Pubdate: Sun, 16 Apr 2006
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Page: BW04
Copyright: 2006 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Eric Miles Williamson
Note: Eric Miles Williamson has recently published "Two-Up," his 
second novel. He edits American Book Review.
Photo: Allen Ginsberg reads to a crowd in Manhattan on Aug. 28, 1966. 
(AP) http://www.mapinc.org/images/GinsbergManhattan.jpg
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Allen+Ginsberg
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Marijuana)

HE SAW THE BEST MINDS OF HIS GENERATION

A Collection of Essays About Allen Ginsberg's Most Celebrated and 
Condemned Work.

THE POEM THAT CHANGED AMERICA

"Howl" Fifty Years Later

Edited by Jason Shinder

Farrar Straus Giroux. 288 pp. $30

Soon after Allen Ginsberg wrote a slim, 44-page volume called Howl 
and Other Poems in 1956, it became a secret handshake between the 
cool and the hip, quickly drawing attention from edgy writers and 
poets around the country. Rebellious young folk found a voice for 
their Eisenhower-era disillusionment.

The 14-page title poem begins with these famous lines:

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,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to 
the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. . . .

William Carlos Williams in the original introduction wrote: "Hold 
back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell." And 
hell is what follows. "Howl" provided a blistering poetic alternative 
for a nation being reared on Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and T.S. 
Eliot. At the end of "The Waste Land," rain falls on the desert 
plain. Ginsberg, on the other hand, writes of "the crack of doom on 
the hydrogen jukebox."

A year after "Howl" was published, a shipment of newly printed copies 
was seized by federal authorities. The copies were returned after the 
ACLU protested, but two months later San Francisco police arrested 
Ginsberg, City Lights bookstore owner and publisher Lawrence 
Ferlinghetti and a City Lights cashier, charging them with 
trafficking in obscenity. "Howl," the title poem, is rife with overt 
sexual (and homosexual) references and the kind of explicit language 
that at the time was keeping Henry Miller's works classified as 
contraband. Amid Cold War hysteria and the worship of conformity that 
predictably accompanies such times, Ginsberg had written, "America I 
used to be a communist when I was a kid I'm not sorry," and "I smoke 
marijuana every chance I get." Despite the tenor of those times, 
Judge W.J. Clayton Horn ruled that "Howl" was not entirely devoid of 
social importance and therefore did not fit the legal definition of 
obscenity. Ginsberg became one of America's most famous poets.

The Poem that Changed America, edited by Jason Shinder, is a 
collection of 26 essays about Ginsberg's masterpiece. From the title 
of the book, we would expect essays arguing that the poem has indeed 
changed America. We might expect an essay by a prominent CEO whose 
dirty secret is that his business practices are informed by a 
Ginsbergian omnisexual Buddhist ethic. We might hope for an essay by 
a politician or a rap singer or a judge or a filmmaker or an artist 
or a gay-rights activist or a gangbanger -- perhaps even an actor or 
a television repairman or a rural schoolteacher in a red state who 
sneaks "Howl" into the lesson plan. And what a delight it would be to 
hear from some conservatives -- Jesse Helms, John Ashcroft, perhaps 
Ann Coulter -- concerning "Howl."

What the reader gets instead is a hodge-podge of essays, mostly 
written by poets. We see no evidence that the poem "changed America." 
We don't even much see how "Howl" changed the essayists. The news 
seems to be that a major poet influenced subsequent writers -- but 
that's not news, that's a sophomore literature-exam answer.

It's as if Shinder sent out a batch of letters to writers asking them 
to participate in his book and got turned down by most of the people 
we might want to hear from. There's a blurb, for instance, from 
Ferlinghetti, but no essay. We're left with many voices we don't 
particularly care about, including writers such as Vivian Gornick, 
Mark Doty and Phillip Lopate, whose solipsistic essay is titled, " 
'Howl' and Me." Billy Collins and Robert Pinsky each labor to fill 
two pages about "Howl," and several of the essays read as if they 
belong in academic journals, replete with colons in the titles, 
works-cited pages and footnotes. Marjorie Perloff titles her essay "A 
Lost Battalion of Platonic Conversationalists: 'Howl' and the 
Language of Modernism," and we settle in like hungover freshmen at an 
8 a.m. lecture.

The book has its high points. Amiri Baraka riffs like Coltrane 
blowing prose from his tenor in an homage to Ginsberg that shimmers 
and eviscerates. Rick Moody seems electrified and intoxicated in his 
splendid essay "On the Granite Steps of the Madhouse with Shaven 
Heads," interspersing lines from "Howl" into his own improvisational 
memorial word-chart. And Anne Waldman, co-founder (with Ginsberg) of 
the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University 
in Boulder, Colo., contributes a closing essay that bears the marks 
of beauty, wonder and passion that Ginsberg evidently left on those 
who knew him.

The great gift of Shinder's book, though, is a 32-minute CD of 
Ginsberg himself reading "Howl" at the Town Hall Theater in Berkeley 
in 1956. Hearing the pitch of his voice rise with each succeeding 
line into a fever of urgency says more than any memorializer could 
ever hope to convey. His is not the puny voice T.S. Eliot envisioned 
whimpering at the world's end. Successive generations of youth have 
come across Howl in used bookstores and had their perspectives 
shattered, reinforced or altered. As long as humanity remains a heap 
of wobbling dichotomies, Ginsberg's "Howl," like Thoreau's Walden and 
Twain's Huckleberry Finn , will remain a monumental cry of dissent 
against the allures of our darker inclinations. .
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake