Common Sense	Common Sense Archive

It was a lovely spring day. I stepped outside my store to have a smoke and a Fresca. My neighbor's daughter, a young woman who had just finished her first year at college, accompanied by two very good-looking young men (one of whom was lying upside down on the stoop stairs), was screaming out loud. She had a book in her hand and was, presumably, reading from a text. I tried to listen to the words through the screaming.

Suddenly, I got it! They were reading from "Howl," Allen Ginsberg's signature poem. And, I guess, a screaming version of " Howl" was entirely appropriate. It was 50 years ago this year that "Howl" was first published in a City Lights edition. The publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was later indicted on an obscenity charge (he beat the rap). The poem has gone on to become a central event in the Beat literature and a founding text of the American counter-culture of the 1950s and 1960s. My neighbor's daughter and her friends finished their reading-- and, yes, the one young man read his portion of the poem while upside down, also completely appropriate (how did they know?)-- and then she told me: "Here we are, right in the heart of Boston's financial district, broadcasting 'Howl.'" I found the whole spontaneous event just delightful. I dashed into the store and pulled a copy of this nice book-CD release of Ginsberg's and gave it to her. The release is from "The Voice Of The Poet" series, the editor of which is J.D. McClatchy, and has a CD in which Ginsberg reads "Howl" and other texts.

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Ginsberg had worked on "Howl" for a couple years before it was published. In the new book, 'Howl' Fifty Years Later: The Poem That Changed America, edited by Jason Shinder, there is included a reprint of Ginsberg's May, 1956, mimeographed production of " Howl," which he handed out to friends, published here for the first time. Ginsberg had his first public reading of "Howl" in San Francisco, during the high-water moment of the San Francisco Renaissance. Timing is all. It's hard for a poem to get famous. Just as hard for a poet. Ginsberg went on to read "Howl" in venues around the world. Ginsberg became something larger than just another American poet. He became an icon, not something I would aspire to. But the poem spread to everywhere. There's a famous photo of a group of cadets at one of the US military institutes, sitting around a table, in their smart uniforms, reading copies of "Howl" (if memory serves, one cadet is scratching his head). The photo is both jarring and wholesome at the same time, something hard to explain.

Should a poem be as long as " Howl"? Walt Whitman's ghost hovers over it and Walt wanted his garrulousness to be as big as the country, which strikes me as a bit of hubris. "Howl" is also very New York, very talky, and infused with Ginsberg's Jewish heritage. It is a paean to injustice collecting, if you want to employ a phrase fashionable with some anti-gay shrinks of the 1950s. But still news today. And still a great poem. And the injustices are still out there to be collected!

Still I wonder. Cultural artifacts are new for each new generation-- witness my neighbor's daughter's delight in screaming out " Howl" to passers-by in the financial district. Yet the monoliths are no longer new; busloads of tourists see the Pyramids all over again. But there is another consideration. Don't the fabulous cultural moments get worn down over time, like great rocks massaged by the eternal tides? Having created "Howl," Ginsberg was stuck with it for the rest of his life, though, of course, he did move on and created a vast body of work. Think of Judy Garland and "Over The Rainbow." Could she ever get away from it? Did she want to? (I once made the joke: that Judy, late in her life, staggered into a "Judy Garland Look-A-Like Kontest," sang "Over The Rainbow" and came in third! Proving that, at some point, once an artifact becomes universal, others can do it better than the creator, sort of the theme of Henry James's story, "The Real Thing.") Not quite like Kate Smith and "God Bless America," lucky she had it. And God bless Kate herself! And Totie Fields too! Being a public celebrity is a big job-- you have to perform. Again and again. " Play it again, Sam!"

Ginsberg was a political and cultural radical and dedicated his life to this mission. I recall Tony Kushner criticizing Ginsberg for having marched with the NAMBLA contingent in some gay pride parade years ago. What was the point? Did Tony Think Allen was going to change stripes in old age? Odd.

Three decades after he first published the poem, Ginsberg wrote: "In publishing 'Howl,' I was curious to leave behind after my generation an emotional time bomb that would continue exploding in US consciousness in case our military-industrial-nationalist complex solidified into a repressive police bureaucracy. As a sidelight, I thought to disseminate a poem so strong that a clean Saxon four-letter word might enter high school anthologies permanently and deflate tendencies toward authoritarian strong-arming (evident in later-50's neoconservative attacks on Kerouac's heartfelt prose and Burroughs's poetic humor)."

Moloch!

Author Profile:  Mitzel
	Mitzel was a founding member of the Fag Rag collective, and has been a Guide columnist since 1986. He manages Calamus Books near Boston's South Station.
	Email:	mitzel@calamusbooks.com
	Website:	calamusbooks.com