The Poem That Changed America

Jason Shinder, editor, has gathered some wonderful views of Ginsberg’s marvelous and terrible iceberg – “Howl”. I’m astounded by the numerical fact of years since the 6 Gallery Reading, San Francisco, 1955.

This collection has made pull out all my Ginsberg collections – specifically, Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions. “Howl” is an astounding achievement. In some way, it invents the wheel.

A few passages from “Howl”: Fifty Years Later (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006):

“Howl” is a poem full of miracles and event, not the least of which is its own machinery. Because you are in it, witness, and you watch the poem grow. The only promise in this poem is more, and it makes good, not in some other world but in this one that you read in.

– from “Repeating Allen,” Eileen Myles

Presumably—and here’s the Buddhist paradox that really makes “Howl” a provocation—the Mind that brought us LeFrak City and the hydrogen bomb is the same Mind the reader brings to bear on the poem itself, assuming that Mind was formed, as Ginsberg’s was, under the tutelage of the New Critics. It must also be the Mind Ginsberg himself used, as we now know, to revise the poem as methodically as a formalist poet might have done—but that is too much to get your mind around.

– from “Welcoming 'Howl' into the Canon,” David Gates

Seizing its freedom as it did, as it does, from the very first line, “Howl” restored fro me the sense of annunciatory risk. As before, I found I was reading in bursts, as if it were something glowing up spasmodically in a grate, lit bright and quickly burnt through. I couldn’t take it as a poem. Not then, not now. For to read it as a poem, knowing what I know, how I invested myself once, would have been to finish it off, four-corner framing an agitation that would always run deeper than my idea of art.

– from “Not Then, Not Now,” Sven Birkerts

Poetry seems to close down periodically to something safe and barely felt. Then comes a poet who thrusts the door open with a great shocking bang. Allen Ginsberg did that for so many of us.

– from “The Best Bones for Soup Have Meat on Them,” Marge Piercy