Howl for Carl Solomon

As a student of literature, one typically finds oneself edged towards The Classics, the literary canon, all the works that themselves form the literary tradition.  This is partially because that's how the curriculum "has always been done" and partially because The Classics are so for a reason and greatness has a way of making itself felt at whatever epoch.

As a student of the art of writing, however, it's quite the opposite; we as writers are encouraged to steep ourselves in the contemporary; to be of-the-moment in our subject matter, our style and diction, and our understanding.  In my current quest to read all the books in my little library that I bought and never touched, I recently encountered a poet whose writing managed to elude me within both of these paradigms--the theory and the practice.  Unquestionably, I would place Allen Ginsberg within an essential canon of modern literature, with Howl probably on my list of Top Ten Poems that Shaped Modern Poetic Thought.  (Forthcoming.  Obviously.)  How I managed to eke out a university education without ever reading it mystifies me; nevertheless.

Much of the subject matter of Howl was widely contested as obscene when it was published; there's truth in this, but in spite of the obscenity, there is much that is beautiful, startling and painful.  The pieces that struck me most poignantly are what I choose to share here.


From the introduction by William Carlos Williams:

"It is a howl of defeat.  Not defeat at all for he has gone through defeat as if it were an ordinary experience, a trivial experience.  Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated."
"...the spirit of love survives to ennoble our lives if we have the wit and the courage and the faith--and the art! to persist.  It is the belief in the art of poetry that has gone hand in hand with this man into his Golgotha..."
"We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness.  Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels."


From Howl for Carl Solomon, by Allen Ginsberg:

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

"...incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between..."
"...whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes..."
"...who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task..."
"...who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons..."

"...who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade..."
"...who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second..."
"...returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East / Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon..."
"...to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head..."
"...and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio / with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years."
"I'm with you in Rockland / where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse"
"I'm with you in Rockland / in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night"


From the Footnote to Howl:

"The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!"
"Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements!"
"Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space holy the fourth dimension..."
"Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!"