Book/9972

Howl and Other Poems (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)

City Lights Publishers Search City Lights Publishers by Allen Ginsberg Search Allen Ginsberg

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ISBN13: 9780872860179

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Product Description
poetry, Pocket Poets classic

The epigraph for Howl is from Walt Whitman: "Unscrew the locks from the doors!/Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!" Announcing his intentions with this ringing motto, Allen Ginsberg published a volume of poetry which broke so many social taboos that copies were impounded as obscene, and the publisher, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was arrested. The court case that followed found for Ginsberg and his publisher, and the publicity made both the poet and the book famous. Ginsberg went on from this beginning to become a cultural icon of sixties radicalism. This works seminal place in the culture is indicated in Czeslaw Milosz's poetic tribute to Ginsberg: "Your blasphemous howl still resounds in a neon desert where the human tribe wanders, sentenced to unreality".

Customer Reviews:
Interesting to analyze, but in my opinion, not too good poetry.

I got this little book because it kept being mentioned on several sources I was reading on Queer studies (more of a personal interest, as my professional research is not in this field) as one of the most influential gay male poems in the 20th century. I read it twice, the second time forcing myself to make sure I was actually feeling this way about the book: Honestly, how can you call this good poetry?

It has some good things: It is not apologetic at all because of the expression of gay love, what was probably quite a bold move for an artist in the American 1950s, and in some ways it does critic the conformist feeling of the era. So, I do understand that, if this was the first main stream poetry book to have been published with this message, that it is considered relevant, not necessarily for its quality, but for its boldness, and plainly for being the first.

On the other hand, there is no rhythm, no rhyme, it feels more like reading prose than poetry. Maybe it's because I was born on a completely different historical moment, but this book does not really evoke any meaningful feelings in me.

Allen Ginsberg Howl and other poems
For some reason I thought this was going to be a large collection of poems by Allen Ginsberg. I can say I've been a fan for quite sometime. This was not the case. In fact, This book only consists of 57 pages. Its a very small book so I don't care how famous Howl is or if it's being made into a movie with James Franco. This is not worth the purchase of 6 or more dollars.

Great book, great price
Can your household live without this book? Well, probably. But there's no reason it shouldn't.

The one gripe is the odd sizing of this book. C'mon, City Lights, what book is this supposed to sit on the shelf with?!

Ginsberg the 'greatest'?.. hmmm
Don't get me wrong. I attended 3 readings by Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky at Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusettes in the late 1970's and even recorded "Contest of the Bards" and handed him a copy of it at his request,... I 'absolutely' consider his oratory style of delivery and poetic verse and style amazing and brilliant and so very very entertaining and inspiring.. but the 'greatest' epic poem or poet of his century I just can't agree with. Gary Snyder made such an impact with introducing the marriage of Zen and the Orient into modern poetry style of his day (as Vincent vanGogh and Gauguin did in painting in the Expressionest era in painting/art), and Gary's poems of the passing of a day's events are so brilliant and open and revealing, and Jack Kerouac's style and impact, and Ferlinghetti's brilliance stemming from such a variety of different drugs... T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Patty Smith, Bob Dylan, ... Marianne Moore,... grins... there are so many just 'great' poets from that and before and after generations in American history... one can really not call one the 'greatest' of any of their peers when there is such an overabundance of wealth to choose from and to have been entertained and inspired by. Howl is about the 'awakening' of american society, the public, the 'beginning' of awakening that could happen. But we actually have reverted, we actually believe that it was 'only' Russians or Chinese or Cubans or the Germans of WWII who were lied to or not told the truths by their governments whether led by Political Action Groups, Special Interest, drug companies, oil companies, insurance companies, etc. The rending of the veil of sleepiness of being 'content' socially is what Howl is all about, the 'rage' against that as we should be enraged against the last moment of breath to deaths' face as deat come to take us to the next realm. I don't know if anybody actually feels the rage of "Howl" within anymore, whether it was worth it after all, after all of the tea and ices... shrugs.

Seeking Jazz or S*x or Soup
While Allen Ginsberg's three-part, long poem "Howl" is borne of a particular moment in American history --- the Joseph McCarthy congressional witch hunts; the cold war with Russia (which includes, to a degree, the Korean War); social and racial unrest --- it is still possible to read and appreciate the work without the context of the time. The staccato beats of the stanzas, the raw and potent language, as well as the cross-country travels in the poem are all worth exploring in detail outside of the realm of Ginsberg's cultural experience. With powerful imagery, specific American locales, and references to John Milton, William Blake, Neal Cassady and the Bible, the 1956 poem ushered in not only the age of Beat poetry, but a lasting piece of fury, compassion and madness.

The opening line, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness" sets in motion a seemingly endless list of unnamed, but mostly male, people whom the narrator apparently knew who lost their sanity in the streets, subways, back alleys and bars of America. Written as a single, run-on sentence, the rhythm scheme is structured as mini-tales, each passage of a new, mind-blowing experience beginning simply with "who," connecting back to that first line of the poem. The sense of dislocation within familiar terrain is the theme repeated throughout, with places in the heartland like Laredo, Texas and Arkansas as sinister and terrifying as Chicago and New York City. The people of the narrator's generation come from and travel to all points on the U.S. map, but share the common states of sorrow and confusion, unable to feel grounded within landscapes that no longer hold the same security and dependency that they once did. When the "angelheaded hipsters [...] / [...] bare their brains to Heaven under the El" and "[drink] turpentine in Paradise Alley," the America that once made sense is transformed into a jumble of seedy and depressed places where screaming at God, poisoning oneself, and having meaningless s*x for an almighty, capitalistic dollar is the current norm.

Time, space, eternity, the universe and Plato are invoked throughout the narrator's journey across America, allowing Ginsberg to delve into the big questions asked by man, albeit without attempting to directly answer any of them. He is ambitious in his reachings, detailing the concerns and experiences of an entire generation, his only judgments coming in the form of labeling the various acts performed as the actions of an insane group of people. He then follows the list of his generation's misdeeds with a section devoted to Moloch, invoking the biblical Canaanite who also shows himself in poems by Coleridge and Milton. The third and final section addresses Carl Solomon, a real-life friend to Ginsberg, to whom the poem is dedicated. It continues the societal course of madness to its logical conclusion, with Solomon in a Rockland, N.Y. mental hospital receiving treatment for the destruction of his, the best, mind.