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Written as a cultural weapon and a call to arms,Howltouched a raw nerve in Cold War America and has been controversial from the day it was first read aloud nearly fifty years ago. This first full critical and historical study ofHowlbrilliantly elucidates the nexus of politics and literature in which it was written and gives striking new portraits of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. Drawing from newly released psychiatric reports on Ginsberg, from interviews with his psychiatrist, Dr. Philip Hicks, and from the poet's journals,American Screamshows howHowlbrought Ginsberg and the world out of the closet of a repressive society. It also gives the first full accounting of the literary figures-Eliot, Rimbaud, and Whitman-who influencedHowl,definitively placing it in the tradition of twentieth-century American poetry for the first time. As he follows the genesis and the evolution ofHowl,Jonah Raskin constructs a vivid picture of a poet and an era. He illuminates the development of Beat poetry in New York and San Francisco in the 1950s--focusing on historic occasions such as the first reading ofHowlat Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955 and the obscenity trial over the poem's publication. He looks closely at Ginsberg's life, including his relationships with his parents, friends, and mentors, while he was writing the poem and uses this material to illuminate the themes of madness, nakedness, and secrecy that pervadeHowl.A captivating look at the cultural climate of the Cold War and at a great American poet,American Screamfinally tells the full story ofHowl-a rousing manifesto for a generation and a classic of twentieth-century literature.

[...]I will concern myself with the European tradition of phenomenology, fathered by Edmund Husserl, when necessary for furthering the argument. Ginsberg is articulating such a poetics of inclusiveness when he makes the claim that presentation of consciousness as found in The Cantos or Leaves of Grass legitimately oversteps the success/failure or veridical/ non-veridical opposition. [...]Ginsberg's auto-commentary is consonant with the Husserlian approach and as such is indicative of a poetics that can be construed in terms of phenomenology. [...]as I have noted earlier, I turn to Advaita Vedanta to sketch out the rudiments of a phenomenological poetics through which the work of Allen Ginsberg can be read. [...]in section IV, I reflect on the nature of Ginsberg's relationship with Indian thought, primarily to make the point that not just Buddhism but also the Hindu philosophical system must also be considered in evaluating Ginsberg's essential engagement with Indic civilization.

\"Smart (Studies) Now\" rethinks the significance of Christopher Smart for authors, critics, and students. While writers from Frances Burney to Allen Ginsberg have rated this elusive author highly, critical appreciation has lagged, often focusing on his madness, or treating him as a hack who got lucky once. This essay extends attention from the linguistic and formal power of Smart's religious verse to highlight his generic range and cross-corpus coherence. Three imperatives to advance Smart studies are formulated: clarity about Smart's influence on authors across various periods, attention to the value and relevance of his complete corpus, and availability of a robust sample of his poetry and prose for classroom use.

As was the case for other writers from the Beat Generation, geography is more than simply a setting for Allen Ginsberg’s work, as his poetry also bears the imprint of the influence of the landscapes through which he traveled in his mind and poetic practice. In the 1950s, the same decade which saw the composition of Ginsberg’s Howl, Guy Debord and his followers developed the concept of “psychogeography” and “dérive” to analyze the influence of landscapes on one’s mind. The Debordian concept of psychogeography implies then that an objective world can have unknown and subjective consequences. Inspired by Debord’s theories and through the analysis of key poems, this paper argues that a psychogeographical focus can shed new light on ecocritical studies of Ginsberg’s poetry. It can indeed unveil the complex construction of the poet’s own space-time poetics, from hauntological aspects to his specific composition process.

The Beat Generation was mentioned again the same year in an article about the British Angry Young Men. Since the first complete critical article on the Beat Generation, written by Ge Ha (pseudonym), in i960, criticism of the Beats in Chinese academic circles has moved from ideological condemnation, to initial acceptance, and now direct promotion. In today's environment, when many in the West have stepped up criticism of China on human rights and cultural issues, it is important to recognize that Kerouac and the Beat generation are as popular and as available as they have ever been. According to Ge, On the Road was \"like the record of a confession by juvenile delinquents. The only difference between the characters in the book and actual juvenile delinquents was that the former didn't commit serious crimes like rape, murder or robbery.

In the post-World War II era, authors of the beat generation produced some of the most enduring literature of the day. More than six decades since, work of the Beat Poets conjures images of unconventionality, defiance, and a changing consciousness that permeated the 1950s and 60s. In recent years, the key texts of Beat authors such as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac have been appropriated for a new generation in feature-length films, graphic novels, and other media. In Adapting the Beat Poets: Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouc on Screen, Michael J.Prince examines how works by these authors have been translated to film. Looking primarily at three key works—Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Ginsberg's Howl, and Kerouac's On the Road—Prince considers how Beat literature has been significantly altered by the unintended intrusion of irony or other inflections. Prince also explores how these screen adaptations offer evidence of a growing cultural thirst for authenticity, even as mediated in postmodern works. Additional works discussed in this volume include The Subterraneans, Towers Open Fire, The Junky's Christmas,and Big Sur. By examining the screen versions of the Beat triumvirate's creations, this volume questions the ways in which their original works serve as artistic anchors and whether these films honor the authentic intent of the authors. Adapting the Beat Poets is a valuable resource for anyone studying the beat generation, including scholars of literature, film, and American history.

At least one novel and a collection of short stories are as yet unpublished, though perhaps as Ginsberg said of other books in his Dedication to Howl and Other Poems, they \"are published in heaven\" and will in time be published here below. The other segment appeared as \"Interview: John Clellon Holmes\" in Quarterly West 5 (1978), then a relatively young journal hosted by the University of Utah where I was then teaching and edited by James Thomas, who had studied fiction writing with Holmes at Bowling Green State University. Introduction to 1977 Interview in Quarterly West (1978) In the 25 years since his first novel Go was originally published, John Clellon Holmes has covered the bases: three novels, a collection of essays, short stories and journalism in magazines like Esquire and Playboy, poems in the quarterlies, and stints as a writing teacher from Iowa to Brown, most recently at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Focusing on the young Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and Kerouac, he records and critiques the search for values of the generation that came of age during the cultural bankruptcy of the Second World War.

The four-letter word, much abused, assumes here a delicious and simple and homosexual irony as the reader and listener imagine the rocket-shaped phallus and a howling explosion as the poet exercises his right to deny sex to Moloch, because \"I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.\" Perhaps at thirty, finishing \"Howl\" in San Francisco, having \"wandered around and around at midnight in the / railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, / leaving no broken hearts,\" Ginsberg managed to distill all the years of his experience into one tremendous first thought-\"I saw the best minds of my generation\"-and kept the thought alive through \"incomparable blind sheets of shuddering cloud . . . listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox / . . . yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts / and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks / and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars . . . .\" What a sweeping entrance to this American line and poem, a mind breath stirring the young, shell-shocked, comatose, \"destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn / looking for an angry fix.\" Despite Howl's reputation as the mantra of the counterculture, essential reading of adolescents turning against their parents, a quintessential Holden Caulfield for the gay, hip set, I find the poem speaks to me now in my fifties as powerful, heart-rending elegy: a love song for what has passed and is passing, affirming the value of hurtling through the charnel house, of witnessing the horror and beauty and distilling what senses and spirit have learned in verses that gallop through the heart and mind of the house, stirring the dust, taking the jambs

\"The way to point to the existence of the universe is to see one thing directly and clearly and describe it. . . . If you see something as a symbol of something else, then you don't experience the object itself, but you're always referring it to something else in your mind. It's like making out with one person and thinking about another.\" -Ginsberg speaking to his writing class at Naropa Institute, 1985 With \"Howl\" Allen Ginsberg became the voice of the Beat Generation. It was a voice heard in some of the best-known poetry of our time-but also in Ginsberg's eloquent and extensive commentary on literature, consciousness, and politics, as well as his own work. Much of what he had to say, he said in interviews, and many of the best of these are collected for the first time in this book. Here we encounter Ginsberg elaborating on how speech, as much as writing and reading, and even poetry, is an act of art. Testifying before a Senate subcommittee on LSD in 1966; gently pressing an emotionally broken Ezra Pound in a Venicepensionein 1967; taking questions in a U.C. Davis dormitory lobby after a visit to Vacaville State Prison in 1974; speaking at length on poetics, and in detail about his \"Blake Visions,\" with his father Louis (also a poet); engaging William Burroughs and Norman Mailer during a writing class: Ginsberg speaks with remarkable candor, insight, and erudition about reading and writing, music and fame, literary friendships and influences, and, of course, the culture (or counterculture) and politics of his generation. Revealing, enlightening, and often just plain entertaining, Allen Ginsberg in conversation is the quintessential twentieth-century American poet as we have never before encountered him: fully present, in pitch-perfect detail.