the beat poets/howl and other poems · is love, but we carry the weight wearily, and so must rest...

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 accidentRebel Without a Cause The Man in the Grey Flannel SuitDisneyland opensEmmett Till murderedMcDonalds Corp. is foundedRosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a bus—the Montgomery Bus Boycott

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS—FROM “THE ART OF BEING A TRUE NON-CONFORMIST”

“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 GINSBERG1926-1997

JACK KEROUAC1922-1969

JOHN CLELLON HOLMES –1926-1988

WILLIAM BURROUGHS--1914 -1997

DIANE DI PRIMA1934—

She raisesin flames

thecity

it glows about herthe Loba

mother wolf &mistress

Of many dances thetreads

in the severed headsthat grow

Like mosseson the flood

the cityMmelts it

flows past herTreading

white feet theycurl around

ashes & the ashessing. they chant

a newcreation myth

ghoul lips oflovers she

leftlike pearls

in the roadshe

dances, seeher 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 self-preservation and order. The nihilistic period is past. The time for sincere creativity, I think is here.”

JOYCE JOHNSON1935—

PETER ORLOVSKY AND ALLEN GINSBERG

NEAL CASSADY 1926-1968

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI 1919---

CONSTANTLY RISKING ABSURDITY (#15)--LAWRENCE 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-

MILTON BY FIRELIGHTBY GARY SNYDER: PIUTE CREEK, AUGUST 1955

“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 roadThe bell-mare clangs in the meadowThat packed dirt for a fill-inScrambling through loose rocksOn an old trail

All of a summer’s day

SOME THOUGHTS ON “HOWL”

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 handand 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.