This weekend I read The Poem that Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later, a collection of essays from poets, academics, and friends of Ginsberg's who recount their initial encouter with Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl." A common thread throughout these accounts is the immense disruption that the poem caused to readers' understanding of themselves, of America, and of poetry. Edited by Jason Shinder, the volume includes essays from Frank Bidart, Sven Birkerts, Amiri Baraka, among others, which testify to the influence of "Howl" in shaping our contemporary sense of human experience. "Howl" speaks to a collective experience of both American dreams of "supernatural ecstasy" and capitalist nightmares of "sexless hydrogen" "Moloch." But, "Howl" testifies to a collective experience that is on the fringe, the edges and extremes in the barely understood realms of human experience, of "Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!" "dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!" "Howl" validates that "sensitive bullshit" of our bodily, affective experience, resanctifying it as "Holy! Holy! Holy!" "Howl" speaks to those "who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity." Yet, while Ginsberg speaks to those dwelling on the misunderstood edges of 'polite' and 'normal' middle-of-the-road American society, "Howl" also assembles a new community that understands humanity via its connectivity, one bridged in the recognition of experiences and ways of being that are conventionally partitioned off in those "buildings" of "judgment,"the "invincible madhouses" and "incomprehensible prison!" "Howl" is interesting to me in its rallying call to readers, charging them to quest for transcendent knowledge through art. "Howl" gave, and continues to give, generations a vocabulary for transcendence and consciousness that challenges the Rational-Objective myth of a stable, singular reality. What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? "Howl" breaks reality into multitudes by reorganizing our perceptual sense of "madness" and sanity. "Howl" teaches its readers to recognize the infinite possibility in the imagination to push into the "unknown."
And, what happens in this transcendent state? Is it the ascent into the New, a cognitive recognition of the previously unknown, yet Now grasped. I leave you not with answers, but with Ginsberg:
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalogue the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtraposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
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,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the golden shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxphone 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.
For more recordings of Ginsberg's poetry, check out PennSound.
Shinder, Jason, ed. The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later. NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006. Print.
I was just reading Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" again, and I am struck also by what critics call "new" or how they track "change". Ginsberg is certainly haunted by Whitman, "What thoughts I have of you tonight Walt Whitman as I wander..." (Supermarket in California). How close if Ginsberg's 'New' to Whitman's 'New' despite their separation by 100 years?
ReplyDeleteI would certainly place them on the same continuum. There is a transcendental awareness of change and the new throughout Whitman. He revels and basks in the freedom of expression possible in poetry. Ginsberg does this too, but I read more of an assault in his work too (on Moloch), in his attack to all that stifles that imagination and its access to the changing New. But I think Whitman and Ginsberg both understood the New as brought upon by a sense of open awareness and free imagination, that the poet is not solely privileged too, but that that the poet acts as our guide or shaman into this state of being.
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