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