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Journal Article
Listening to Allen Ginsberg
2020
Overview
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
Publisher
Middlebury College Publications,Middlebury College,New England Review
