HE SAW THE BEST MINDS OF HIS GENERATION

A Collection of Essays About Allen Ginsberg's Most Celebrated and
Condemned Work.

THE POEM THAT CHANGED AMERICA

"Howl" Fifty Years Later

Edited by Jason Shinder

Farrar Straus Giroux. 288 pp. $30

Soon after Allen Ginsberg wrote a slim, 44-page volume called Howl
and Other Poems in 1956, it became a secret handshake between the
cool and the hip, quickly drawing attention from edgy writers and
poets around the country. Rebellious young folk found a voice for
their Eisenhower-era disillusionment.

The 14-page title poem begins with these famous lines:

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,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to
the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. . . .

William Carlos Williams in the original introduction wrote: "Hold
back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell." And
hell is what follows. "Howl" provided a blistering poetic alternative
for a nation being reared on Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and T.S.
Eliot. At the end of "The Waste Land," rain falls on the desert
plain. Ginsberg, on the other hand, writes of "the crack of doom on
the hydrogen jukebox."

A year after "Howl" was published, a shipment of newly printed copies
was seized by federal authorities. The copies were returned after the
ACLU protested, but two months later San Francisco police arrested
Ginsberg, City Lights bookstore owner and publisher Lawrence
Ferlinghetti and a City Lights cashier, charging them with
trafficking in obscenity. "Howl," the title poem, is rife with overt
sexual (and homosexual) references and the kind of explicit language
that at the time was keeping Henry Miller's works classified as
contraband. Amid Cold War hysteria and the worship of conformity that
predictably accompanies such times, Ginsberg had written, "America I
used to be a communist when I was a kid I'm not sorry," and "I smoke
marijuana every chance I get." Despite the tenor of those times,
Judge W.J. Clayton Horn ruled that "Howl" was not entirely devoid of
social importance and therefore did not fit the legal definition of
obscenity. Ginsberg became one of America's most famous poets.

The Poem that Changed America, edited by Jason Shinder, is a
collection of 26 essays about Ginsberg's masterpiece. From the title
of the book, we would expect essays arguing that the poem has indeed
changed America. We might expect an essay by a prominent CEO whose
dirty secret is that his business practices are informed by a
Ginsbergian omnisexual Buddhist ethic. We might hope for an essay by
a politician or a rap singer or a judge or a filmmaker or an artist
or a gay-rights activist or a gangbanger -- perhaps even an actor or
a television repairman or a rural schoolteacher in a red state who
sneaks "Howl" into the lesson plan. And what a delight it would be to
hear from some conservatives -- Jesse Helms, John Ashcroft, perhaps
Ann Coulter -- concerning "Howl."

What the reader gets instead is a hodge-podge of essays, mostly
written by poets. We see no evidence that the poem "changed America."
We don't even much see how "Howl" changed the essayists. The news
seems to be that a major poet influenced subsequent writers -- but
that's not news, that's a sophomore literature-exam answer.

It's as if Shinder sent out a batch of letters to writers asking them
to participate in his book and got turned down by most of the people
we might want to hear from. There's a blurb, for instance, from
Ferlinghetti, but no essay. We're left with many voices we don't
particularly care about, including writers such as Vivian Gornick,
Mark Doty and Phillip Lopate, whose solipsistic essay is titled, "
'Howl' and Me." Billy Collins and Robert Pinsky each labor to fill
two pages about "Howl," and several of the essays read as if they
belong in academic journals, replete with colons in the titles,
works-cited pages and footnotes. Marjorie Perloff titles her essay "A
Lost Battalion of Platonic Conversationalists: 'Howl' and the
Language of Modernism," and we settle in like hungover freshmen at an
8 a.m. lecture.

The book has its high points. Amiri Baraka riffs like Coltrane
blowing prose from his tenor in an homage to Ginsberg that shimmers
and eviscerates. Rick Moody seems electrified and intoxicated in his
splendid essay "On the Granite Steps of the Madhouse with Shaven
Heads," interspersing lines from "Howl" into his own improvisational
memorial word-chart. And Anne Waldman, co-founder (with Ginsberg) of
the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University
in Boulder, Colo., contributes a closing essay that bears the marks
of beauty, wonder and passion that Ginsberg evidently left on those
who knew him.

The great gift of Shinder's book, though, is a 32-minute CD of
Ginsberg himself reading "Howl" at the Town Hall Theater in Berkeley
in 1956. Hearing the pitch of his voice rise with each succeeding
line into a fever of urgency says more than any memorializer could
ever hope to convey. His is not the puny voice T.S. Eliot envisioned
whimpering at the world's end. Successive generations of youth have
come across Howl in used bookstores and had their perspectives
shattered, reinforced or altered. As long as humanity remains a heap
of wobbling dichotomies, Ginsberg's "Howl," like Thoreau's Walden and
Twain's Huckleberry Finn , will remain a monumental cry of dissent
against the allures of our darker inclinations. .