Howl

Allen Ginsberg was one of the Beat Poets. He was born Jewish in 1926 and died as a Buddhist in 1997. He was friendly with, and an influence upon, all the leading Beats and Beatniks like Jack Kerouac, Neal Casady, William S Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Gregory Corso, Bob Dylan etc. He appeared in Dylan's film which accompanied 1965's 'Subterranean Homesick Blues', and accompanied Dylan on his 'Rolling Thunder Tour' in the mid-seventies. He also wrote superb sleeve-notes for Dylan's 1975 album 'Desire', recognising that album's 'Hebrew sound' when he describes the singer as, "..heart stilled & singing clear, cantillating like synagogue cantor, "fore I go down to the Valley below"". Ginsberg's most well-known poem is 1955's 'Howl' which famously begins, "I saw the best minds of my generation, destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix" It continues in a similar vein for many pages and is thus far too long to quote in full. I do not pretend to understand more than a fraction of what he says, since much of it is written in his familiar hallucinatory style, but the fact that I've no idea what Dylan's on about in much of Blonde on Blonde has never prevented me from appreciating it in full. Many of Ginsberg's poems are unquotable here for another reason, namely that they concern themselves with Ginsberg's main hobby, ie graphically penetrative homosexual sex. Each to his own and live and let live etc is what I say, but on a family blog I cannot quote what Ginzy did next. But here is one of the few which is both short enough and genital-free to quote: UPTOWN Yellow-lit Budweiser signs over oaken bars, "I've seen everything" - the bartender handing me change of $10, I stared at him amiably eyes thru an obvious Adamic beard- with Montana musicians homeless in Manhattan, teenage curly hair themselves -we sat at the antique booth and gossiped, Madame Grady's literary salon a curious value in New York- "If I had my way I'd cut off your hair and send you to Vietnam"- "Bless you then" I replied to a hatted thin citizen hurrying to the barroom door upon wet dark Amsterdam Avenue decades later- "And if I couldn't do that I'd cut your throat" he snarled farewell, and "Bless you sir" I added as he went to his fate in the rain, dapper Irishman 1966