I had a certain hesitancy about Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" before I had ever even read the poem, which I did not do until my fourth year as an undergraduate. I'm aware that this pre-judgment seems patently unfair, but allow to explain:
For years, going back as far as high school, I suffered through my peers talking about the brilliance of Ginsberg, Kerouac, and the whole Beat movement. My fellow teens and undergrad would whimsically pontificate upon how illuminating the work was, and how it spoke to them. However, whenever I pressed them for details, they were unable to provide explanations. My theory was always that they liked the Beats because it gave them the encouragement and rationalization to take drugs.
A related anecdote: I recently had a brief conversation with my girlfriend about The Beatles. Referring to some friends who had said they didn't like the band, she asked, "How can *anyone* not like the Beatles? I mean, they're the Beatles? How can you not just automatically recognize that they're the best band ever?" I WANTED to ask her why exactly she was so positive they were "the best band ever,"--what was the criteria for making such a claim, and how did The Beatles fulfill it--but I've learned from past experiences with women that it's often best just to let those things slide. As far as I'm concerned, for every truly beautiful and timeless Beatles song, there's another borderline maudlin and conventional to match. So, I don't think it's the music itself that has made so many young people of my generation "automatically recognize" the greatest of the Beatles; I think it's because that's what they've been told since they could remember such things. And who has been telling them? Their parents, and all the other Baby Boomers--the rebels turned establishment who refuse to let go of their youth.
It's hardly surprising that the Boomers fawn over and exalt the Beatles every opportunity they can: for their generation, the Beatles really were more than just a band--they were spiritual, moral, and political guides. Unfortunately, even though the Boomers eventually cast aside their youthful ideals, they refused to cast aside their youthful obsessions. The defining characteristics of the Baby Boomer is self-absorption, and they have clung to the belief that what was important to them as youth is important to all youth. And, their indoctrination has been successful.
My impression is that most young people my age who speak of the brilliance of "Howl" weren't really moved by it; rather, they just thought they were supposed to be moved by it. Although the poem can be rightfully commended for its audaciousness, and does have genuine moments of lyrical beauty, I tend to find its self-absorption and presumptuousness frustrating. For me, the poem is an engaging, amusing, and even well-crafted artifact of the period, yet it now lacks some credibility and a legitimate contemporary relevance.
In many ways, "Howl" represents the worst the Boomer generation had to offer--though perhaps also the best. Ginsberg displays the petulant qualities of the Boomers--their smugness and self-centeredness--from the opening lines of his 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 (9)
I cannot help but agree with Phillip Lopate, who--in his article, "Howl and Me"--finds it just a tad presumptuous of Ginsberg to declare himself the spokesman of "his" generation. It seems a bit unfair for someone to speak on behalf of everyone who, by mere coincidence, was born within the same fifteen year window. Not only does Ginsberg (and I will use "Ginsberg" rather than "the speaker") find it appropriate to appoint himself the representative of his generation, he manages to point out that he and his friends are "the best minds" of it. In "Footnote to 'Howl'" he goes as far as to canonize his comrades ("Holy Kerouac")! In many ways, "Howl" becomes Ginsberg's self-indulgent ode to the brilliance of his divinely-inspired clique, who speak for the less capable through idiosyncratic art and reckless behavior.
This presumption to speak for an entire generation is even more frustrating when one looks at the
behavior Ginsberg describes and, at least implicitly, endorses:
"angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly / connection to the starry dynamo in the machi / nery of night, / who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat / up smoking in the supernatural darkness of / cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities / contemplating jazz...who were expelled from the academies" (9)
Ah, the romance of dropping out and getting high! Of course, with the exception of those lucky few such as Ginsberg who could behave this way and succeed, this philosophy really is nothing more than a romance. Lopate--who does admit to enjoying the poem both as a youth and an adult--criticizes Ginsberg's romanticization. Lopate write:
What about all those working stiffs who would not end up raving lunatics, who could not afford to drop out, were we automatically judged mediocre, and condemned to a lower status than 'the best minds,' by dint of negleting or refusing to fall apart? (89)
I think Lopate helps illuminate a major problem of "Howl": in many ways, it is a spoiled teenagers fantasy. It is a shrieking cry for attention; an outburst. Tantrums are hard to ignore, and they can even be somewhat entertaining, but they're also irritating. I see "Howl" has something of a foot-stomping tantrum, even if it was borne of genuine frustration. I don't believe the legitimacy of that anger truly resonates with most young readers now, though. Perhaps they relate to the general sense of disillusionment in the poem, but I think it's more likely that teens enjoy the poem because they been told it's a teen's poem.
"Howl" is an interesting poem and not a poorly written poem. However, I do think that it has been unfairly exalted. In many ways, the Beats are a blip in the political, social, and artistic history of the United States. Yet, since it flourished during the youth of the Boomers--that period which forever defines them and they refuse to relinquish--it has been granted a prestige and importance it does not really deserve.
I beg to differ: I don't think Ginsberg's "Howl" is self-absorbed or presumptuous. Ginsberg is describing/responding to experiences that greatly affected him (and his cohorts) personally, and these experiences are not particularly pleasant. My copy of "Howl" contains an introduction by William Carlos Williams (do you all have this edition?), in which Williams states that Ginsberg has "been through hell" and that the "howl" is one "of defeat" (7). I am of the mind that Ginsberg is not romanticizing or even advocating the behavior he describes, though some, perhaps many, have chosen to read him in that manner. The pot smoking/ jazz listening, the benzo-fueled cross country trips, the manic subway rides, and the naked ravings are pathetic reactions to a sense of helplessness or hopelessness. In other words, one would be hard-pressed to convince me that Ginsberg is in any way pleased that "minds" have been "destroyed by/ madness."
Indeed, the question to be asking is not whether these behaviors are commendable or condemnable, but why are people exhibiting these behaviors? All of the less than responsible behaviors Ginsberg portrays in section "I" of "Howl" lead up to section "II," which (especially since we just finished up with Eliot) incidentally reads, albeit in a different style, much like "The Wasteland." Rather than depicting the destruction that ensues after a world war, Ginsberg seems to be rallying against American capitalism in general (and Ginsberg's indictment of course travels beyond "Howl" into "A Supermarket in California," "Sunflower Sutra," and certainly into "America").
I am, of course, aware of the would-be-hipster high school, early undergraduate crowd, mentioned by Jack, that takes the work of Ginsberg (and Kerouac and Cassady, etc.) as the sanction for drug use and anything else that needs the label of anti-establishment to be "cool." However, I hope we can agree that this sort of interpretation of Ginsberg is a rather naive, superficial one (and one that I think fails to do the Beats justice). (Wow- that reads dangerously close to Hirsch's argument, and I am prepared to be chastised for it.)
As a critique of capitalism, I think Ginsberg continues to be relevant, but perhaps more importantly, there is a relevant lesson for present-day readers about what fails to affect lasting, substantial social change and why. The Beat Movement (and this is a bit of a paraphrase of Eldridge Cleaver- what?) was indeed the precursor to white (especially student) involvement in organized, political action for various causes of social justice. (Perhaps I shouldn't specify white, as I think, interestingly enough, Amiri Baraka got his "start" in Greenwich with some of the Beats.) At any rate, a number of young folks got turned onto the Beats's anti-establishment vibe, weren't satisfied by just sitting around in cold water flats feeding junk habits and complaining, and decided to go out and actually do something that would change the establishment(s) they were disatisfied with. This chain of events seems to me to be more than a "blip" in history, whether we characterize the social movements of the sixties and seventies as failures or as successes. I suppose what I'm getting at is the importance of an awareness that enables us either to repeat history or to not repeat history. On the one hand, minds being "destroyed by/ madness" ultimately served an admirable end; on the other, as an end in itself, such destruction is not useful or desirable. Either way, poems like Ginsberg's "Howl" helped put in motion a series of events (that I shudder to imagine the absence of) in U.S. history.
I suppose I'm finished defending Ginsberg's honor (for now, anyway)...
Posted by: alschmidt | March 03, 2008 at 06:30 PM
This was my first time reading “Howl.” Before this reading experience, the word itself harkened me back to an older line of poetry than the poem we’re talking about now; the word “howl”, in a literary sense, has long made me think of King Lear. To me, the words in the final scene of that play are some of the most beautifully written (that I have come across, yet), but it is their lack of poetic embellishment (in particular the words spoken by the old king) that wins them my favor. And, of course, that Lear’s miserable stumble through the wilderness has transformed his verbal faculties from refined and pompous court speech into animalistic (“Howl, howl, howl, howl”) and nihilistic (“Never, never, never, never, never”) rants makes their simplicity significant. To me, what makes that play great is that Shakespeare, though supernaturally in love with language and what it can do, acknowledges that for all of its force, the human vocabulary is a limited tool. Lear doesn’t die coughing up rich poetry, as some casualties of Shakespearean tragedy (Cleopatra, Hamlet, Othello, to name a few) have, instead he howls like an animal seeking its lost companions in the middle of the night.
Now, I don’t know if Ginsberg intended any reference or reverence to King Lear when he came up with the title for his verses, but certainly both poets, S. and G., must have had an interest in the connotations of that word. It is a word that mingles feelings of both loneliness and defeat. And though Lear literally screams “Howl” while Ginsberg named his whole work “Howl,” implying that all the words of the poem are the tiny vibrations that form one very long cry, the speakers in both these cases express a deep longing for something absent and probably lost. Interestingly, however, and as you bloggees out there in the ether are probably thinking right now, the similarities between the two basically end there: Lear is (was…whatever---it’s pretty grammatically confusing to talk in the same sentence about an actual literary character who will always live in the present and an actual historic person whose deeds have a particular place in the past) an established tyrant who falls from power, Ginsberg a rebel against the establishment who tried (tries) to detach from the society that he felt perpetuated a type of power similar to Lear’s. Lear’s howl is a sparse utterance of pain forsaking vocabulary, while Ginsberg’s is highly engaged with vocabulary, verbose to the point of (I think intentional) excess.
. So why am I comparing the poem to King Lear? To me, “howl” is the only word that really matters in it, and I think it matters in the same way that it matters in King Lear, both howls express the disappointment of watching one’s world view fade away. Certainly, aspects of the body of the poem strike me. Though I would tend to agree with Jack and have little patience for war stories about all the drugs somebody took in one night or in one decade, I do have a lot of patience for nonconformity. So when Ginsberg tells of a group throwing potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism I am delighted. I think this brand of nonconformity is in many ways rebellion at its best, nobody gets hurt, it’s pretty funny, you can usually wash potato salad out of your suit, and the usual modes of thought get knocked just a little bit more out of whack. It is certainly very experimental; the intended long-term goals of such a rebellion are pretty hazy (knock everybody off their game a little, make other people feel more free to express themselves, maybe someday we’ll be a liberated society if enough food gets thrown?) But I am of the thinking that maybe we’d be able to more effectively alter the rules and restriction that a society imposes upon its people if we question our agreement to obey even the most seemingly insignificant societal rules (like don’t throw potato salad at your lecturer.) I can see how Ginsberg and his cohorts thought it was worth a go. That they were so drug-addled through the experiment very well might have effected its outcome, though I think Amy is right that we feel many of its reverberations today. Perhaps this is what Ginsberg had to howl about: that he thought they were really onto something, but they got sidetracked.
Posted by: Margaret Poist | March 03, 2008 at 09:24 PM
For me, HOWL is difficult to love, but impossible to ignore, like an unruly child. In fact, the poem has the energy of a child, and I find that at times attractive, at other times, wearying. But like a child, the poem is correct in a kind of primal way. Life is more urgent, more sacred, more pressing than our country has allowed at times.
One of thes times was the Fifties. Or perhaps more accurately, Post-WWII. The images and ideas that come from the decade, spilling over in the early 60’s are definitive: smiling Ike, factory-working women during the war who had to give up their jobs to returning soldiers after the war, plastics, better living through modern chemistry, nuclear fission, nuclear family, suburbs, and outer space. And a host of other things as well.
Traditionally, America has been a difficult country to bully into conformity (now with the media’s omnipresence it’s much easier to do it, and conformity seems at times to be proceeding apace); in the Fifties, a dominant culture automatically insured a backlash of sorts, and a backlash of sorts was what the Fifties received: the Beats, jazz, early Civil Rights, Communists, labor unions, Zen, non-violent political groups, to name a few. A very few.
HOWL was among these. So I read “America,” for example, as an attempt to re-appropriate that myth by deflating that myth.
“America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?” It was a good question then, and it’s a good question now.
“America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.” It was the only answer then that Ginsberg could muster, and it’s a good answer now too. America’s defining characteristic is its difficult diversity . . . We pride ourselves on it at times, and at times do all we can to oppress it. It is during these times of oppression that a kind of dyspeptic feeling comes over us. The dominant voice of the country, however you identify it, however you hear it, seems less and less representative, more and more marginal. But marginal, of course, with power. And it is this nauseating combination, the marginal still retaining its relationship to power, that began to arise in the Fifties.
And so HOWL was born. I love the idea of the poem more than I love the poem. It cannot influence another poem without debilitating it, and its essential weakness is revealed by comparing it to its great progenitor, LEAVES OF GRASS. Whitman was, by admission, Ginsberg’s patron saint and if we want to talk about artistry—we are talking about poetry, after all—Ginsberg had a lot to learn from Whitman that he never really learned. I am thinking of craft, a concern whose obviousness in the work is not a reliable sign of the writer’s attention to it. (Many of Lowell’s late poem, for example, seem dashed off. They weren’t. That was an effect much labored after.) HOWL at times seems to me to ramble, not simply digress; to wander, not to explore; to scream, not to protest. Very seldom does Whitman relinquish control of his line, and I think that Ginsberg does that quite often.
Ginsberg’s artistic decisions have implications that I suspect he was fully aware of. If writers foreground their formal concerns—rhyme, meter, stanzaic regularity—their work will automatically fall into a tradition that more often than not has conservative implications. It’s a short step, if you wish to take it, from formal conservatism to cultural conservatism. And that wasn’t a step, obviously, that Ginsberg wanted to take.
Yet I can’t imagine the Fifties without Ginsberg anymore than I can imagine them without Jackson Pollock, a painter whose work at times suggest HOWL to me. The point is that HOWL is a hand grenade of sorts—it does its work and it does it efficiently.
And it’s not work that a culture can tolerate for long periods of time. But it is necessary to my mind.
Posted by: sburris | March 04, 2008 at 03:15 PM