let's sing another song boys
this one has grown old and bitter.
"Howl" is, without a doubt, a seminal piece of American literature and of English language poetry. I agree with critics, such as Sturgis, that it could probably have been improved by more judicious editing on Ginsburg's part. There is a looseness, a not-always-successful search for the shocking image, the over-the-top metaphor. But, that said, it is the one poem which has probably influenced American poetry of the second half of the 20th century more than any other.
People who denigrate "Howl" either do not understand it or are so stuck in the stilted conventions of pre-Howl poetry that they are unable to appreciate anything fresh. And that's what "Howl" was when first published -- fresh, daring to break the mold of all that gone before and an anthem for an entire generation, the Beat Generation.
I was an adolscent when the little book Howl and Other Poems was published. I was still in high school. I freely confess that I didn't like it at the time. I laughed at its weird and disconnected metaphors and similes, its lack of any sustained meter, its anarchic imagery. But that was because I was an adolescent and not quite a Beat Generation rebel. I wasn't ready to be rebel; I was too immersed in the standards of Shakespearean and Spenserian and Miltonic ideals. I thought Edgard Allan Poe's poems sucked, too, btw. It was only after I had begun to achieve some level of maturity that I started to appreciate what Ginsburg had done here.
Perhaps Sturgis still has some growing up to do.
Sturgis is an okay dude, just not coping with Ginsburg.
edgarblythe wrote:Sturgis is an okay dude, just not coping with Ginsburg.
And why should I? He never even bothered going to meet me in Tompkins Square Park or walk down Avenue A babbling his yawnings...although there was somebody who looked suspiciously like him over at Veselka's one afternoon in 1988 but that meanie breathed near my borscht so fie on him too!.
Maybe he was still trying to come up with a plan to levitate the Pentagon.
Wasn't that Abbie Hoffman's job?
It may have been Abbie's baby, but there were plenty of others there to carry it out.
Was the book Soul on Ice?
Never read Cleaver.
Anyway the book I had was
I figured all the copies of Hoffman's book were stolen, thet's why I thought you might have opted for Cleaver. I had you pegged as a Beaver Cleaver fan.
I just posted a poem called "Song" by Allen Ginsburg in the Solitude thread.
