Howl

I've left this post hang for a disconcertingly long time, I think I was more or less ready to go ten days ago (seeing as that's when I'd finished reading the thing), but here we are. Let's see if I can remember what I wanted to say.

Shamed by my ignorance in having not yet read Allen Ginsberg's seminal piece, Howl- what could I do but get the thing from the library? Sent my way was the 50th anniversary edition annotated by the author himself, and yes, you better believe I went through the various notes and appendices.

I started reading it on the transit ride over to meet up with my friend Andy for dinner (remember you owe Andy a dinner, me) getting to the end of part II or III by the time I reached Yonge and Bloor. Naturally I enjoyed the image I projected of the cool intellectual, leaning against the wall, my sole accessory an oversized book containing a single poem.

(Style note: didn't even consciously avoid repeating sole/sole or single/single, yet happened onto sole/single. A nice surprise, and some alliteration to boot)

The introduction by Ginsberg raised a red flag regarding the annotations. It's great that the notes are from him, there really is no better method of getting into an authors head (if we really must do so) than by asking the author himself, however we have to beware of the potential for Big Brother style historical revisioning. The line "In publishing "Howl," I was curious to leave behind after my generation an emotional time bomb that would continue exploding in U.S. consciousness in case our military-industrial-nationalist complex solidified into a repressive police bureaucracy." is hard to take seriously. Either he thought that at the time of publishing in 1956, or it came to him in the "now" of 1986, but either way it sounds arrogant.

It's difficult to comment specifically on the text largely because of the long form style used (and then there's the rorschach factor, but I'll try to ignore that). Individual images get lost in the jumble. "Hydrogen jukebox" is a fun one, and I love the line
"...boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in/
grandfather night,"
as the form perfectly follows the function, the speaker/the listener is seeing a train pass by with the repetition of boxcars. Were this designed to be read instead of heard (actually Ginsberg went to great pains, and additional expense, to make sure the script was just exactly right- so the poem was in fact also designed to be read) I'd call this an imagist bit of poetry. That probably isn't the right term, I'm just referring to the imagist movement as exemplified by Ezra Pound and, more importantly, William Carlos Williams- I say more importantly because when I think of imagist poetry I only ever think of his "The Red Wheelbarrow", but also because Williams was a big influence on Ginsberg, personally supporting the mans work, and even writing the introduction to the first printing of Howl and Other Poems back in '56.

I should note that the title is probably more correctly referred to as "Howl for Carl Solomon", a close friend, perhaps lover (I forget, but I'm sure it's mentioned in the book here..) of Ginsberg. The first part of Howl was written upon learning of Carl's getting sent to a psychiatric institute, something that would have elicited strong enough feelings on its own, but far and away compounded by the fact that Ginsberg had just authorized a lobotomy for his mother(!) who was at the same facility at some point.

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,"

Ginsberg is raging at the system that would take someone who is different and crush them until they fit an acceptable mold- fair enough. But according to THE Carl Solomon in a note after the text, he was institutionalized by choice. It's unclear if he means he signed the papers himself to get committed, or if his "crazy" actions and getting committed were all a rather convenient way for him to make a statement, or prove a point to himself or others. My money is on the latter option. Regardless, Carl seems to think Howl was written under false pretenses, and there's a very interesting account

(how often have I said something was 'interesting' in this piece? It already feels like a lot, with more on the way..)

of Ginsberg going to Carl and apologizing for, in effect, reducing him to a single image and broadcasting that image to the world. This, I thought, demonstrated a humility that I found endearing in Ginsberg.

Returning to Howl, I'll complain about something that really gets under my skin: the start of the 43 strophe (man, I hope you know what a strophe is, it's pretty much Ginsberg's favourite word when discussing poetry... well, it comes up a lot. It's not a big deal though- (in modern poetry) any separate section or extended movement in a poem, distinguished from a stanza in that it does not follow a regularly repeated pattern.) is all praise for Neal Cassady. I always got the feeling that the Beat obsession with Cassady stemmed from either being hopelessly in love with the guy or with being completely jealous of him. If it were me, I think I'd be jealous of all the attention he gets. Maybe I AM, and that's the source of my irritation. So, yeah, not necessarily a literary justification to dislike this passage.

A similar distaste for the other Beat peoples sort of clouds my opinion of the Footnote to Howl, with the proclamations of "holy Kerouac... holy Burroughs...", however I appreciate that the point of the footnote is to say that EVERYTHING is holy, and it's a point well taken. Less well taken is the exaggerated space filling of the first repetition of "Holy!" My suspicion is that this was a purely visual aesthetic choice, 15 "Holy!"'s to exactly cross the typed page, run across as a banner for the rest of the Footnote. For a poem that lasts almost a half an hour of being read out loud this strikes as self indulgent.

My collection then goes on to showcase several drafts of Howl, copied from their original typewritten forms, with pencilled in notes, with a clearer version typed up on the opposing page. I very quickly lost interest in going over this gradual evolution of the work, however one change did jump out at me: the first line originally went
"I saw the best minds of my generation
generation destroyed by madness
starving, mystical, naked,"

With the chief difference being the replacing of 'mystical' with 'hysterical', I think with the purpose of removing any positive connotation that could arise with the martyrdom of being one of "the best minds of a generation" destroyed.

It's no wonder I skipped through all these different draft notes- it's a hundred pages of a 194 page book! Yeesh!

Then comes the section with commentary by Carl Solomon, a meandering retelling of his time in therapy, being brought in and out of insulin comas, without any direct reference to Howl, excepting of course that it showcases the manner in which the best minds get destroyed.

If I seem to hold too fast to the opening line of the poem, well, I'm taking it as the introduction of the piece, it frames the entirety of Howl. I think the line deserves to be held on to.

("on to" or "onto"? Both have been looking weird to me lately..)

Page 118 has a highly revelant quote touching on something I will return to again and again (I've, uh, basically got the last line of this post all ready, it's written in my litte notepad beside me, and this quote *spoilers* basically states the point right now. That doesn't mean stop reading!)

"The case of the so-called lunatic opened up by Artaud and no other writer is really the case of Socrates, who was condemned to death for being what, in his day, was considered "bright," that is to say not stupid. I say that we live in a generation of charlatanry, propaganda and corruption, and that there is no room for an honest man on either side of the Iron Curtain."

P. 124-146 contains the real meat of the annotations, with every allusion in the poem broken down and explained. Sure enough, the number of literary allusions is staggering, but more often than not the allusions are to in-jokes/personal anecdotes that only friends could have had any hope of being on the ground floor of. At a web-series premier I was talking to a friend of mine, D (I feel what he says, and I'm about to record, makes him sound a little myopic, so a sneaky initial will have to be his name here. But if you wanted to be a little sneaky yourself and figure out to whom I'm referring, here's a hint: the D is for Double. Cool Geoff could almost certainly figure out who this is from that clue- but don't say who it is in the comments below, I'd have to figure out how to delete comments!)

Anyways, I say to D how I'm reading Howl, and having difficulty wrapping my head around it. Is it good, is it bad, do I even like it? I mention the allusions, and to this he has something grandiose to say, "when something can't be understood by everyone, is it art?" I'm slightly paraphrasing, but that was ultimately the gist of it. It's been long since drilled into me to be fairly accommodating with my definition of art, so I went on the defensive. However, I took the wrong way to go about it, talking some nonsensical gibberish about art being in everything, citing a sunset as my example. Well, D isn't talking about nature, and wasn't having any of that. It was just about here that the lights went down and we went our separate ways for the show, but the conversation stayed with me.

I'm not sure how it happened, but eventually I thought of the question in terms of Barney the Dinosaur. Yeah, I REALLY have no idea how that happened- I'm thankful I was too old for that monstrosity when it showed up on the scene- but that's the thing right there. I don't like Barney because I'm not the target audience. I can still appreciate the craft that goes into creating something that hits its target audience so successfully (your mileage may vary on that one), but it just isn't for me.

With that example in mind I attacked Howl with a new perspective. Who IS the target audience? Well, the highly literate, sure. So it's on an even keel with scholarly publications as far as its impenetrability goes. That it goes further into the in-side stories, well, what of it? The target audience is simply trimmed down that much smaller. It doesn't delegitimize the work. I do think that a necessary consequence of having such a small pool of insiders to speak to suggests that the vast majority of Howl's extended audience is made up of people projecting their own ideas onto the poem to enjoy. Well, what of THAT? I dare say the lions share of poetry is enjoyed in just that manner... it's rather a consequence of that intellectual leap to understand another persons ideas. Forget poetry- this is every day human interaction!

I left myself a note in my book mark here to check out the bottom right of p. 131- okay, right, it's an excerpt from a book by Carl Solomon (titled "More Mishaps"). It's a bit dismissive, but hardly a unique opinion, and phrased in a rather fun manner:

"History moves in strange ways, I met for the first time my fellow Beatnik to be, Allen Ginsberg. I gave Allen an apocryphal history of my adventures and pseudo-intellectual deeds of daring. He meticulously took note of everything I said (I thought at the time that he suffered from "the writer's disease," imagined that he was a great writer). Later, when I decided to give up the flesh and become a professional lunatic-saint, he published all of this data, compounded partly of truth, but for the most raving self-justification, crypto-bohemian boasting ala Rimbaud, effeminate prancing, and esoteric aphorisms plagarized from Kierkegaard and others- in the form of Howl. Thus he enshrined falsehood as truth and raving as common sense for future generations to ponder over and be misled."

The page turns over, and I may as well include this quote, though I know you already get the point already concerning Carl's opinion of the piece: "Ginsberg was just having a verbal orgy at this point. He likes words. No hallucinations were involved in the 'breakdown'; just overexposure to the metaphysical imagination of Manhattan's crackpot intelligentsia vintage 1956."

Quick note to self: it's rather ridiculous that you needed dictionary.com to look up "aberrated".  Characterized by defects, abnormality, or deviation from the usual, typical, or expected course.
You know, as in "aberration". Buh.

Last note and I can throw out this bookmark/nofrills receipt.

Ah, this is a note informing me that Carl Solomon worked as an "editor for his uncle A. A. Wynn's Ace Books, publishing Burroughs' "Junky" and contracting Ur-text of Kerouac's "On the Road"." Not what you know, but who.

I recall wanting to mention this as well: printed immediately below on p. 143 are two rude letters to Malcolm de Chazal and T.S. Eliot. A pre-internet version of trolling.

Man, I've spent far and away too much time on this, and haven't even yet gotten to the obscenity trial or the direct literary inspirations on Ginsberg. All right, the bare bones of the obscenity trial is that for something to be classified obscene in the U.S. it must be deemed to have NO social value/commentary. IF there is no social value/commentary, then it can be evaluated whether or not the work is obscene. Despite the prosecution's best efforts to trip up the various poets and professors (discounting their own witnesses of course) they couldn't even argue that it had no social value/commentary. Therefore, not obscene, free speech, constitution, yada yada. And of course the free publicity from the trial was a nice bonus.

Sorry, looking back at the book, replace my use of social value/commentary with "social importance". I'd go back and change what I previously entered here, but I think it'll be clearer if I leave it as is.

Mustn't leave out this gem from the end of the courts ruling: "In considering material claimed to be obscene it is well to remember the motto: "Honi soit qui mal y pense." (Evil to him who evil thinks.)"

As for the listed influences on Ginsberg, besides the ever present Williams and Whitman, there's:
Christopher Smart
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Guillaume Apollinaire
Kurt Schwitters
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Antonin Artaud
Federico Garcia Lorca
Hart Crane

You'll forgive me if I skip the act of recording which poems are cited here, but sure enough you can see the thread connecting them all together for Howl.

That's it, that's everything in the book. Yeesh, I mostly came out sounding negative about the whole thing, and I see I've skipped out entirely on any mention of Moloch from part II. You know what I think? One persons brilliance is another persons insanity. That was basically the ruling at the trial, and it's the message of Howl, with the further addendum that society is built to destroy those it views as insane. The fact that, whether by design or accident (I'm still not convinced one way or the other), Howl works as a device to sort those who accept "brilliance" and those who dismiss it. That's kind of amazing.

Bet you wish I just said that at the start and skipped all the recording of minutiae from the book, huh?