beat poets.howl

THE BEAT
POETS/ HOWL
AND OTHER
POEMS
What else is happening in 1955, when Allen Ginsberg gives his famous
reading of Howl in San Francisco?—
James Dean dies in car accident
Rebel Without a Cause
The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit
Disneyland opens
Emmett Till murdered
McDonalds Corp. is founded
Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a bus—the Montgomery Bus
Boycott
T ENNESSEE W I L L IAM S—FROM “ T H E A R T OF B EI NG
A T R UE NON-C ONFOR MIST”
“Reactionary opinion descends like a ton of bricks on the head of
any artist who speaks out against the current of prescribed
ideas. . . . We are all under wraps of one kind or another,
brambling before the specter of investigating committees.”
By 1948, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)
had begun its work. David Halberstam writes of it:
“The House Committee . . .included a large number of the most
unattractive men in American public life—bigots, racists,
reactionaries, and sheer buffoons.”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: “it is not the poet, but what he
observes which is revealed as obscene. The great obscene
wastes of Howl are the sad wastes of the mechanized world,
lost among the atom bombs and insane nationalisms.”
ALLEN GINSBERG
1926-1997
JACK KEROUAC
1922-1969
JOHN CLELLON HOLMES –1926-1988
WILLIAM BURROUGHS--1914 -1997
DIANE DI PRIMA
1934—
She raises
in flames
the
city
it glows about her
the Loba
mother wolf &
mistress
Of many dances the
treads
in the severed heads
that grow
Like mosses
on the flood
the city
M
flows past her
Treading
white feet they
curl around
ashes & the ashes
sing. they chant
a new
creation myth
ghoul lips of
lovers she
left
like pearls
in the road
she
dances, see
her eyes
glow the
city
CARL SOLOMON 1928-1993
FROM MISHAPS BY CARL SOLOMON (1966)
“On the subway twice a week, I pass and can see the High
School I graduated from, James Monroe, and am recalled to
the early heroic, pre-decadent days of my generation. When
we were busy with scrap drives, orienting ourselves toward
being public-minded citizens rather than hopped-up,
disoriented nuts. The reaction was a hatred of
regimentation, and when the reaction set in it was bitter and
fatal to some. Perhaps, now that the fifties are forgotten,
another reaction will set in, in the interests of selfpreservation and order. The nihilistic period is past. The
time for sincere creativity, I think is here.”
JOYCE JOHNSON
1935—
PETER ORLOVSKY AND ALLEN GINSBERG
NEAL CASSADY 1926-1968
L AWRENCE FERLINGHETTI 1919---
CONSTANTLY RISKING ABSURDITY
(#15)
--L AWRENCE FERLINGHETTI
Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of day
performing entrechats
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be
For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap
And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems.
Copyright 1958
GARY SNYDER: 1930-
MILT O N B Y FIRE L IGHT
B Y GA RY SNY D ER: P I UT E C R EEK , AUGUST 19 5 5
“O hell, what do mine eyes
with grief behold?”
Working with an old
Singlejack miner, who can sense
The vein and cleavage
In the very guts of rock, can
Blast granite, build
Switchbacks that last for years
Under the beat of snow, thaw, mule-hooves.
What use, Milton, a silly story
Of our lost general parents,
eaters of fruit?
The Indian, the chainsaw boy,
And a string of six mules
Came riding down to camp
Hungry for tomatoes and green apples.
Sleeping in saddle-blankets
Under a bright night-sky
Han River slantwise by morning.
Jays squall
Coffee boils
In ten thousand years the Sierras
Will be dry and dead, home of the scorpion.
Ice-scratched slabs and bent trees.
No paradise, no fall,
Only the weathering land
The wheeling sky,
Man, with his Satan
Scouring the chaos of the mind.
Oh Hell!
Fire down
Too dark to read, miles from a road
The bell-mare clangs in the meadow
That packed dirt for a fill-in
Scrambling through loose rocks
On an old trail
All of a summer’s day
SOM E T H OUGHTS ON “ H OW L”
Kenneth Rexroth:
This kind of poetry is “in one of the oldest traditions, that of
Hosea or the other, angry minor prophets of the Bible.”
Ginsberg said that the first section of the poem was “typed out
madly in one afternoon, a tragic custard-pie comedy of wild
phrasing, meaningless images for the beauty of abstract
poetry of mind running along making awkward combinations
like Charlie Chaplin’s walk, long saxophone-like chorus lines I
knew Kerouac would hear sound of—Taking off from his own
inspired prose line—really, a new poetry.”
Ginsberg:
“Part I, a lament for the Lamb in America with
instances of remarkable lamb-like youths; Part II
names the monster of mental consciousness that
preys on the Lamb; Part III a litany of affirmation of
the Lamb in its glory: ‘O starry-spangled shock of
Mercy!’; the structure of Part III, pyramidal, with a
graduated long response to the fixed base.”
FOOTNOTE TO HOWL
“Footnote” draws on Kaddish—Hebrew prayer of praise:
May His great name be blessed for ever, and to all eternity!
Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and
honoured, adored and lauded
be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, above and beyond
all the blessings, hymns, praises and consolations that are
uttered in the world! And say, Amen.a
“Footnote” begins with: “Holy, Holy, Holy, Holy, Holy, Holy,
Holy, Holy, Holy, Holy, Holy, Holy, Holy, Holy, Holy”
The poem also echoes Whitman here—from Leaves of Grass:
“Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or
am touched from;
The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer,
This head is more than churches or bibles or creeds.”
From “Footnote”:
“The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!
The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand
and asshole holy! . . .
The bum’s as holy as the seraphim! the madman is
holy as you and my soul are holy.
SONG
The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction
the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.
Who can deny?
In dreams
it touches
the body,
in thought
constructs
a miracle,
in imagination
anguishes
till born
in human-looks out of the heart
burning with purity-for the burden of life
is love,
but we carry the weight
wearily,
and so must rest
in the arms of love
at last,
must rest in the arms
of love.
No rest
without love,
no sleep
without dreams
of love-be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
or machines,
the final wish
is love
--cannot be bitter,
cannot deny,
cannot withhold
if denied:
the weight is too heavy
--must give
for no return
as thought
is given
in solitude
in all the excellence
of its excess.
The warm bodies
shine together
in the darkness,
the hand moves
to the center
of the flesh,
the skin trembles
in happiness
and the soul comes
joyful to the eye-yes, yes,
that's what
I wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.