notevayas
March 23, 2008 - 02:50 PM
QUOTE (SimpleBear @ March 23, 2008 - 11:06 AM)
In case anyone didn't know that was "Howl", by another one of my heroes, Alan Ginsburg. I had just gotten back from taking Denny to High Mass at St. Mathews, and I was watching a documentary of Ginsburg on Logo.
Another one of my heroes, Norman Mailer, called Ginsburg "the most important writer of the century, maybe of all time" and I agree with that accessment. (assessment, but accessability is an issue..Note)
I hope you enjoyed it. It was a calculated risk, and I don't know if it was wise, but it feels right to me.
Sorry if any of you were offended, or didn't understand. There are provacotive words and images in that work, but I love it, and I wanted to share it with youse folks.
The thing is Bear, you just finished watching a documentary that put "Howl" in context. Without that context this poem can be too inaccessable and crude sounding. This poem mixes "intensely personal experience" including drug influenced visions, references to the poet's friends and family, "socio-political critique, and irreverant profanity". I took the time to read a line by line breakdown of the poem, but without that, I would have dismissed it as rude lunatic ravings posted on Easter for purely the shock value with the excuse that the poet is famous and celebrated in some circles.
I say it is all well and good to share, but like my guy says "Time and Place! Time and Place!" That is why you call me a "nancy" I think, and often point out that you are a "guy" and "that's the way you roll". You say you do not usually post about politics or religion "without knowing the opinions of everyone in the room", but you post a very political poem with Biblical reference from Leviticus, etc. on Easter day. And of course it includes many sexual references. It seems purposefully incendiary, as is the poem itself, even after one deciphers it.
for example this excerpt... cannot be fathomed without knowing that his mother was mentally ill and had a lobotomy, as well as knowing that his relationship with her was complicated... hence the (expletive deleted)
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur-
nished room emptied down to the last piece of
mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted
on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that
imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of
hallucination
this article may be helpful..
After 50 Years, Ginsberg's 'Howl' Still Resonatesby John McChesney
October 27, 2006 · When poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti heard
Howl in 1955, he sent a telegram to Alan Ginsberg."I greet you at the beginning of a great career," he wrote. (He was borrowing from what he remembered as Emerson's words to Walt Whitman upon receiving one of the first copies of
Leaves of Grass.)
Ferlinghetti recognized that Ginsberg's work had the potential to reshape the dominant poetic tradition. Fifty years later, the poem stands as a watershed.
Ginsberg, the son of a traditional poet and initially a student at Columbia University, found liberation from the East Coast establishment in the San Francisco of Ferlinghetti and the beat poets.
"San Francisco was, in a way, a refuge for people from all over the country," says Jonah Raskin who authored a book about
Howl called American Scream. "In the '40s there was a substantial community of anarchists, pacifists, experimental poets. In part because it was far away from the East Coast centers of power and you could do things that you couldn't do elsewhere, there was an invitation to experiment. Ginsberg became part of this intellectual and cultural scene right away."
Ginsberg bought a tape recorder and practiced reading his poems aloud because poetry as performance art was blossoming in San Francisco nightclubs.
He quit his work in corporate advertising and began work on
Howl. He first read the poem at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. Jack Kerouac of
On the Road fame was there pouring wine.
And so was Ferlinghetti, who had added a coda to that congratulatory 1955 telegram: "When do we get the manuscript?"
Publishing
Howl was not a trivial matter.
Ferlinghetti -- who got his manuscript -- rightly anticipated trouble with the law over the poem's explicit content. So he sent it to England to have it printed.
Not long after it arrived in San Francisco, police arrested a bookseller at City Lights -- the iconic book store -- and charged publisher Ferlinghetti with obscenity. The ensuing trial delighted Ginsberg, who knew it would only enhance the poem's reputation. Judge Clayton Horn ruled that the poem had not been written with lewd intent.
Poet Bob Hass says
Howl still provokes strong criticism.
"It still seems like literary sensationalism and bad manners in a repellant way to certain kinds of writers," says Hass. "But my experience of teaching students year after year American poems that interest me is that they mostly respond very powerfully to this poem, in a way that every generation has."
...
<A href="http://" target=_blank>
...Just kidding...
...
...But only another gay, is allowed to call another gay man, eather 'gay' or a '[fa*]'...And not mean it in a good way...
