Allen Ginsberg's long poem "Howl" published in 1956 remains a influential, provocative, and contemporary poem. "Howl" continues to influence American counter-culture, both for better and worse.

It describes how Ginsberg and his Beat Generation friends raced through the "narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism," through "Baltimore," "Houston," "Newark," "New York" and "the West Coast," to look for "Eternity," good times, and each other, "yacketyyakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories." They visit "nowhere Zen New Jersey." They find "the lava and ash of poetry."

Allen Ginsberg was born in 1926 in New Jersey. While attending Columbia University in New York City, he met Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and many others who would later form what is now called the Beats. The 1956 poem "Howl" rebels against the work-centric, American social-order that remains fundamentally in place in 2006. In this way, "Howl" is contemporary.

With this poem's 50th anniversary, readings are being staged across the country.

In Baltimore on Friday Oct. 27 at the Load of Fun Gallery near Mt. Vernon, a reading of "Howl" will be held as part of a larger celebration of the Beats. Beginning at 8 p.m., this "Tribute to Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation" will feature live jazz, short readings from the works of other Beat writers, and a multi-person performance of "Howl." "Howl" will be set to a live drummer.

The Load of Fun Gallery is located at the corner of North Avenue and Howard, just north of the Charles Theater and Penn Station. More information can be found here: www.mayhemonward.com/1956/

Event organizer and poet Brian Langston says one reason to stage this event is because writers like Ginsberg are not meant to live on only "in books" or "bedrooms or classrooms." Rather, they are meant to be read and heard "out loud, alive, spontaneous, to people, with jazz, with drums, with dark sunglasses on," says Langston. Langston notes that Ginsberg and the Beats tried to write "the truth as they saw it, spontaneously and realistically."

This type of vital and experimental energy will on display Friday night. In fact, "Howl" on the page--with its maybe too long opening section, with all its gems and repetitions--remains a fundamentally energy-filled, experimental poem.

In "Howl," Allen Ginsberg is the poem's speaker running with "radiant cool eyes," while "contemplating jazz," in a "teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light."

Ginsberg and his friends reject the "scholars of war" at universities. Instead, they jump into the world "whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars," looking around "with big pacifist eyes."

They "shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime," "sweetened the snatches of a million girls," and "let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists."

Sometimes they "coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame."

Ginsberg's "Howl" celebrates all of their adventures in Part I of this three-part poem. They eschew regularized American life.

Brian Langston writes on "Howl":

"Howl" is a poem that rails against the status quo, against a popular culture that accepts the machinery of big government and war, against a system that opposes any type of creative thought. In essence, "Howl" is the rallying cry of America's poor, downtrodden masses, its immigrant population, its disgruntled and disengaged after World War II, the anthem of the counter-culture.

And the themes that run throughout continue to be meaningful, especially in today's social and political arena with an unpopular President who seems so out of touch with the will of the people; with a war for which we had no justification, and that we are obviously losing; and with big business conducting the usual business antics and political power plays. . . .

Just like John Lennon's "Imagine," "Howl" continues to inspire us to question what is and try, with whatever creative gifts we might have, to create a better world.

II.
"Howl" is like a two-faced Janis looking back to the American poetic past, while also written as encouragement for future generations. Ginsberg considered his long lines in "Howl" to be examples of what he and poet Charles Olsen called "breath-lengths," a line that should be spoken in one breath. These breath-lengths give the poem that shouted, excited quality. They also express an exhausted, dizzy, and exhausting quality when they run at extremely long lengths.

This excited yet exhausted quality exemplifies the dilemma faced by Ginsberg in charting his own path in America in the 1950s. It basically is the same dilemma for anyone charting their own path.

The long lines also hark back to Walt Whitman, especially Whitman's 1855 poem "Song of Myself." At the same time, Ginsberg's compression of imagery in the poem takes its technique from Modernist practices, such as T.S. Eliot in his 1922 modernist epic, "The Wasteland."

In this way, "Howl" can be seen as an epic in the line of American epics from "Song of Myself" through "The Wasteland" through "Howl." Looking at it this way, one can sketch a historical story spanning from 1855 to 1956. This narrative arc tells a story of a raw American and poetic optimism coming under increasing strain and difficulty in the modernizing, industrial world.

"Howl" begins:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical naked....

Whitman's introduction of himself to readers in the poem "Song of Myself" goes:

Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a cosmos,
Disorderly fleshy and sensual . . . eating drinking and breeding,

We can see the rhythmic roots of Ginsberg's line in Whitman's. In the same way, Ginsberg speaking voice in "Howl" also take its roots in Whitman's first-person, spoken-language technique. Ginsberg however sees his friends "destroyed" by their own "madness" while facing what they see as an oppressive social order of 1950s America during the Cold War. During the Cold War, America and the Soviet Union faced off in an arms race, and jousted in international political games of brinkmanship.

For more on Ginsberg:
poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/8

To Read Howl:
members.tripod.com/~Sprayberry/poems/howl.txt

For more information of the Oct. 27 Howl reading, see:
www.mayhemonward.com/1956/

Picture from Poets.org.