howl

so welcome to our discussion on Allen Ginsberg's most famous poem how which in actuality is the most famous poem of the middle of the American century the 20th century and it's also the most influential poem of that period in fact many people consider the year 1956 to begin to be the beginning of contemporary American poetry precisely because Howe was published and changed the poetic landscape in this country how was written by Allen Ginsberg at a time when the country was locked in a kind of cultural conformity everybody was acting in a similar way I should say most people the vast majority of people what had just taken place its 1956 11 years before World War two ended during World War two there were two primary horrific events which entered the consciousness of Americans as well as the country people around the world but especially of Americans and those two events that had such an effect were first the use of the atomic bomb people saw the atomic bomb pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Life magazine Look magazine but Life magazine the most famous magazine of the day everybody used to subscribe you can see the mushroom clouds etc and then later on it became clear as reports came back from Germany that the Holocaust had actually taken place and the effect of this was highlighted again in a magazine like Life magazine where you saw skeletal living people who have survived this extraordinarily barbaric event so these two events tonic bomb Holocaust have a horrific effect effect on Americans and the rise of communism following World War two has a similarly fearful effect on Americans what do they do Americans tend to turn to work and while they are turning to work to make things to get back to life they also tend to shut off the impulse towards questioning the world around them the idea was to have a little house in Pacifica maybe you know Pacifica and in outside San Francisco or Levittown back east and you would have this almost prefabricated house with a little white fence around it and you'd have your 2.2 children and you commute to work and come back to work and everything would be perfect now I gotta say that there is a lot appealing to that life but the thing that's unappealing about that life is the fact that associated with it was the notion that you should not question authority at all this was a democracy where the whole idea is to debate and yet people did not question any of the overriding values and ideas of the day here comes Ginsberg Ginsberg is one of the members of The Beat Generation be EA T and as a member of The Beat Generation he felt that the culture had beaten down people who were free fingers people who wanted to examine the world around them and live in a different way they didn't have to wear white shirts with dark ties and grey suits if there are women they didn't have to they have to stay at home staying it all was fine but they didn't have to stay at home and yet if you did not stay at home if you did not get married if you did not have children there were all kinds of issues that women faced as well Ginsberg wasn't especially sensitive about those but the woman's the lives of women kind of was a big part of this cultural conformity that had taken place so how their form starts and 56 beginning of contemporary poetry in effect how is a poem that renders old versus new the old are the forces of conformity the new are the forces of personal thought there's a term that we often hear called groupthink and groupthink means the kind of thinking that takes place when everybody is more or less on the same page and they don't question Ginsberg was interested in individual expression this poem puts those two kinds of temperaments at odds with one another let me tell you a few other things and then we're going to actually get into the poem and read it what he called his principal poetic technique was spontaneous Bop prosody spontaneous bob prosody now we first should start with word prosody word prosody is simply a word which means the rules of poetry a lot of people think it means prose because it seems to have prose in it but it doesn't it just means the rules of poetry bob was an improvisational kind of jazz that was being performed at the time spontaneous of course goes with Bob improvisational means you make it up in the act of making your music spontaneous Bob prosody meant that Ginsberg was making up what he wrote without too much pre thought he wasn't figuring out what he wanted to say before he said it he was trying to write in the act of thinking right during the very act of thinking spontaneous Bob prosody that's why I think the poem has such a rhythmic flow it's relentless actually we'll get to that too there was there is another technique in the poem that I really want to draw your attention to and that is that there is all throughout the poem a kind of conflict between earthy gritty painful difficult physical experience bodily experience and then that is countered by a kind of meditative ascendant nearly religious body lists spirituality now I say bi unless that's the goal to get bodyless for Ginsberg and the beats some of them felt that we could use the senses of the body and the pleasure of the body to become bodyless and spiritual sex wasn't a bad thing for them but in the context of 1956 when Howe was written sex was something we hardly even spoke about people were scared even to use the word that made them nervous to use the word pregnant because pregnant meant sex it was a throwback to a kind of Victorian era Ginsberg was upset about that kind closeted thinking and he wanted to break the bonds of conformist ideas so why the title Howell because he is Howlin against cultural conformity in his great book civilization and its discontents civilization and its discontents Sigmund Freud says that we are always in favor of civilization and simultaneously opposed to civilization we like civilization because it will provide laws and rules or mores mo re s mores that will protect us that will secure us on the other hand we don't like civilization because civilization means we don't get to do what we might always want to do I could ask all of you if you drive do you ever go over the speed limit if you go over the speed limit now Betty most of you do you end up being a symbol for that conflict that Freud talks about you can see this conflict in the poem howl Ginsberg isn't opposed to all of civilization he is not opposed to laws and certain rules he isn't a proponent of anarchy he's not even a libertarian quite what he wants is openness of thought and tolerance of different behaviors he is howling he is ranting against the forces that prevent openness that prevent tolerance let's start the poem the poem starts with one of the great and most famous lines in 20th century poetry I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness starving hysterical naked I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness starving hysterical naked well I mean it starts up right out of the box I saw so we are going to have a poem that witnesses and what is it going to witness it is going to witness the effect of forces that prevent us from being who we might want to be right out of the box I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness they were starving they were hysterical they were naked earthy gritty difficult painful bodily experience and that bodily experience is emotionally difficult so you get that right from the beginning and then we go to the next line dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angel headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night first three lines opening up this description of what's going on here do we have any kind of clue yet or any kind of mention of the opening of the removal of cultural conformity is desired we move us I think angel had an ancient heavenly connection to the stars what he calls the starry dynamo maybe it's there and then after that the poem becomes a list poem and almost every line not every line but almost every line begins with who and we're going to save Ginsberg lists the different people who did all of these different things positive and negative suffering and attempting to break from the chains that held them down okay are there any questions at this point Jen first Vaughn taneous thought prosody how's that different than stream of consciousness very good question so the question is is spontaneous bob prosody different from stream of consciousness stream of consciousness is written primarily by fiction writers it can be written by poets but primarily by fiction writers so there's one difference and stream of consciousness is designed the to render the ongoing operations of the mind of a character showing the associative thought processes one immature idea triggers another image or idea and then two that is associated another image idea itself etc so spontaneous bob prosody has some of that it is associated the difference is that stream of consciousness is nowhere near as interested in the musicality and so spontaneous and improvisational that can seem like stream of consciousness but the stream of consciousness fiction writer isn't necessarily saying oh I'm only going to write you know whatever comes into my head he makes it or she makes it seem as if the story itself is inside the mind of this character and that character is having improvisational thoughts the writer is it for Ginsburg spontaneous Bob prosody is a rule for writers the writer is supposed to write and let onto the page what comes into his or her mind so in stream of consciousness we have probably most famously Joyce the Irishman Faulkner and the American both the Brit right spontaneous Bob prosody was a beep poetics and it was practiced primarily by the beats it influenced others but no but the other thing here I think we should also mention to Shannon and everybody else the other thing here is that Ginsburg said it was improvisational he didn't revise but we have the texts now we have the the poem in the original papers of the poem and he revised the poem so it was spontaneous but he came back and started revising it to okay I'm going to go down to line eight and I want to note the transition from a kind of earthy experiential Sensibility just talking about here to a more ethereal metaphysical even religious sensibility one of the prime things Ginsberg is trying to do is to yoke these two sensibilities together he wants physicality to be a good thing and he wants to have physicality as a kind of gateway to bodyless spiritual experience the romantics wanted some of this some of the romantics let's see what he does here who cowered in shavin who cowered in unshaven rooms and underwear burning their money in waste baskets and listening to the terror through the wall who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York who ate fire and pain hotels or drank turpentine and paradise alley death or purgatory their torsos night that the night would dream with drugs with waking nightmares alcohol and and endless balls incomparable blind streets of shuttering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward polls of Canada and Patterson illuminating old emotionless world of time between ok so in those lines we can see the pain of these people members of The Beat Generation those who were the best minds of Ginsberg generation who hated the conformity who didn't like to be locked into a way of being and tried to break from it and didn't always do it in the most constructive ways but like Baudelaire who was the French poet in the middle of 19th century they felt that if they countered cultural forces no matter how they did it they were not only making a statement but they were helping themselves that remains to be seen then we have they are unshaven they're burning money they're listening to terror they're which means they're probably psychotic they eat fire I'm not sure if they actually eat fire although there are allusions to people swallowing fire they purgatory themselves now one of the things that's so great about this poem is it's in way that he's got these ideas working but it's in the style and when he says he purgatory their torsos he is taking a noun purgatory and making it into a verb purgatory to purgatory and he does that to break us out of our normal way of thinking and being especially as we're reading so it breaks us out of our way of moving along nice and logically in expected kind of culturally acceptable ways of fun and instead it forces us and jumps us it kind of stuns us out of that way of being and asks us to see things and feel things as we read in a new way questions and so we have this this pain and then we have the the references throughout the poem to materialism which never provides its promise the artificial promise of materialism the promise of materialism is that if you buy if you consume you will become happy by virtue of your material goods even the very act of purchasing is an act perceived by many to be a kind of pleasure a kind of ultimate pleasure that leads you to what to a transcendence you get up and away from your ordinary lives go out and buy it's gonna make you feel good Ginsberg and the beats like many others are suggesting listen that is not how to feel good it's an empty pleasure you can also see that one of the ways the is Beat Generation members acted L was to have sex outside the bounds of the culturally except in time the culturally accepted battles so nineteen mid-50s when you have people saying the only time you have sex is in marriage probably on Saturday night and and it's only between a man and a woman and Ginsburg who incidentally was gay was certainly not going to stand for that now give me his real life it is actually life he was a very kind man he was non materialistic and he was very funny but here at least at this part of the poem it's not funny they purgatory their torsos night after night with dreams with drugs with waking nightmares alcohol and and endless balls however there is something else coming in this next line incomparable blind streets of shuttering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward polls of Canada and Patterson now that's a little bit of it a kind of a joke Patterson is a working-class town in New Jersey which Ginsberg knew well and which is where William Carlos Williams lived and wrote Patterson and Canada become symbols or at least early on the poem there's a desire to see them as repositories for something more than material well-being something perhaps metaphysical even illuminating all the motionless world of time between and there's the line that really breaks out from the rest illuminating all the motionless world of time now speaking of time we don't have time to go through this entire poem line by line I want you to read section 1 most people only teach section 1 section 2 and section 3 are fine but they're nowhere near as good as section 1 section 1 is quite long as you can see and I want you to think when you see these sections that are so painful and difficult I want you to ask yourself what is the function of these passages that seem to be this designed to shock even now here we are in the 21st century it's been so many years more than 50 years since he wrote the poem and even now especially in classrooms this language can Shawn Gus why does he want to shock us I think he wants to shock us to break us out of our usual way of thinking even if we dislike what we read maybe we will come to think about it in a way which is different than with the way we thought about it previously we may even think about something for the first time we may not have ever thought about these things before certainly not in this way so just as he changes his language and he drops commas and he uses nouns as verbs and he runs everything together and the poem has this kind of antic high velocity to it all of that is designed to change us somehow get us out of our normal way of being and thinking so let's say the poem is characterized by a notion that the consumer mentality is unhealthy what is healthy what is good according to Ginsberg and he has three religions in this poem that he borrows primarily the first religion is Buddhism all through the poem there are Buddhist ideas and I if I could over reduce Buddhist ideas to one idea it would be this that desire is the source of all pain desire is the source of all pain Ginsberg knows that desire for consumer goods for purchasing for more and more money from useless power all ends up being a dead end being empty making us unhappy desire is the source of all pain now he borrows from two other great religions as well he borrows from Jewish religion by focusing on what he calls the Bob Kabbalah and the Kabbalah is a mystical book of Judaism which is which like some Buddhist methods asks us to think in ways which are not rational they're not illogical but they're illogical and finally he also borrows from Christianity especially interested is in the figure of Jesus Christ why well for everything we've been talking about Jesus Christ is an anti-establishment figure he comes at a time when materialism in its own way behavior in its own way was leading people away from spiritual happiness from enlightenment and to a kind of baseness so what we end up with and how is the conflation of Buddhism the Kabbalah and Jesus Christ it brings it all together so if you look at line 19 whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes meet for the synagogue cast on the pavement who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall suffering Eastern sweats and Tangier e'en bone grindings and migraines of China under junk withdrawal and nerves blink furnished room what you have there again are the best minds of the generation trying to break free doing it in ways that might not be the best and trying to ascend towards some kind of spiritual betterment the synagogue is mentioned Zen is mentioned Eastern sweatt's is mentioned Eastern religion who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go and went leaving no broken hearts who had cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars rocketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather Knights who studied blue titus poe saint john of the cross telepathy and Bach Kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas so The Beat Generation travelled and uh you know about Jack Kerouac you knows about the great book called on the road and so you know they drove all over the country movement the active movement motion itself was one of their methods they felt that if they could move that in the act of motion they might be able to gain enlightenment themselves and here look what we have Latinas pose and jawed of the crawl to a telepathy baat Kabbalah the whole thing the poem is punctuated throughout by terms that render Ginsberg and the beat generations desire for something that is ascendant that is divine it is in its own way looking for the kind of intuitive romantic vision that existed in 19th century England and 19th century America in those poets poets like Wordsworth in England and Whitman in the US the trouble is those poets believed by studying nature and communing with nature they could read the signature of God in the natural world and find enlightenment and that a sentence even though they were here in their own bodies Ginsberg once that but he has a countering force to deal with which I've talked about all through the class that is the force that says do exactly this and nothing else do not question do this and nothing else and Americans again fearful to have to World War two kind of March to one drummer now we're starting to head towards the end of our discussion and we could talk a lot about many of the different references throughout at home and I know that they're all not easy to understand and the word the further we moved from 1956 the more difficult they might be for you to understand but I think it's a good thing it would be a good thing for us to look towards the end of the poem and to see how Ginsberg tries to wrap this all this whole thing up so why don't we look at line 68 and I'll I'll read this whole ending and then briefly make some comments on what he's doing here hooah numerous protests overturned only one symbolic ping-pong table resting briefly in catatonia returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood and tears and fingers to the visible madman doom of the Lords of the mad towns of the east pilgrim states Rockland's and Graceland whose fetid halls bickering with the echoes of the soul rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude bench dolmen realms of love dream of life a nightmare bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon and mother finally and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window and the last door closed at 4 a.m. and the last telephone slammed at the wall when reply in the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet and even that imaginary nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination Oh Carl while you are not safe I am not safe and now you're really in the total animal soup of time and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter and the vibrating plane who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in time and space through images juxtaposed and trapped the Archangel of the soul between two visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the mound and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Potter omnipotent ins and eternity us to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head the madman boom an angel beat in time unknown yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death and rose we incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the gold horn shadow of the band and blue the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an Eloi Eloi Lama Lama sabachthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio but the absolute part of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years what a remarkable ending feel the velocity of this poem moving so he's referring in this poem the poem is dedicated to his friend Carl Solomon who was in fact institutionalized he was one of the best men's minds of the generation destroyed by madness and he actually addresses Carl Solomon here at the end of the poem notice that when begin that section returning years later truly bald except for a wind of blood who had the wind of blood Jesus Christ and the women blood it could have been a reference to the crown of thorns the blood coming down and the poem at the end does what has been doing all along it's been objecting to a kind of consumeristic Madison Avenue driven idea that conformity and materialism will make you happy in fact it's also saying that will not make you happy it has made others suffer you will suffer and so we get down to the end of the poem and who becomes the hero the sensation of parterre Lipton's by eternal days all-powerful father eternal God Ginsberg asking us to become spiritual and then we get down to the last two lines of this section one of the poem is great section one and the madman bum that's the generation of the piece who are they they are those who rise in the ghostly clothes of jazz and I think the word rise is key there and we've been talking about Bob prosody they rise in the ghostly clothes of giants in the gold horn shadow of the band a jazz band and blue in other words like a saxophone blue the suffering of America's naked mind for love trying to strip America's attitude away because down deep he's saying we all want this other kind of love of self-love of other person other people and love of God and what happens we blow the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an Eli Eli llama llama seven fatties sex don't cry Eli Eli lama sabachthani which means my God my God why have you forsaken me the words Christ speak on the cross Ginsberg saying Christ knew the Kabbalah is a path Buddhism is a path why did you forsake spiritual values the absolute heart of the palm of life butchered out of their own bodies whose bodies the bodies of The Beat Generation good to eat a thousand years who knows how to read that ending I like to think the ending means that even though the Beat Generation has suffered so much those people have suffered so much of those people who wanted to be different and suffer so much that they were plugged in even if errantly they were plugged into something that was a pact to the truth to betterment to enlightenment and so their lives are good to eat they are nourishment for us so let me finish with this Ginsberg critiques American materialism and he advocates a kind of free thinking spirituality he uses this kind of rhythmic high velocity expression which makes us kind of get onboard the wave we kind of ride this mesmerizing wave and he vacillate back and forth between these kind of graphic green depictions of individual human physical suffering on one hand and spiritual metaphysical metaphysical ascendance on the other he can never get us up and ascending the pot away from the forces he sees Christ as the archetypal anti-establishment hero he sees the Kabbalah as a path Buddhism as a path he uses unusually graphic off-color language in order to critique the puritanical mores of the time and to shock us out of how we think he asserts that the dream of a life in which the human body is a host of pleasures can be a good thing if we can use those pleasures to move into something spiritual previous to Ginsberg D H Lawrence had been doing the same thing earlier in the century in his fiction in England it is oh it is a political rant it's a howl it's a chant and in all three religions Buddhism Judaism Catholicism there is there can be chanting ceremonies when we get hypnotized almost and ascend mentally and emotionally into a state of mind that is congruent we hope with that of the Lord with that of divinity but the poem has a kind of tension a deliberate tension on one hand it has an impulse towards that mesmeric state that mimics or even leads us to an Enlightenment or enlightened perspective and on the other hand that is impossible because of the countering assertion in the poem that our market culture our consumeristic culture our puritanical culture our fearful culture undermines the human desire for that kind of enlightened any questions could the name be also refers to the rhythm and the influence of half of the beat generations actually everybody asks that and everybody kind of thought does The Beat Generation come from the rhythm or beat of jazz music and the beats always said no they said it comes from the notion of being beaten down and they were beaten down by all these kind of warriors okay thank you very much

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Keywords: howl

Id: b7zFeg3KINo

Length: 44min 21sec (2661 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 27 2010