitman, the first thing that hits you about the poem is its tremendous momentum and kinetic energy, but there's a lot more to it than just the pounding impact of the long lines: every line is dense with paradoxical, unexpected but never quite nonsensical language (negro streets, starry dynamos, unshaven rooms, pubic beards, ...), and there's a clear thread of insight into the hostile world under all that counter-culture posturing. It's tempting to think of it as nothing more than drug-induced ramblings from long ago, but that's not at all what's going on here: this is a serious attempt to push beyond the usual limits of poetry and make it relevant to people who are confronting the dehumanising effects of fifties society, and it still clearly has things to say to us today.

The Pocket Poets collection includes five more, shorter, incantatory poems in the same kind of Whitman long-line format, plus four rather more conventionally lyrical "earlier poems". Probably the most striking is "Sunflower Sutra", where he and Kerouac sit in the shade of a locomotive on a dockside and contemplate a dead sunflower. show less

I want to read this aloud, shout it from the rooftops; just as it should be. Ginsberg lays out a world in which nothing is alright, everything is falling apart, and we really haven't gotten much better since then. Howl is one of those works that is polarizing, you either love it or hate it. If you're unsure, read it again. I find it rare that anybody falls in the middle on Howl, because it is so visceral, it will either turn you into a beat, or turn your stomach. This is Ginsberg at the top of his game.

Also included in this book are America (which is one of my all-time favorites, especially as read aloud by Ginsberg) and A Supermarket in California (in which Ginsberg follows Walt Whitman through a modern American establishment). show more Ginsberg was a huge Whitman fan, imitating his style quite often.

Even if you don't end up liking any of the poems in this book, it's still worth reading. Ginsberg is one of those poets that helps you figure out things about yourself. show less

Many say that this is nothing more than an overrated, incomprehensible bunch of words about sex, alcohol and drugs. And they are right. But poetry is not about words, it's about the feeling they are capable of evoke. And Howl evoke a lot of feelings, at least for me. The eternal search of the meaning of life, the conflicted relation between the fear and mystification of death, the wonders and terrors of growing old.

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, [...]
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and

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were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality.”

If you want to change the world but don't know how, if you want to leave your mark but fear you can't, if you are afraid of waking up one day with your dreams and ideals long forgotten and trapped in the mundane routine of the world. Then, you can relate with this "overrated, incomprehensible bunch of words about sex, alcohol and drugs", and that's all that matters.

“We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside,
we're blessed by our own seed & golden hairy naked accomplishment- bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset.”

Leído para el reto 12 months-12 classic: Julio. show less

In the other reviews here I learned that you now need footnotes to read Ginsburg and that without them, the poems aren't very powerful since you don't know who the people are. How sad. When I read Howl, I didn't have any idea who the people were, but I knew that the best minds of my generation were also being destroyed by madness (and the Vietnam War, drugs, and later AIDS), and the poem resonated with my own experience. When I read the Sunflower Sutra, I wanted to be the sunflower in this barren wasteland of industrialization. It didn't seem to matter much who Jack Kerouac was. And when I read America, even today, I understand Ginsburg's anger but I still want to put my queer shoulder to the wheel as well. I hope that younger people show more for whom these poems no longer have meaning have poets of their own who are as inspiring. show less

An American love poem, prayer and lament, as powerfull now as when it was written. Our children are still sacrificed to Moloch. The machinery of night is still in place digital, darker and more dangerous. Neil Cassidy's ghost walks along counting the railroad ties in eternity, followed by Allen chanting and playing the harmonium. Jack stumbles along behind swigging on a bottle of cheap burgundy. Om Mani Padme Hum

"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 night."

If that doesn't set your reading hair on fire, then this book isn't for you. If so, read it and howl. I had the great fortune of reading it for the first time at City Lights Bookstore in SF.

The titular "howl" seems to be the only poem in this collection worth its salt. In it, Ginsberg paints a dazzling picture of New York City as it was. Drugs and marijuana are romanticized simply for being taboo without giving any reason or description, no actual experiences are described; Ginsberg just wanted to let us know how cool he was.

Name dropping is incessant throughout the whole collection to the point of annoyance. Again, Ginsberg was cool because he knew about other beatniks. He wrote this to make sure you knew.

I can't help but think that he is revered simply for traveling within the same circles as other more experimental writers. It certainly seems that way with all of the brown nosing to Kerouac.

Perhaps it's just a product show more of its time and a celebration of it. It seems like a tiptoe into something that may have been verboten a long time ago but has since lost its edge. show less