Talking "Howl" 1Your "Howl" for Carl Solomon is very powerful, but I don't want it arbitrarily negated by secondary recommendations made in time's reconsidering backstep--I want your Lingual Spontaneity or Nothing.
--Jack Kerouac, letter to
Allen Ginsberg, August 19, 1955"Howl" is a wild, volcanic, troubled, extravagant, turbulent, boisterous, unbridled outpouring, intermingling gems and flashes of picturesque insight with slag and debris of scoriac matter. It has violence; it has life; it has vitality. In my opinion, it is a one-side neurotic view of life; it has not enough glad, Whitmanian affirmations.
--Louis Ginsberg, letter to
Allen Ginsberg, May 27, 1956It is a howl of defeat. Not defeat at all for he has gone through defeat as if it were an ordinary experience, a trivial experience ... This poet sees through all the horrors he partakes of in the very intimate details of his poem. He avoids nothing but experiences it to the hilt. He contains it. Claims it as his own--and, we believe, laughs at it and has the time and affrontery to love a fellow of his choice and record that love in a well-made poem. Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.
--William Carlos Williams,
Introduction to Howl and Other Poems,
October 1956"Howl" is the most significant single long poem to be published in this country since World War II, perhaps since Eliot's Four Quartets ... "Howl" commits many poetic sins, but it was time.
--Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
"Horn on Howl," Evergreen Review,
Winter 1957We have had smoking attacks on the civilization before, ironic or murderous or suicidal. We have not had this particular variety of anguished anathema-hurling in which the poet's revulsion is expressed with the single-minded frenzy of a raving madwoman ... He has brought a terrible psychological reality to the surface with enough originality to blast American verse a hairsbreadth forward in the process.
--M. L. Rosenthal,
"Review of Howl and Other Poems,"
The Nation, February 23, 1957"Howl" proclaims, in a hopped up and improvised tone, that nothing seems to be worth saying save in a hopped up and improvised tone.
--John Hollander,
Partisan Review, Spring 1957I do not believe that "Howl" is without even the slightest redeeming social importance. The first part of "Howl" presents a picture of a nightmare world; the second part is an indictment of those elements in modern society destructive of the best qualities of human nature; such elements are predominantly identified as materialism, conformity, and mechanization leading toward war. The third part presents a picture of an individual who is a specific representation of what the author conceives as a general condition. "Footnote to Howl" seems to be a declamation that everything in the world is holy, including parts of the body by name. It ends in a plea for holy living. In considering material claimed to be obscene it is well to remember the motto: Honi soit qui mal y pense (Evil to him who thinks evil).
--Judge Clayton Horn,
judgment, October 3, 1957
Allen GinsbergI've Lived With and Enjoyed "Howl"
I've lived with and enjoyed "Howl" for three decades, it has become a social and poetical landmark, notorious at worst, illuminative at best, more recently translated for understanding hitherto forbidden to the public in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and China. It seems helpful in this fourth decade of the poem's use to clarify its literary background and historical implications as well as its author's intentions. Few poets have enjoyed the opportunity to expound their celebrated texts. Usually it is the lamplit study of an academic scholar, as with Mr. J Livingston Lowe's hard interesting work on Coleridge's "Rime." Wordsworth essayed explanations of his editions. Whitman early and appreciatively critiqued his own Leaves with modest anonymity for a generally hostile or indifferent literary society. Later, for a more sympathetic public, he expounded its purport through several prefaces unique in comprehension of his own appointments and disappointments. Still I've ventured my intelligence, neither modest nor immodest, for the general public, poetry lovers, scholars, breakthrough artists and future generations of inspired youths.The appeal in "Howl" is to the secret or hermetic tradition of art "justifying" or "making up for" defeat in worldly life, to the acknowledgement of an
Unworldly love that has no hope of the world and that cannot change the world to its delight-- after desolation as if the earth were our feet were an excrement of some sky and we degraded prisoners destined to hunger and we eat filth1Thus William Carlos Williams appealed to the "imagination" of art to reveal our deepest natural ground: love, hopeless yet permanently present in the heart, unalterable. ("Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds.") The worldly love hypostatized through thick and thin with Carl Solomon rose out of primordial filial loyalty to my mother, then in distress. Where mother love conflicts with social facade, the die is cast from antiquity in favor of sympathy.
Blocked by appearances, love comes through in the free play of the imagination, a world of art, the field of space where Appearance--natural recognition of social tragedy & world failure--shows less sentience than original compassionate expansiveness of heart.
It is in the poem, as WCW says, that we reconstruct the world lost. The end verses of Part I hypothesize various arts that reconstruct our original "petite sensation" of "Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus." The classic art tactics cataloged there suggest a shrewd humor that protects our unobstructed sympathy from chaos. The matter is in objective acknowledgement of emotion.
"Howl" was written in a furnished room at 1010 Montgomery, a few houses up from where the street meets Broadway, in North Beach, and continues down a few steep blocks into San Francisco's financial district. I had weeks earlier quit work as a minor market research executive, had moved in with new-met friend Peter Orlovsky, but as he returned to Long Island to visit his family over the summer, I was alone. I had the leisure of unemployment compensation for six months ahead, had concluded a longish period of psychotherapeutic consultation,2 enjoyed occasional visits from Neal Cassady, decade old friend, now brakeman on Southern Pacific Railroad, and maintained energetic correspondence with Jack Kerouac in Long Island and William Burroughs in Tangier.I had recently dreamt of the late Joan Burroughs, a sympathetic encounter with her spirit. She inquired the living fate of our friends. I wrote the dream as a poem ("Dream Record: June 8, 1955") about which in a few days Kenneth Rexroth, an elder in his literary city, wrote me he thought was stilted & somewhat academic. A week later, I sat idly at my desk by the first floor window facing Montgomery Street's slope to gay Broadway--only a few blocks from City Lights literary paperback bookshop. I had a secondhand typewriter, some cheap scratch paper. I began typing, not with the idea of writing a formal poem, but stating my imaginative sympathies, whatever they were worth. As my loves were impractical and my thoughts relatively unworldly, I had nothing to gain, only the pleasure of enjoying on paper those sympathies most intimate to myself and most awkward to the great world of family, formal education, business, and current literature.
What I wrote that afternoon was not conceived as a poem to publish. It stands now as the first section of "Howl." Later parts were written in San Francisco, and in a garden cottage in Berkeley over the next few months, with the idea of completing a poem.In publishing "Howl," I was curious to leave behind after my generation an emotional time bomb that would continue exploding in U.S. consciousness in case our military-industrial-nationalist complex solidified into a repressive police bureaucracy. As a sidelight, I thought to disseminate a poem so strong that a clean Saxon four-letter word might enter high school anthologies permanently and deflate tendencies toward authoritarian strong-arming (evident in later-'50's neoconservative attacks on Kerouac's heartfelt prose and Burroughs's poetic humor).
Please with this Howl, I remain your yet living servant, etc. The author.
Notes
1. William Carlos Williams, "Rain" in Collected Poems: 1909-1939, Volume I, 1938.
2. Editor's note: Ginsberg began seeing the therapist, Dr. Philip Hicks, at the Langley-Porter Institute. According to Allen, at one point in the treatment, the following dialogue occurred: "What would you like to do?" the doctor asked. "What is your desire really?" I said, "Doctor, I don't think you're going to find this very healthy and clear, but I really would like to stop working forever--never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I'm doing now--and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the days outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I'd like to keep living with someone--maybe even a man--and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quite city-hermit existence." Then he said, "Well, why don't you?" Ginsberg discusses this encounter as the Great Breakthrough. The doctor's acceptance of Ginsberg's untraditional desires encouraged his own self-acceptance and his misguided attempts to please his teachers and father, the poet Louis Ginsberg--all of which in turn generated the time and space for "Howl" to be written.Credits
From The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later, edited by Jason Shinder, to be published in April 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright (c) 2006 by Jason Shinder. All rights reserved.
"I've Lived With and Enjoyed 'Howl'" by Allen Ginsberg, reprinted with permission from The Allen Ginsberg Trust.
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) is the author of more than 40 books of poetry, prose, letters, and photographs. His books of poetry include Howl and Other Poems (1956); Kaddish and Other Poems (1961); Reality Sandwiches (1963); Planet News (1968); The Fall of America (1973); Mind Breaths (1978); Plutonian Ode (1982); Collected Poems (1984); White Shroud (1985); and Cosmopolitan Greetings (1994). His many honors included The National Book Award for The Fall of America and election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1966 Ginsberg founded the Committee on Poetry in New York City to support artists and play a role in politics; and in 1974 Ginsberg co-founded (with poet Anne Waldman) the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado. A member of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Review, and a performer with the Clash, Ginsberg released several recordings of poems and original songs, including First Blues, a double album produced in 1983 by John Hammond, and HolySoul Jelly Roll, a 1994 four-CD set featuring the best recordings of his career. A Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, Ginsberg taught, lectured, and read, however, in every state and in over twenty-five countries. The majority of his archives are at Stanford University. Following his death The Allen Ginsberg Trust was established to "manage Ginsberg's tangible and non-tangible assets in a manner consistent with Ginsberg's world-view, sensibilities and artistic and literary values." For more information, contact www.allenginsberg.org.
