Howl (2010)

Oh My Gods!  Exploration of Ginsberg's epic poem and the controversy surrounding it!  Think about the fuss over Gable not giving a damn a few years earlier (1939) then Ginsberg comes out and talks about sodomy and male genitalia (1954)!  


Ginsberg was a gay rights and mental health activist at a time when both were viewed as things to lock away and hide.  He was a man searching for spirituality and peace in a country searching for another excuse to go to war and using the fear of Communism and the love of a White Baptist God to do so.


Howl breaks the poetic conventions of rhyme, line length, metrical pattern, and overall poetic structure.  It is a free form streaming of consciousness exploring his own childhood, his countries politics and the lives of those around him.  


When I first read Howl it opened my eyes to what language could be.  Secondary school poetry was rigidly classified by meeting the conventions.  It had to rhyme, it had to be in stanzas, it had to be able to be clapped to.  Crassness had no place in poetry, you could use metaphor but not meta-phwoar.  


For someone on a diet of Blake, Shelley, Keats, Lawson and Patterson Howl opened me to my own voice.


Stream of consciousness was OK.  The poem became about expressing who you were, where you were, when you were.  It became a statement of the larger picture and removed the constraints of "Today you will write a piece on happiness" which seemed to be the English teachers idea of introducing people to poetry.  (No wonder so many of my friends think that poetry peaked with the Raven and the writings of Dr Suess!)


Howl helped me go from:


The little bird on it's branch
Dreams of the far off ranch
It spreads it's wings into the sky
Drifting on the wind up high
Freedom like this makes him happy
Meter and rhythm are so crappy

To:

Happiness... the hollow pursuit
The needing to own and be owned
Possessions filling the voids in our souls
The latest, the greatest, the next must have thing

Happiness... sitting alone in the dark
Waiting for a call you know won't come
Fooling yourself that his preoccupation is you
Dreaming that the next moment the cell will ring

Happiness... that myth espoused from the pulpit
That carrot dangled in our faces hinting
Showing us the afterlife that is gone!
An empty space filled with advertising and shopping

Happiness co-opted by corporations
Governments in four year spaces
Lies upon lies, smile it will be better,
The panacea of our times, the band-aid to fix all things

Thank you Mr Ginsberg.