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Howl and Other Poems

Allen Ginsberg

Hardcover | Pages: 56 pages

Rating: 4.13 | 89867 Users | 1558 Reviews

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Title	:	Howl and Other Poems
Author	:	Allen Ginsberg
Book Format	:	Hardcover
Book Edition	:	Anniversary Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 56 pages
Published	:	January 1st 2001 by City Lights (first published 1956)
Categories	:	Poetry. Classics. Fiction

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Easy to overestimate Allen Ginsberg. Easy to underestimate him too.

There are—if you leave out the political, religious and major historical figures—only about two dozen or so 20th century cultural icons, and Ginsberg is one of them—right up there with Einstein, Bogart, James Dean, and Marilyn Monroe. In the 60's, his face was ubiquitous, and the Ginsberg poster you picked out for yourself showed the kind of Ginsberg you aspired to be: Ginsberg in Uncle Sam hat, naked Ginsberg embracing naked Peter Orlovsky, psychedelic “Moses” Ginsberg holding up two stone tablets of the Law of “Who to be Kind to,” or Ginsberg protesting in the snow and wearing a big sign that says “Pot is Fun.” He was a hipster, a hedonist and a holy man, standing up for every form of free expression you could imagine, smiling from the walls of every coffeehouse, every bookstore, every other two room apartment that you knew. And it was hard to get past all those posters and just sit down and read the poetry.

But if you got past all that, it was still hard to separate the political from the poetic. His most famous poem "Howl" was the center of a notorious free speech fight, and many of the later poems, from “America” to “Wichita Vortex Sutra” and beyond, could not be fully understood without some knowledge of the protest movements of the time. However, if you did actually sit down and read some of his poetry--away from the context, away from the intoxicating counter-cultural atmosphere--you might begin to suspect that Ginsberg the Poetry Icon was superior to Irwin Allen Ginsberg from Newark, New Jersey, the guy who actually sat down and wrote what is often—frankly--mediocre verse.

Part of the problem stems from the length of Ginsberg's free verse line: it is indeed a very long line, habitually a few beats longer than a dactylic hexameter. (Even when he breaks a line into W.C.Williams “triads,” it still seems to be long.) Most poets who choose such a line as their vehicle (Kit Smart, Martin Tupper, Whitman, Fearing, Jeffers, Ginsberg) come off sounding biblical and orotund in long passages which lack lyricism and are often indistinguishable from mediocre prose. (C.K. Williams--perhaps because of his narrative drive--is the notable exception here). When you add to this the fact that Ginsberg delights in improvisation, and once embraced as his model the “no revisions necessary” Kerouac prose style, it is little wonder that many of his lines fail to sing.

But, as I said, it is easy to underestimate him too, particularly if we “just sit down and read” his poetry, divorcing it from the world of cultural influences and public performance that he loved. For example, if you sit down to read “Howl,” and it seems too ponderous, too much like the prophet Jeremiah wailing for all the pitiful beatnik dead, just stop for a minute and go download some early 50's jazz--Herbie Nichols maybe, or Lee Konitz or the MJQ—and play it quietly in the background while you stand up and recite the poem aloud to yourself—swaying a little, perhaps even snapping your fingers. You may begin to discover unexpected deposits of gentle humor, the occasional pocket of sick humor, and even a little slapstick from time to time, and also sense--knitting the four movements of this magnificent performance piece together—an overarching, self-conscious hipster irony which refuses for even one second to take Ginsberg the Prophet or Ginsberg the Poetry Icon completely seriously.

As you probably can tell, I love “Howl.” I think it is a masterwork of American poetry, unique and irreplaceable. This collections also contains four shorter pieces almost as good: ”A Supermarket in California” (an encounter with Walt Whitman, who is “eyeing the grocery boys”), ”America” (a love letter to the USA and a protest poem at the same time, ending with the memorable line, “America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel"), “Sunflower Sutra” (a conversation with Kerouac in Frisco about a gray dead sunflower which ends with a “sermon” proclaiming that “we are all beautiful golden sunflowers inside”), and “In the Baggage Room at Greyhound” (Irwin Allen Ginsberg's farewell to a job he obviously hated).

These five poems make up only 70% of this small 50 page collection, and the rest of the poems included here I don't think are worth reading at all. (But then I didn't experiment with jazz in the background. So I just might be underestimating Ginsberg once again.)

Specify Books As Howl and Other Poems

Original Title:	Howl and Other Poems
ISBN:	0872863107 (ISBN13: 9780872863101)
Edition Language:	English
Setting:	United States of America

Rating Epithetical Books Howl and Other Poems

Ratings: 4.13 From 89867 Users | 1558 Reviews

Assessment Epithetical Books Howl and Other Poems

"who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,with

Allen Ginsberg, a sad and lonely man, wrote this to impress Kerouac, another sad and lonely man. Over the years, a lot of sad and lonely people haven't gotten over the how much that first fucking line resonates with them. The whole best minds/generation/destroyed/madness line.Ten years ago, this was a 5-star poem. Ten years from now, it will be a 3-star poem. That's just called growing up, folks.

ah, ranty rants and beautiful language and a deep deep sense of the long poetic sentence. and madness writ large. and industrial dissolution. and that wasteland that is america.

Ginsberg spent years, hunched over his typewriter, working at poetry, sending out poems with little validation for his talent from the gatekeepers of poetry, poetry magazines and literary journals. Then around 1956 City Lights published this little, very little book Howl. A year later Ginsberg got lucky when a plain-clothes SF cop came into the City Lights book Store and bought a copy of Howl, arresting the store manager and subsequently the publisher for dealing in obscene material. Bingo! With

I have a problem with Allen Ginsberg. It goes beyond how overrated I think he is, how mediocre his poetry seems to me. The titular poem of this volume in particular.It goes beyond his adolescent fixation on the prurient and the vulgar.See, I know for a fact that he was a pedophile. I studied under one of his friends, someone who admitted that Ginsberg was sexually attracted to little boys -- to the extent that Ginsberg's friends all refused to let the poet be alone (or, in some cases, even

I had goosebumps while reading Howl. It's like nothing I have ever read!