Howl and Me

Abstract

must have been fourteen and still in junior high school when first encountered Allen Ginsberg's Howl. How it crossed my path I'm not sure; probably my older brother Leonard, who was seventeen and mad about Garcia Lorca and William Blake, tossed it my way, as he did all of his poetic discoveries. We went around for weeks intoning favorite passages?the first two lines, of course, I saw best minds of my generation... down to looking for an angry fix, and fucked in ass by saintly motorcyclists and boxcars boxcars, which for some reason always cracked us up. We loved poem for its phonic fireworks and flaming images, but we also mocked its solemn oracular quality, opportunistically applying an adolescent penchant for parody to any target within easy reach. have to say that Howl struck me from first as a little ludi crous and overblown. In retrospect think may have been threat ened by its intense emotions, and deaf to its more ironic registers. Then, too, much as we embraced Kerouac and Ginsberg as a retort to tranquilized Fifties, we were not immune to ubiqui tous parodies of them in popular culture. Who could not giggle at Bob Hope's beatnik routine, wearing a beret and a fake goatee, banging bongos, snapping his fingers and Yeah, man! Still, we were much more pro-Beat than anti-; and Howl, by virtue of giving America finger, fit neatly into our bag of anarchic provo cations, along with Mad Magazine, raunchier lyrics of rhythm and blues, and, a bit later, Lenny Bruce. have a feeling some shards of Ginsberg's dangerous shrapnel lodged more deeply into my subconscious than realized, because, soon after reading it, wrote a poem called I Hate It All and turned it into my English teacher for creative writing extra-credit. This lurid rant enlisted every clich? about gnawing rats, crying men and the dirt of slums, disguising my personal resent