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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Howl, a preview to acclimate the prospective buyer, September 13, 2006
A Kid's Review
This review is from: Howl (Paperback)
Before starting, allow me to mention the fact that I am reviewing solely the poem "Howl" in Howl and Other Poems.
I read "Howl" this summer as a 16 year old and was absolutely stunned and amazed. As far as enjoying the poem I was entirely too confused by it the first time I read it to actually enjoy it; so let me start by giving the reader of this and prospective buyer of Howl and other Poems the advice to read "Howl" several times before forming a concrete opinion about it. To best describe it shortly, "Howl" is the story of a man that has been through and survived and recognized the horrors of the post war 1940's and the 1950's. "Howl" shows the oppression that people faced during this era and gives a ghastly description of the government and institutions in general at this time. The main strength of Ginsberg's poem is to expand the mind of the reader, even if that means confusing the reader. Take for example the stanza:
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue, amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
This is an absolutely mind boggling sentence. It attacks the areas of fashion and advertising and the powers of editors in newspapers. Stanzas like that are why I enjoy this poem, it is a critique of the time that Ginsberg lived in and allows one to see parallels in the current day and age.
Howl was written over the course of 1955-1956, and is truly a product of its time. This was the beginning of the beat generation, with other writers such as Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey. "Howl" reflects the post war era in which Ginsberg lived; an era of, as he believes, governmental oppression and assimilation. These thoughts are best conveyed in the stanzas discussing mental institutions and how they try to force a disease that may not actually be a disease out of you. Ginsberg also critiques the everlasting effects of a 1950's mental institution with lines such as "I'm with you in Rockland where 50 more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void" and "(who were) returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears, and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East". Along with Ginsberg's encounters with people in the post-war era and his personal experiences of mental institutionalization and the oppression he faced for being homosexual, drugs contributed much to Ginsberg's poem. Howl would not have come into existence without many of the drugs that started the new mindset of the beat generation such as Peyote, LSD, and DMT. Howl was a product of its own culture and it began and shaped much of the following beatnik era.
I do not consider "Howl" to have weaknesses as a peace of literature, but there are certain times where the reader is often confused by what Ginsberg is saying. Much of this is not so much because of the prosody of the poem but because so many of the ideas in an individual stanza are disconnected that it confuses the reader. For me, one of the stanzas that was so disconnected that it was confusing reads "who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed". The prospective reader must be prepared to allow the images that Ginsberg provides in "Howl" give them a new way of thinking rather than try and dissect its every stanza. I very much recommend reading "Howl"; it changed my outlook on the world.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Poets see hell through the eyes of angels, July 16, 2006
This review is from: Howl (Paperback)
I reread this little book before attempting to review it. I remembered that it was a mad mantra of transcendent power from the heart of hell, but I didn't remember how nondated it was. This work is fresher and more relevant than 99% of what passes for poetry today. How can something last nearly 50 years without going stale or becoming trite? How can it be even more real now? Maybe it is because Ginsberg ripped it live, screaming, and bleeding from a place beyond time and beyond space. He tore it from the living bowels of MOLOCH itself and showed it to HIM. After all, what does divine madness know of time?
This poem is transcendence itself. It demonstrates that when you plunge into the deepest pit of hell it either kills you, or perhaps it burns out your insides so that you become a soulless zombie, OR you transcend it and rise howling to become a Mad Poet Saint who can truely encompass the Sacred in the Profane.
Read this poem, and the others like America, A Supermarket in California, Sunflower Sutra, Wild Orphan, and In Back of the Real. It's almost frightening how relevant to daily life it is. If you didn't know it, you would never guess that it was written in the 50's. Of course Ginsberg does invoke, holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space the fourth dimension, in the Footnote. Maybe that's why it's timeless. As Cassady used to say, we know time, yes, we know time....
I wish I would have been there for that first public reading in San Fran with Kerouac running around the audience passing the wine jug. On all the planes, the Gods themselves must have jumped back in shock as a flaming monkeywrench of living poetry was jammed through the spokes of the great quivering meat wheel of conception....
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Shame, May 5, 2006
This review is from: Howl (Paperback)
It is a shame that this annotated edition of one of the great beat/modern poems is out of print. I strongly suggest you get this book while it is still available at the used bookshops.
Ginsberg claimed to have written this work spontaneously, but this work shows the poem was written over a period of time, and edited. Maybe he was only referring to the first draft! It really doesn't matter,but looking at the drafts does give one insight into how Ginsberg created the poem(s) and the development of a classic.
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