The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374173443 ISBN 13: 9780374173449

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006

Synopsis

A tribute to Ginsberg's signature work, which stirred a generation of angel-headed hipsters to cultural rebellion.

In 1956, City Lights, a small San Francisco bookstore, published Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems with its trademark black-and-white cover. The original edition cost seventy-five cents, but there was something priceless about its eponymous piece. Although it gave a voice to the new generation that came of age in the conservative years following World War II, the poem also conferred a strange, subversive power that continues to exert its influence to this day. Ginsberg went on to become one of the most eminent and celebrated writers of the second half of the twentieth century, and "Howl" became the critical axis of the worldwide literary, cultural, and political movement that would be known as the Beat generation.

The year 2006 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of "Howl," and The Poem That Changed America will celebrate and shed new light on this profound cultural work. With new essays by many of today's most distinguished writers, including Frank Bidart, Andrei Codrescu, Vivian Gornick, Phillip Lopate, Daphne Merkin, Rick Moody, Robert Pinsky, and Luc Sante, The Poem That Changed America reveals the pioneering influence of "Howl" down through the decades and its powerful resonance today.

About this title

About the Author:

Jason Shinder (1955-2008) was the author of three poetry collections: Stupid Hope, Among Women, and Every Room We Ever Slept In. He also edited numerous anthologies, including The Poem that Changed America and The Poem I Turn To. Shinder earned a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and founded the YMCA National Writer's Voice.

From The Washington Post:

Soon after Allen Ginsberg wrote a slim, 44-page volume called Howl and Other Poems in 1956, it became a secret handshake between the cool and the hip, quickly drawing attention from edgy writers and poets around the country. Rebellious young folk found a voice for their Eisenhower-era disillusionment.

The 14-page title poem begins with these famous lines:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. . . .

William Carlos Williams in the original introduction wrote: "Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell." And hell is what follows. "Howl" provided a blistering poetic alternative for a nation being reared on Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot. At the end of "The Waste Land," rain falls on the desert plain. Ginsberg, on the other hand, writes of "the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox."

A year after "Howl" was published, a shipment of newly printed copies was seized by federal authorities. The copies were returned after the ACLU protested, but two months later San Francisco police arrested Ginsberg, City Lights bookstore owner and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti and a City Lights cashier, charging them with trafficking in obscenity. "Howl," the title poem, is rife with overt sexual (and homosexual) references and the kind of explicit language that at the time was keeping Henry Miller's works classified as contraband. Amid Cold War hysteria and the worship of conformity that predictably accompanies such times, Ginsberg had written, "America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I'm not sorry," and "I smoke marijuana every chance I get." Despite the tenor of those times, Judge W.J. Clayton Horn ruled that "Howl" was not entirely devoid of social importance and therefore did not fit the legal definition of obscenity. Ginsberg became one of America's most famous poets.

The Poem that Changed America, edited by Jason Shinder, is a collection of 26 essays about Ginsberg's masterpiece. From the title of the book, we would expect essays arguing that the poem has indeed changed America. We might expect an essay by a prominent CEO whose dirty secret is that his business practices are informed by a Ginsbergian omnisexual Buddhist ethic. We might hope for an essay by a politician or a rap singer or a judge or a filmmaker or an artist or a gay-rights activist or a gangbanger -- perhaps even an actor or a television repairman or a rural schoolteacher in a red state who sneaks "Howl" into the lesson plan. And what a delight it would be to hear from some conservatives -- Jesse Helms, John Ashcroft, perhaps Ann Coulter -- concerning "Howl."

What the reader gets instead is a hodge-podge of essays, mostly written by poets. We see no evidence that the poem "changed America." We don't even much see how "Howl" changed the essayists. The news seems to be that a major poet influenced subsequent writers -- but that's not news, that's a sophomore literature-exam answer.

It's as if Shinder sent out a batch of letters to writers asking them to participate in his book and got turned down by most of the people we might want to hear from. There's a blurb, for instance, from Ferlinghetti, but no essay. We're left with many voices we don't particularly care about, including writers such as Vivian Gornick, Mark Doty and Phillip Lopate, whose solipsistic essay is titled, " 'Howl' and Me." Billy Collins and Robert Pinsky each labor to fill two pages about "Howl," and several of the essays read as if they belong in academic journals, replete with colons in the titles, works-cited pages and footnotes. Marjorie Perloff titles her essay "A Lost Battalion of Platonic Conversationalists: 'Howl' and the Language of Modernism," and we settle in like hungover freshmen at an 8 a.m. lecture.

The book has its high points. Amiri Baraka riffs like Coltrane blowing prose from his tenor in an homage to Ginsberg that shimmers and eviscerates. Rick Moody seems electrified and intoxicated in his splendid essay "On the Granite Steps of the Madhouse with Shaven Heads," interspersing lines from "Howl" into his own improvisational memorial word-chart. And Anne Waldman, co-founder (with Ginsberg) of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colo., contributes a closing essay that bears the marks of beauty, wonder and passion that Ginsberg evidently left on those who knew him.

The great gift of Shinder's book, though, is a 32-minute CD of Ginsberg himself reading "Howl" at the Town Hall Theater in Berkeley in 1956. Hearing the pitch of his voice rise with each succeeding line into a fever of urgency says more than any memorializer could ever hope to convey. His is not the puny voice T.S. Eliot envisioned whimpering at the world's end. Successive generations of youth have come across Howl in used bookstores and had their perspectives shattered, reinforced or altered. As long as humanity remains a heap of wobbling dichotomies, Ginsberg's "Howl," like Thoreau's Walden and Twain's Huckleberry Finn, will remain a monumental cry of dissent against the allures of our darker inclinations.

Reviewed by Eric Miles Williamson
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0374173443
• ISBN 13: 9780374173449
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336
• Editor: Shinder Jason