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Friday March 30, 2007

Writers weigh in on 50 years of Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’

by ari messer
correspondent

Fifty years after the publication of “Howl,” Allen Ginsberg’s epic poem still lives in the memories of countless writers, a literary love affair that has lost no steam over the years.

In “The Poem That Changed America: ‘Howl’ Fifty Years Later,” editor Jason Shinder has selected a number of moving memoirs from people obsessed with “Howl” and the cultural changes it signifies. This makes sense because, as Eileen Myles writes in her essay, Ginsberg “wrote both a poem and a culture to put it in.”

In 1976, Shinder, like so many budding writers at the time, sent a letter asking if he could study with Ginsberg. As was his custom, Ginsberg responded quickly, “on a postcard with a picture of himself and Bob Dylan sitting cross-legged at the graveside of Jack Kerouac. ‘Come when you can,’ he scribbled.”

For this exploration of Ginsberg’s extraordinary influence, Shinder, now a celebrated poet himself, solicited personal essays concerning writers’ personal encounters with “Howl.”

The result is a social study of Beat poetry written by other, equally difficulty poets and writers like Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) and Sven Birkerts. Many of these writers fell in love with “Howl,” we find, because it fit in their back pocket and wouldn’t lie down quietly.

The 26 essayists can’t get seem to get very far without quoting from “Howl” directly, particularly its famous first line: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.” And, even though their memoirs and memories are uniquely voiced, most contributors end up in the same place — praising the poems “prophetic” nature, Ginsberg’s immense kindness, or both.

It took some time for those who experienced “Howl” while young to digest it. In his essay “Not Then, Not Now,” Birkerts writes with characteristic elegance that in 1968, at 17, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “A Coney Island of the Mind” was, for him, “a thing to have and keep, to hold as a shield.

“Against what?” he posits. “Well, almost everything, though the situation was not yet completely clear.” But when he got a copy of “Howl,” this “shield” shot up flames. The first lines alone burned away the “practiced disaffection” of other male writers of the time, he wrote.

Kurt Brown encountered “Howl” as a 13-year-old military cadet. For the cadets, it was more shocking than Playboy, Brown recalls. Brown was “compelled” to keep reading while “the forbidden flickered momentarily” before his eyes.

Eileen Myles is particularly good at explaining how “Howl” works, likening it to a “flip book” or other “predecessor of film.” It “functions so often literally like a trailer,” she writes, producing the very spectacle for which it is a preview.

Ginsberg’s Jewishness, which Alice Ostriker explores in “The Poet as Jew: ‘Howl’ Revisited,” seems to function similarly. Ostriker draws Ginberg’s verse near to the Book of Lamentations, where it is impossible to draw clear lines between God, prophet, and city. She also touches on what she sees as his diaspora consciousness: “America will always be, for him, infinite hope and infinite disappointment. That’s very Jewish,” she writes.

Several versions of “Howl” are included, as are a number of quotes from early reviewers and supporters. The hardback edition also contains a CD of Ginsberg reading the poem in Berkeley in 1956. Novelist Rick Moody’s essay, “On the Granite Steps of the Madhouse with Shaven Hands,” explores the connections between “Howl” and the punk music scene, highlighting Ginsberg’s ability, with nothing more than words, to break “everything wide open.”

Moody’s piece is preceded by quotes from the mid-1950s, including the following one from Louis Ginsberg’s letter to his son that some credit as inspiring the addition of the “Footnote to Howl”: “It has violence; it has life; it has vitality. In my opinion, it is a one-sided neurotic view of life; it has not enough glad, Whitmanian affirmations.”

Perhaps this vitality, having more life than affirmations of life, is why “Howl” is still screeching through our lives today.

Was it Ginsberg’s best work? Maybe, maybe not. But it is certainly the one that keeps readers reflecting.

“The Poem that Changed America: ‘Howl’ Fifty Years Later” edited by Jason Shinder (336 pages, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $14-$30).