As Norman Podhoretz wrote in "The Know-Nothing Bohemians," his 1958 attack on the Beats in Partisan Review, "On the Road and The Subterraneans are so patently autobiographical in content that they become almost impossible to discuss as novels." Podheretz grants the Beats great, albeit negative, influence when he claims that "juvenile crime can be explained partly in terms of the same resentment against normal feeling and the attempt to cope with the world that lies behind Kerouac and Ginsberg." These attacks, along with the pop-culture image of the beatnik—as embodied by the iconic, goatee-wearing slacker Maynard G. Krebs—have worked to keep the Beats on the margins of any serious discussion about literary greatness.
But there is a clear work ethic that reverberates in their lives and in their writing, and in the eyes of many readers and critics, the Beats fostered a sustained, authentic, and compelling attack on post–World War II American culture. In their lives, they rejected the stultifying materialism and conformism of the cold war era by experimenting with drugs and public homosexuality. In their prose and poetry, they rejected the highly wrought and controlled aesthetic of modernist stalwarts such as T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. Indeed, to reject—as the Beats did—the modernist aesthetic, at the time of its coronation as the very definition of literature, would inevitably lead to their marginalization.
The academic and cultural politics that have kept these writers and their texts largely outside of the academic canon are complex, and it's an overstatement, of course, to call the Beats utterly noncanonical. They are read and anthologized, though not as widely as the Modernists. Beyond the shady groves of academe, the Beats have thrived: Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs are widely read among younger readers, many outside of the university. It's important to note as well that three urtexts of the Beat Generation—Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems (1956), Kerouac's On the Road (1957), and Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1962)—have never gone out of print since their respective publications. These texts have remained popular because they speak to perennial concerns: personal freedom, resistance to authority, the search for ecstasy (physical, aesthetic, and religious), and the nature of America.
The title poem of Howl and Other Poems is key, and its opening line famously defines the Beat Generation: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked." The poem captured the imagination of writers and artists who were alienated from the dominant social forms of Dwight Eisenhower's America. The poem's rejection of modernist aesthetics, its return to Whitmanesque long lines and method of catalog, assured that it would be read primarily outside the realm of the great books, as those books were then understood. The modernist writers and formalist canon-makers had little use for Ginsberg and the Beat Generation. The Beats' prose and verse, according to Podhoretz, is founded on the notion that "incoherence is superior to precision; that ignorance is superior to knowledge; that the exercise of mind and discrimination is a form of death."
But Podhoretz and the other defenders of Modernism were wrong about the Beats. Take for instance the quintessential "Howl." The four-part structure—yes, it has one!—of Ginsberg's poem (including "Footnote to 'Howl' ") is essential to its interpretation. First comes a catalog of the destruction wrought upon these best minds, and their resistance to the dominant American culture. Second, the poet sings a screed against "Moloch," American culture embodied as the avatar of a pagan god to whom children were once sacrificed. The third part of the poem asserts the solidarity of the poet with the mad (in particular, the eccentric Carl Solomon, to whom the poem was initially dedicated) and gestures towards a hopeful reconciliation. Hope resonates, too, throughout "Footnote," a litany that begins with the word holy repeated 15 times and that asserts the sacred nature of all of life, redeeming madness with divinity. The poetic voice in the poem echoes Old Testament prophets, and aspects of its structure evoke various Hebrew prayers. This prophetic voice—coupled with a structure decidedly at odds with modernist control and precision—forms a powerful indictment of the insularity of Cold War American culture. The future evolution of Beat philosophy toward Eastern, especially Buddhist, mysticism begins in this prophetic voice and structure.
But beyond its status as great literature, Howl and Other Poems is a great book in another sense. It is not just a text worthy of academic study and reading for pleasure; the book itself, the physical manifestation of the text, is culturally influential and meaningful. Howl and Other Poems is a great book as well as a great text. But this distinction between "book" and "text" needs clarification.
When people talk about great books, they usually mean great texts. A poem or play or novel that survives and is read and reread over generations, acing the proverbial test of time, is our culture's standard for understanding literary greatness. Except for first editions or copies signed or filled with marginalia by a writer, the particular physical artifacts—the manifestations of texts as books—don't matter as much the abstract "text," something that can be, and probably has been, reproduced in many books.
Stress on the interpretation of "the text" makes sense when one considers that, over decades or centuries, various canonical poems and novels have been issued in many editions. Professional readers, professors and literary critics, would read and re-read the same text in many different editions, indistinguishable from one another with the exception of a different foreword or preface, a few footnotes perhaps. Independent of these contributions, the paper-ink-cardboard-and-glue object seems ephemeral, a mere accident of commerce or culture.
The dismissal of the book-as-object in favor of the abstracted text also corresponds to Platonic tendencies in Western culture, the dualism that sees the essential reality of something existing in a realm beyond the shadows cast on the walls of the cave. Texts were this Platonic reality, books the shadows, mere objects in the realm of ideas, simple artifacts of commercial culture. But all acts of reading take place in a context of commerce and culture. The conflation of book and text, understandable as it is, blinds us to the way that material aspects of books operate in the social realm of readers.
Of course no one reads "texts" in some disembodied or immaterial sense: we read books, material manifestations of texts. Non-professional readers don't go looking for a good text to curl up with at night or to take on their commute to work. They don't go to textstores and have monthly text clubs. Readers want good books in the textual sense, of course, but the materiality of books matters. Books will always mean something in the world of reading and readers.
Some books are great beyond their text, beyond what the author says or how the author says it. The greatness of some books resides at least in part in the way that their materiality speaks to readers and to other writers, the cultural significance that their material form communicates. Take, for instance, how we value texts like the Bible, which we produce bound in durable hardcover form, occasionally with expensive embossing, gold leaf, or other embellishments.
We might, however, call this symbolic materialism into question, especially in the case of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems. This book—as a book, as a material object—communicates vital cultural meaning. The text mattered, obviously: It spoke to the fact that there was a counterculture in America, there were other people scattered around who had rejected American materialism and conformism, who resisted the culture of death that praised the atomic bomb as an American technological marvel. And the text taught its readers that the poets of Greenwich Village had their counterparts in North Beach and Denver and New Orleans and Chicago.
And that content first reached a public in just such a community: The San Francisco poetry renaissance was the fertile soil where the poem had its roots in performance, a reconnection to the bardic tradition of spoken poetry. Fellow poets and other audience members who were present at the first public reading of "Howl," at San Francisco's Six Gallery in 1955, report a palpable sense of change, of poetic possibility in its very performance. Michael McClure, another poet who read that night, describes the scene and its meaning in his book Scratching the Beat Surface (1982):
Allen began in a small and intensely lucid voice. At some point Jack Kerouac began shouting "GO" in cadence as Allen read it.
In all of our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before—we had gone beyond a point of no return—and we were ready for it, for a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the gray, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellective [sic] void—to the land without poetry—to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision.
Ginsberg read on to the end of the poem, which left us standing in wonder, or cheering and wondering, but knowing at the deepest level that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America and its supporting armies and navies and academies and institutions and ownership systems and power-support bases.
One aspect of the Beat Generation that set them apart from the modernists was an emphasis on orality, on the poem as a performance rather than on the poem-for-the-page: the text living on its own, independent of the book. But that original audience was small and "Howl" would require a different kind of publisher to bring this kind of poetic vitality to a wider audience. Lawrence Ferlinghetti published Ginsberg's book in short order, and it immediately found an audience with the United States Custom Office and the San Francisco Police Department. Howl and Other Poems was first seized by customs (en route from the printer in Great Britain) and then by the local authorities due to its obscene content. The State of California stepped in, but Judge Clayton J. Horn found the book not to be obscene, and along with the Massachusetts obscenity trial for Burroughs's Naked Lunch and the Chicago trial for Big Table (a journal that published Kerouac and Burroughs), Howl and Other Poems was one of a handful of Beat books that led to the end of literary censorship in the United States. (This form of historical greatness should be kept in mind as well.)
Once the book was widely available, it spread like a virus. Many writers who have written about the Beat Generation, especially those who were young when Kerouac and Ginsberg first broke on the scene, often describe as a revelation the first moment that they held Howl and Other Poems in their hands. In Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969), Diane DiPrima writes:
The priestly ex-book-thief arrived and thrust a small black and white book into my hand, saying, "I think this might interest you." I took it and flipped it open idly, still intent on dishing out beef stew, and found myself in the middle of "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg. Put down the ladle and turned to the beginning and was caught up immediately in that sad, powerful opening: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness. . . .
I was too turned on to concern myself with the stew. I handed it over to Beatrice and, without even thanking Bradley, walked out the front door with his new book. Walked the few blocks to the pier on Sixtieth Street and sat down by the Hudson River to read and to come to terms with what was happening. The phrase "breaking ground" kept coming into my head. I knew that this Allen Ginsberg, whoever he was, had broken ground for all of us—all few hundreds of us—simply by getting this published. I had no idea yet what that meant, how far it would take us. . .
For I sensed that Allen was only, could only be, the vanguard of a much larger thing. All the people who, like me, had hidden and skulked, writing down what they knew for a small handful of friends—and even those friends claiming it "couldn't be published"—waiting with only a slight bitterness for the thing to end, for man's era to draw to a close in a blaze of radiation–all these would now step forward and say their piece. Not many would hear them, but they would, finally, hear each other. I was about to meet my brothers and sisters.
We had come of age. I was frightened and a little sad. . . . But for the moment regret for what we might be losing was buried under a sweeping sense of exhilaration, of glee; someone was speaking for all of us, and the poem was good. I was high and delighted. I made my way back to the house and to supper, and we read "Howl" together, I read it aloud to everyone. A new era had begun.
Writers like McClure and DiPrima show the ways in which, as a text in the traditional sense, Howl and Other Poems is a great book in the canonical sense. It opened doors for other artists to follow, it captured its era unmistakably, it broke new aesthetic ground, it revisited lost forefathers like Whitman. It enabled an entire generation of aesthetic and ideological outsiders to conceive of themselves as a generation—underground, perhaps, but not alone.
With all the passion and drama surrounding Howl and Other Poems, it's interesting to consider that the bulk of the cultural weight that it carries comes not from its text but instead from its material form. First, it was a paperback, published by City Lights Press, based in Ferlinghetti's North Beach bookstore of the same name. City Lights was the first American bookstore that sold only paperback books, and this matters.
"Paperback"—especially in the context of 1950s literary culture—is not just a neutral term for the material manifestation of a text. The paperback, like Howl and Other Poems, was both the product of and the producer of a revolution in literary culture.
While the paperback revolution was not of the same magnitude as Gutenberg's, there are real parallels. Advances in the technologies of printing, papermaking, and binding, as well as methods of distribution, made books radically cheaper and more widely available in both cases. Paperbacks are now ubiquitous and unremarkable, but when Howl and Other Poems was published, paperbacks as an economically viable literary form had existed for less than two decades. Paper-bound books have a history extending back to the late middle ages, but until Robert de Graff founded Pocket Books in 1939, paperbacks could not hold up to their hardcover competitors in the American marketplace. (Penguin preceded Pocket Books in the United Kingdom by a few years). Copyright and distribution problems killed the dime novels of the 19th century, and until de Graff managed to create an effective distribution system—by using newsstand magazine distributors to sell his 25-cent books far and wide—most books sold in America were expensive hardcovers. Bookstores were few and far between, more like high-end boutiques than the café-style franchises so common now. Even how bookstores arranged and displayed books was different before the advent of the paperback: Books were displayed spine-out, and sorted by publisher rather than by genre. Bookstores were as staid as the canon.
Paperbacks changed all that, making books available in every train station, five-and-dime, and drugstore in the nation. Traditional bookstores initially resisted stocking paperbacks at all, not seeing the sense in underselling their own more expensive stock (just as most bookstores today stock new or used books, but not both). At first, bookstores would add a "paperback corner" or other small selection of the new kind of book, but soon economic demand overwhelmed snobbery and paperbacks came to dominate the literary marketplace.
Yet due to material aspects of their distribution—their newsstand roots—paperbacks still carry more than a hint of literary illegitimacy. The 25-cent paperback killed off the lurid pulp magazines that had thrived from the 1920s through World War II, with their steamy covers and genre fiction. The term paperback original soon took over the pulps' spot as the scorned and disreputable literary stepchild, above only graphic fiction (née comic books) in the hierarchy of intellectual prestige. Mainstream authors were divided over paperbacks: glad for the extra income that paperback reprint contracts provided, but acutely aware that cheap editions with lurid covers could damage their reputations as serious writers. Politically engaged fiction writers such as James T. Farrell, Erskine Caldwell, and Nelson Algren especially suffered from being sold in packages that made their work seem like urban exposé, backwoods pornography, or juvenile delinquent novels.
Writing about the obscenity trial of Howl and Other Poems, the journalist David Perlman notes the significance of the fact that City Lights was a paperback-only bookstore:
Ferlinghetti's bookshop sells no hardcovers, but it does stock all the quarterlies, all the soft-cover prestige lines of the major publishers, a lot of foreign imprints and periodicals, and just about every other sort of pocket book except the kind whose bosomy covers leer from the racks of drugstores and bus terminals.
Most American readers—inside and outside of the system that created canons—also associated paperbacks with bosomy leering, not high literature. "Paperback" was not just a neutral description of the physical form a text happened to take but rather a cultural symbol associated with the lowbrow rather than the high, with wire racks in a grubby bus station instead of a fireplace mantle in a Park Avenue brownstone.
As with other commodities, the differences in the physical form of books communicate different social statuses. As hardcover sales fell and paperbacks became more widely read, the material form morphed again. Paperbacks diverged into the reputable "trade paperback," with its higher status represented in its material form: almost the size of a hardcover, with sturdier binding, heavier paper, and higher production values. The old disreputable paperback became the "mass market" paperback: smaller, cheaper paper, with lower production values, likely to sport a more lurid cover, and hence to be of lesser status. But this status is arbitrary and about the book, not the text, for the exact same text can be printed in either book format: The material form points readers in one interpretive direction or another.
But it is important to remember that in 1956 when Howl and Other Poems appeared, the Paperback Revolution had yet to occur. For City Lights to sell and publish nothing but paperbacks was a culturally meaningful act, a way of creating a counter-canon that meshed perfectly with the Beats' antimaterialist and countermodernist aesthetic.
Yet an aspect of irony attends this method of production. To publish serious poetry in paperback original form asserts that greatness is not manifest in hard covers and dust jackets and higher prices. Ferlinghetti's Pocket Poets series suggests that greatness resides in the text itself. The books in the Pocket Poets series were slim, undersized volumes, about 6 by 5 inches, usually with simple black-and-white cover design and typography. Symbolically, the material form of the Pocket Poets suggests that the book holds something written for everyone, regardless of class or educational status. The Pocket Poets were designed to fit in the palm of the reader's hand and in the back pocket of a pair of blue jeans.
These physical signs matter: They speak to the nature of poetry and its audience. In the 21st century, blue jeans are worn by just about anyone, but in 1956, they were still associated with working-class jobs and status. In postwar America, poetry was anything but working-class. Poetry came in staid hardcovers with print runs in the low hundreds, or, worse, bricklike anthologies to be lugged around campus by undergraduates being introduced to William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity.
So, a book of poems designed to fit in one's hand, to nestle comfortably in one's back pocket, made the book itself a symbolic rejection of contemporary poetic sensibilities. (Today, this division between popular and ivory tower poetics exists in the fault line between the performance and slam poets on one hand, and the getters of Guggenheims on the other.) The production of Pocket Poets as a series with similar (though not identical) design acted as a material representation of a counter-canon, poems by poets who wouldn't be taught in the university.
Of course what sort of books one reads is also an indicator of social status. This is another realm in which Howl and Other Poems is a great book—it betokens its readers' status as rebels and nonconformists. This status inheres in the physical design of the book beyond its being a paperback original. The size and shape of the book itself, along with the content, speaks to issues of class and conformity. Even today, the power of this counter-canon is made evident by the simple fact that the design for the Pocket Poets edition of Howl and Other Poems hasn't changed in the 62 years since its publication.
So what are we to make of the fact that, in 1986, Allen Ginsberg and Barry Miles produced an Annotated Facsimile edition of "Howl," clearly and admittedly modeled on the Facsimile edition of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, issued by Valerie Eliot in 1971. This physical resemblance (with the light-police-blue- cover of Howl being, of course, more colorful than the muted browns of The Waste Land) asserts a canonical continuity, a connection between the generation-defining poems of the Modernists and the Beats. Where the original Howl and Other Poems asserted its independence from the modernist giant, the facsimile edition insists on connections between the two poems. The content of "Howl" certainly rejected modernist poetic sensibilities as exemplified by Eliot and as promoted by his critical progeny, but these two oversized books, these two editions of generation-defining poems, fit together quite nicely on the bookshelf—both the literal shelf in my office and the metaphorical shelf of canonical American poetry of the twentieth century.
This variant package also changes the experience of reading the poem in ways that demonstrate the importance of the physical form a text takes. The small and almost-square format of Ferlinghetti's edition makes the many long lines in the poem read like short paragraphs with idiosyncratic indentation. Laid out across a wider page, the lines just go on till their end, and the few that are too long even for this wider page shift over in a visually jarring way. The physicality of the text matters: The book that a text appears in changes the experience of reading the text.
Because, finally, we don't read texts. We read books. Beyond the always arguable greatness of any particular text, some books are great for historical and material reasons. Howl and Other Poems—and also On the Road and Naked Lunch—helped define the Beat Generation and helped end government censorship of literature: reasons enough to stand as a great book in the historical sense. But its particular materiality, its status as a paperback, its design features, and its ubiquity in certain cultural and social venues, also contribute to the ways in which Howl and Other Poems should be understood as great.
"Howl", also known as "Howl for Carl Solomon", is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1954–1955 and published in his 1956 collection Howl and Other Poems. The poem is dedicated to Carl Solomon.
Ginsberg began work on "Howl" in 1954. In the Paul Blackburn Tape Archive at the University of California, San Diego, Ginsberg can be heard reading early drafts of his poem to his fellow writing associates. "Howl" is considered to be one of the great works of American literature.[1][2] It came to be associated with the group of writers known as the Beat Generation.[1]
It is not true that "Howl" was written as a performance piece and later published by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books. This myth was perpetuated by Ferlinghetti as part of the defense's case during the poem's obscenity trial.[3] Upon the poem's release, Ferlinghetti and the bookstore's manager, Shigeyoshi Murao, were charged with disseminating obscene literature, and both were arrested. On October 3, 1957, Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene.[4]
Contents
1 Writing
2 Performance and publication
3 Overview and structure
3.1 Part I
3.2 Part II
3.3 Part III
3.4 Footnote
3.5 Rhythm
4 1957 obscenity trial
5 1969 broadcast controversy in Finland
6 Biographical references and allusions
6.1 Part I
6.2 Part II
6.3 Part III
6.4 Footnote to "Howl"
7 Critical reception
7.1 1997 broadcasting controversy
7.2 2007 broadcasting fears
8 Other uses
9 References
10 Further reading
11 External links
Writing
According to Ginsberg's bibliographer and archivist Bill Morgan, it was a terrifying peyote vision that was the principal inspiration for Howl. This occurred on the evening of October 17, 1954, in the Nob Hill apartment of Shiela Williams, then Ginsberg's girlfriend, with whom he was living. Ginsberg had the terrifying experience of seeing the façade of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in the San Francisco fog as the monstrous face of a child-eating demon. As was his wont, Ginsberg took notes on his vision, and these became the basis for Part II of the poem.[5]
In late 1954 and 1955, in an apartment he had rented at 1010 Montgomery Street in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, Ginsberg worked on the poem, originally referring to it by the working title "Strophes."[6] Some drafts were purportedly written at a coffeehouse known today as the Caffe Mediterraneum in Berkeley, California; Ginsberg had moved into a small cottage in Berkeley a few blocks from the campus of the University of California on September 1, 1955.[7] Many factors went into the creation of the poem. A short time before the composition of "Howl", Ginsberg's therapist, Dr. Philip Hicks, encouraged him to realize his desire to quit his market-research job and pursue poetry full-time and to accept his own homosexuality.[8][9][10] He experimented with a syntactic subversion of meaning called parataxis in the poem "Dream Record: June 8, 1955" about the death of Joan Vollmer, a technique that would become central in "Howl".[8][11]
Ginsberg showed this poem to Kenneth Rexroth, who criticized it as too stilted and academic; Rexroth encouraged Ginsberg to free his voice and write from his heart.[12][13] Ginsberg took this advice and attempted to write a poem with no restrictions. He was under the immense influence of William Carlos Williams and Jack Kerouac and attempted to speak with his own voice spontaneously.[13][14] Ginsberg began the poem in the stepped triadic form he took from Williams but, in the middle of typing the poem, his style altered such that his own unique form (a long line based on breath organized by a fixed base) began to emerge.[8][13]
Ginsberg would experiment with this breath-length form in many later poems. The first draft contained what would later become Part I and Part III. It is noted for relating stories and experiences of Ginsberg's friends and contemporaries, its tumbling, hallucinatory style, and the frank address of sexuality, specifically homosexuality, which subsequently provoked an obscenity trial. Although Ginsberg referred to many of his friends and acquaintances (including Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Peter Orlovsky, Lucien Carr, and Herbert Huncke), the primary emotional drive was his sympathy for Carl Solomon, to whom it was dedicated; he met Solomon in a mental institution and became friends with him.
Ginsberg later stated this sympathy for Solomon was connected to bottled-up guilt and sympathy for his mother's schizophrenia (she had been lobotomized), an issue he was not yet ready to address directly. In 2008, Peter Orlovsky told the co-directors of the 2010 film Howl that a short moonlit walk—during which Orlovsky sang a rendition of the Hank Williams song "Howlin’ At the Moon"—may have been the encouragement for the title of Ginsberg's poem. "I never asked him, and he never offered," Orlovsky told them, "but there were things he would pick up on and use in his verse form some way or another. Poets do it all the time." The Dedication by Ginsberg states he took the title from Kerouac.
Performance and publication
The poem was first performed at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7, 1955.[15] The reading was conceived by Wally Hedrick—a painter and co-founder of the Six—who approached Ginsberg in mid-1955 and asked him to organize a poetry reading at the Six Gallery. "At first, Ginsberg refused. But once he'd written a rough draft of Howl, he changed his 'fucing mind', as he put it." Further evidence that this was not performance art but poetry—a written piece that Ginsberg would not and has not ever described as anything but a poem not a performance piece.[16]
Ginsberg was ultimately responsible for inviting the readers (Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure and Kenneth Rexroth) and writing the invitation. "Howl" was the second to the last reading (before "A Berry Feast" by Snyder) and was considered by most in attendance the highlight of the reading. Many considered it the beginning of a new movement, and the reputation of Ginsberg and those associated with the Six Gallery reading spread throughout San Francisco.[16] In response to Ginsberg's reading, McClure wrote: "Ginsberg read on to the end of the poem, which left us standing in wonder, or cheering and wondering, but knowing at the deepest level that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America...."[17]
Jack Kerouac gave a first-hand account of the Six Gallery performance (in which Ginsberg is renamed 'Alvah Goldbrook' and the poem becomes 'Wail') in Chapter 2 of his 1958 novel, The Dharma Bums:
Anyway I followed the whole gang of howling poets to the reading at Gallery Six 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 was reading his poem 'Wail' drunk with arms outspread everybody was yelling 'Go! Go! Go!' (like a jam session) and old Rheinhold Cacoethes the father of the Frisco poetry scene was wiping his tears in gladness.[18]
Soon afterwards, it was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who ran City Lights Bookstore and the City Lights Press. Ginsberg completed Part II and the "Footnote" after Ferlinghetti had promised to publish the poem. "Howl" was too short to make an entire book, so Ferlinghetti requested some other poems. Thus the final collection contained several other poems written at that time; with these poems, Ginsberg continued the experimentation with long lines and a fixed base he'd discovered with the composition of "Howl" and these poems have likewise become some of Ginsberg's most famous: "America", "Sunflower Sutra", "A Supermarket in California", etc.
The earliest extant recording of "Howl" was thought to date from March 18, 1956. (The Blackburn Collection recordings show otherwise.) Ginsberg and Snyder, after hitch-hiking from San Francisco, read from their poems in the Anna Mann dormitory at Reed College, Snyder's alma mater. This recording, discovered in mid-2007 on a reel-to-reel tape in the Reed College archives, contains only Part I of "Howl". After beginning to read Part II, Ginsberg said to the audience, "I don't really feel like reading anymore. I just sorta haven't got any kind of steam."[19]
Overview and structure
The poem consists of 112 paragraph-like lines,[20] which are organized into three parts, with an additional footnote.
Part I
Called by Ginsberg "a lament for the Lamb in America with instances of remarkable lamb-like youths", Part I is perhaps 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 1950s. Ginsberg refers to these people, who were underrepresented outcasts in what the poet believed to be an oppressively conformist and materialistic era, as "the best minds of my generation". He describes their experiences in graphic detail, openly discussing drug use and homosexual activity at multiple points.
Most lines in this section contain the fixed base "who". In "Notes Written on Finally Recording Howl," Ginsberg writes, "I depended on the word 'who' to keep the beat, a base to keep measure, return to and take off from again onto another streak of invention".[21]
Part II
Ginsberg says that Part II, in relation to Part I, "names the monster of mental consciousness that preys on the Lamb". Part II is 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, the Biblical idol in Leviticus to whom the Canaanites sacrificed children.[21]
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, demonic figure in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, a film that Ginsberg credits with influencing "Howl, Part II" in his annotations for the poem (see especially Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions). Most lines in this section contain the fixed base "Moloch". Ginsberg says of Part II, "Here the long line is used as a stanza form broken into exclamatory units punctuated by a base repetition, Moloch."[21]
Part III
Part III, in relation to Parts I, II and IV, is "a litany of affirmation of the Lamb in its glory", according to Ginsberg. It is directly addressed to Carl Solomon, whom Ginsberg met during a brief stay at a psychiatric hospital in 1949; called "Rockland" in the poem, it was actually Columbia Presbyterian Psychological Institute. 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. Of the structure, Ginsberg says Part III is "pyramidal, with a graduated longer response to the fixed base".[21]
Footnote
The closing section of the poem is the "Footnote", characterized by its repetitive "Holy!" mantra, an ecstatic assertion that everything is holy. Ginsberg says, "I remembered the archetypal rhythm of Holy Holy Holy weeping in a bus on Kearny Street, and wrote most of it down in notebook there.... I set it as 'Footnote to Howl' because it was an extra variation of the form of Part II."[21]
Rhythm
The frequently quoted and often parodied[22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][excessive citations] 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 night,
Ginsberg's own commentary discusses the work as an experiment with the "long line". For example, Part I is structured as a single run-on sentence with a repetitive refrain dividing it up into breaths. Ginsberg said, "Ideally each line of 'Howl' is a single breath unit. My breath is long—that's the measure, one physical-mental inspiration of thought contained in the elastic of a breath."[21]
On another occasion, he explained: "the line length ... you'll notice that they're all built on bop—you might think of them as a bop refrain—chorus after chorus after chorus—the ideal being, say, Lester Young in Kansas City in 1938, blowing 72 choruses of 'The Man I Love' until everyone in the hall was out of his head..."[19]
1957 obscenity trial
"Howl" contains many references to illicit drugs and sexual practices, both heterosexual and homosexual. Claiming that the book was obscene, customs officials seized 520 copies of the poem on 25 March 1957, being imported from England.[30]
On June 3 Shig Murao, the bookstore manager, was arrested and jailed for selling Howl and Other Poems to an undercover San Francisco police officer. City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti was subsequently arrested for publishing the book. At the obscenity trial, nine literary experts testified on the poem's behalf; Ferlinghetti, a published poet himself, is credited (by David Skover and Ronald K. L. Collins) with breathing "publishing life" into Ginsberg's poetic career.[31] Supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, Ferlinghetti won the case when California State Superior Court Judge Clayton Horn decided that the poem was of "redeeming social importance".[32][33]
The case was widely publicized. (Articles appeared in both Time and Life magazines.) An account of the trial was published by Ferlinghetti's lead defense attorney Jake Ehrlich in a book called Howl of the Censor. The 2010 film Howl depicts the events of the trial. James Franco stars as the young Allen Ginsberg and Andrew Rogers portrays Ferlinghetti.[34]
1969 broadcast controversy in Finland
The administrative board of Yleisradio is getting ready to discuss the broadcast of “Howl” in December 1969.
Part one of "Howl" was broadcast in Finland on September 30, 1969, on Yleisradio's (Finland's national public-broadcasting company) "parallel programme" at 10:30 p.m. The poem was read by three actors with jazz music specially composed for this radio broadcast by Henrik Otto Donner. The poem was preceded by an eight-minute introduction. The Finnish translation was made by Anselm Hollo.[35] The translation was published already in 1961 in Parnasso literary magazine, and caused no turmoil then.
A Liberal-Party member of the Finnish Parliament, Arne Berner, heard the broadcast, and started an interpellation, addressed to the Minister of Transport and Public Works. It was signed by him and 82 other members of the 200 members of parliament.[36] It is unclear how many of the other signatories actually had heard the broadcast. The interpellation text only contained a short extract of six lines (considered to be offensive, and representative of the poem) of over seventy from the poem, and the debate was mainly based upon them.[37]
Also, a report of an offence was filed to the criminal investigation department of Helsinki police district because the obscenity of the poem allegedly offended modesty and delicacy. The report was filed by Suomen kotien radio- ja televisioliitto (The radio and television association of Finnish homes), a Christian and patriotic organization, and it was only based on the six-line fragment. In connection with that, Yleisradio was accused of copyright violation.[38] No charges followed.
At that time, homosexual acts were still illegal in Finland.
Finally, the Ministry of Transport and Public Works considered in December 1969 that the broadcast of "Howl" contravened the licence of operation of Yleisradio: it was neither educational nor useful. Yleisradio received a reprimand, and was instructed to be more careful when monitoring that no more such programs should be broadcast.[39]
Biographical references and allusions
Part I
Line Reference
"who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated." This is a direct reference told to Ginsberg by Kerouac about poet Philip Lamantia's "celestial adventure" after reading the Quran.[40]
"Who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake—light tragedies among the scholars of war" and "who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy" 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.[41][42]
"Who were expelled from the academy for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull" Part of the reason Ginsberg was suspended in his sophomore year[43] 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, by writing "Fuk the Jews", and drawing a swastika. He also wrote a phrase on the window implying that the president of the university had no testicles.[44][45]
"who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall" Lucien Carr burned his insanity record, along with $20, at his mother's insistence.[46]
"... poles of Canada and Paterson..." Kerouac was French-Canadian from Lowell, Massachusetts; Ginsberg grew up in Paterson, New Jersey.[47]
"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.[48][49]
"... Tangerian bone-grindings..." "... Tangiers to boys ..." and "Holy Tangiers!" William S. Burroughs lived in Tangier, Morocco at the time Ginsberg wrote "Howl". He also experienced withdrawal from heroin, which he wrote about in several letters to Ginsberg.[50]
"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.[50]
"who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico". Both a reference to John Hoffman, a friend of Philip Lamantia and Carl Solomon, who died in Mexico, and a reference to Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry.[40]
"weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down". A reference to a protest staged by Judith Malina, Julian Beck, and other members of The Living Theater.[51]
"who bit detectives in the neck ... dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts." Also, from "who...fell out of the subway window" to "the blast of colossal steam whistles". A specific reference to Bill Cannastra, who actually did most of these things and died when he "fell out of the subway window".[51][52][53]
"Saintly motorcyclists" A reference to Marlon Brando and his biker persona in The Wild One.[50]
From "Who copulated ecstatic and insatiate" to "Who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N. C. secret hero of these poems". Also, from "who barreled down the highways of the past" to "& now Denver is lonesome for her heroes" A reference to Neal Cassady (N.C.) who lived in Denver, Colorado, and had a reputation for being sexually voracious, as well as stealing cars.[54][55][56]
"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's condition after being released from Riker's Island.[55][57]
"... and rose to build harpsichords in their lofts..." Friend Bill Keck actually built harpsichords. Ginsberg had a conversation with Keck's wife shortly before writing "Howl".[52][58][59]
"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, Russell Durgin, was a theology student and kept his books in orange crates.[58][60]
"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 post-traumatic stress disorder.[55][58]
"who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue... the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising" Ginsberg worked as a market researcher for Towne-Oller Associates in San Francisco, on Montgomery Street, not Madison Avenue.[61]
"who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge..." A specific reference to Tuli Kupferberg.[51][62]
"who crashed through their minds in jail..." A reference to Jean Genet's Le Condamné à mort.[51]
"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" Many of the Beats went to Mexico City to "cultivate" a drug "habit", but Ginsberg claims this is a direct reference to Burroughs and Bill Garver, though Burroughs lived in Tangiers at the time[63] (as Ginsberg says in "America" "Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister"[64]). Rocky Mount, North Carolina, is where Jack Kerouac's sister lived (as recounted in The Dharma Bums).[65] Also, Neal Cassady was a brakeman for the Southern Pacific. John Hollander was an alumnus of Harvard. Ginsberg's mother Naomi lived near Woodlawn Cemetery.[56][58]
"Accusing the radio of hypnotism..." A reference to Ginsberg's mother Naomi, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. It also refers to Antonin Artaud's reaction to shock therapy and his "To Have Done with the Judgement of God", which Solomon introduced to Ginsberg at Columbia Presbyterian Psychological Institute.[66][67]
From "who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism..." to "resting briefly in catatonia" A specific reference to Carl Solomon. Initially this final section went straight into what is now Part III, which is entirely about Carl Solomon. An art movement emphasizing nonsense and irrationality. In the poem, it is the subject of a lecture that is interrupted by students throwing potato salad at the professors. This ironically mirrored the playfulness of the movement but in a darker context. A Post WW1 cultural movement, Dada stood for 'anti-art', it was against everything that art stood for. Founded in Zurich, Switzerland. The meaning of the word means two different definitions; "hobby horse" and "father", chosen randomly. The Dada movement spread rapidly.[68][69][70]
"Pilgrim's State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls ..." and "I'm with you in Rockland" These are mental institutions associated with either Ginsberg's mother Naomi or Carl Solomon: Pilgrim State Hospital and Rockland State Hospital in New York and Greystone Park State Hospital in New Jersey. Ginsberg met Solomon at Columbia Presbyterian Psychological Institute, but "Rockland" was frequently substituted for "rhythmic euphony".[66][67][71]
"with mother finally ******" Ginsberg admitted that the deletion here was an expletive. He left it purposefully elliptical "to introduce appropriate element of uncertainty". In later readings, many years after he was able to distance himself from his difficult history with his mother, he reinserted the word "fuked".[68]
"obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter (alt: variable measure) & the vibrating plane". Also, from "who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space" to "what might be left to say in time come after death". 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 a reference to Walt Whitman's long line style which Ginsberg adapted. "The meter"/"variable measure" is a reference to Williams' insistence on the necessity of measure. Though "Howl" may seem formless, 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 Cézanne.[72][73][74]
"Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus"/"omnipotent, eternal father God" This was taken directly from Cézanne.[66][75]
"to recreate the measure and syntax of poor human prose..." A reference to the tremendous influence Kerouac and his ideas of "Spontaneous Prose" had on Ginsberg's work and specifically this poem.[76][77]
"what might be left to say in time come after death" A reference to Louis Zukofsky's translation of Catullus: "What might be left to say anew in time after death..." Also a reference to a section from the final pages of Visions of Cody, "I'm writing this book because we're all going to die," and so on.[66]
"eli eli lama sabachthani" One of the sayings of Jesus on the cross, also Psalm 22:1: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" The phrase in Psalms would be properly transliterated as azavtani, however, Ginsberg stayed true to how Jesus translated the phrase in the Gospels. The phrase used by Ginsberg would be properly translated as "Why have you sacrificed me?" This ties into the themes of misfortune and religious adulation of conformity through the invocation of Moloch in Part II. Though Ginsberg grew up in an agnostic household, he was very interested in his Jewish roots and in other concepts of spiritual transcendence. Although later Ginsberg was a devoted Buddhist, at this time he was only beginning to study Buddhism along with other forms of spirituality.[58]
Part II
Line Reference
”Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness!” Fire god of the Canaanites referred to in Leviticus 18:21: "And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech." Worship of Moloch involved the sacrifice of children by fire.[59][78]
”Moloch whose buildings are judgement!” A reference to Urizen, one of William Blake's four Zoas.[78]
"Crossbone soulless jailhouse and congress of sorrows..." and “Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy the cafeterias filled with the millions!” A reference to God's Man, a graphic novel by Lynd Ward which was in Ginsberg’s childhood library.[79]
From "Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo!" to "Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs!" A reference to several films by Fritz Lang, most notably Metropolis in which the name "Moloch" is directly related to a monstrous factory. Ginsberg also claimed he was inspired by Lang's M and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse.[80]
"Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!" Ginsberg claimed Part II of "Howl" was inspired by a peyote-induced vision of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco which appeared to him as a monstrous face.[52][80][81]
From "Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!" to "Moloch whose name is the Mind!" A reference to Ezra Pound's idea of usury as related in the Cantos and ideas from Blake, specifically the "Mind forg'd manacles" from "London". Ginsberg claimed "Moloch whose name is the Mind!" is "a crux of the poem".[82]
"Lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us" A reference to "Morning" from Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud.[82]
Part III
Line Reference
"I'm with you in Rockland/where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter..." At Columbia Presbyterian Psychological Institute, Ginsberg and Solomon wrote satirical letters to Malcolm de Chazal and T. S. Eliot which they did not ultimately send.[83][84]
"I'm with you in Rockland/where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica." A reference to Mamelles de Tiresias by Guillaume Apollinaire.[85]
From "I'm with you in Rockland/where you scream in a straightjacket” to “fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again..." Solomon actually received shock treatment and was put in a straightjacket at Pilgrim State.[85]
"I'm with you in Rockland/where you bang on a catatonic piano..." Ginsberg was actually the one reprimanded for banging on a piano at CPPI.[86][87]
"I'm with you in Rockland/where you split the heavens of Long Island..." Pilgrim State is located on Long Island.[86]
"I'm with you in Rockland/where there are twenty five thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale..." The population of Pilgrim State was 25,000. "The Internationale" was a song used and made popular by worker movements, and was featured in the Little Red Songbook of the Industrial Workers of the World.[86]
"... the door of my cottage in the Western night." A reference to the cottage on Milvia Street in Berkeley, California, where many of the poems in Howl and Other Poems were composed, including “A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley.” [86]
Footnote to "Howl"
Line Reference
“Everyday is in eternity!” A reference to "Auguries of Innocence" by Blake: "Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/And Eternity in an hour.” [88]
"Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cassady..." Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg, Carl Solomon, Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, Herbert Huncke, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady.[88]
"Holy the Fifth International" A reference to four "Internationals", meetings of Communist, Socialist, and/or Labor groups. The First International was headed by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in 1864. The Fourth International was a meeting of Trotskyists in 1938. The Fifth International, Ginsberg would claim, is yet to come.[88]
Critical reception
The New York Times sent 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 2, 1956 New York Times Book Review titled "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.[89]
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 and published by Route Publishing (Howl for Now ISBN 1-901927-25-3) reflecting on the piece's enduring influence.
1997 broadcasting controversy
Boston independent alternative rock radio station WFNX became the first commercial radio station to broadcast "Howl" on Friday, July 18, 1997 at 6:00 PM despite Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Safe Harbor laws which allow for mature content later at night.[90][91]
2007 broadcasting fears
In late August 2007, Ron Collins, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Nancy Peters, Bill Morgan, Peter Hale, David Skover, Al Bendich (one of LF's 1957 lawyers in the Howl case), and Eliot Katz petitioned Pacifica Radio to air Ginsberg's Howl on October 3, 2007 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the verdict declaring the poem to be protected under the First Amendment against charges of obscenity. Fearing fines from the FCC, Pacifica New York radio station WBAI opted not to broadcast the poem. The station chose instead to play the poem on a special webcast program, replete with commentary (by Bob Holman, Regina Weinreich and Ron Collins, narrated by Janet Coleman), on October 3, 2007.[92]
Other uses
Part II of the poem was used as libretto for Song #7 in Hydrogen Jukebox, a chamber opera using a selection of Ginsberg's poems set to music by Philip Glass.[93]
An excerpt from the poem was used in "Mad Generation Loss", a sound recording exploring generation loss, partly inspired by Alvin Lucier's 1969 I Am Sitting in a Room.[94]