'The Poem That Changed America:

"HOWL" FIFTY YEARS LATER'

Classic Beat

A "HOWL" photograph, taken at the Virginia Military Institute in 1991
by Gordon Ball: a row of uniformed cadets, their heads shaved, each
with an identical blank notebook, each holding a copy of the City
Lights Books Pocket Poets Series edition of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl
and Other Poems," published in San Francisco in 1956, subject to an
obscenity trial soon after, cleared by Judge Clayton Horn in a
ringing affirmation of individual liberty and creative expression --
and a flag of revolt, a blow against conformity, a hallowed relic, ever since.

The picture is all irony.

What are these presumed soldiers of Moloch -- the demon of money and
power summoned in the second part of "Howl" to devour the soul rebels
of the epic first section, unless, somehow, they can escape to fight
another day -- supposed to make of Ginsberg's celebration of a tiny
band of comrades determined to free America from itself?

Of his paeans to men who "screamed with joy" as they were penetrated
by other men, to heroin and marijuana, to suicide and madness?

Who knows what the cadets made of "Howl" -- in the picture, they look bored.

Another assignment to get through.

Ball, a longtime friend and editor of Ginsberg's, is himself one of
24 contributors to Jason Shinder's collection of new essays on "Howl"
(not counting Ginsberg, with his own comment on the poem, written in
1986, 11 years before his death, and John Cage, with his galvanic
"Writing Through Howl," also from 1986). Like so many of the writers
here, Ball forgivably fetishizes the little City Lights book. Like an
18th-century broadside, it was cheap, it was portable, you could read
it standing up on a bus and give it away when you got off. It was a
key to the enormous readership "Howl" has gathered over the decades,
and you can still pick up a used copy for a dollar or so. But like so
many, he gropes for something to say. The literary nakedness of the
beats, Ball says of beat heroes like Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs,
Neal Cassady and the few and then the many who took up the cause,
"has something to do with the fact that today national debate
includes, as legitimate topics for discussion, things such as
homosexuality and heroin addiction." This is close to babble --
equating homosexuality and heroin addiction, and ignoring the fact
that to the degree that homosexuality is today part of our national
debate, it is precisely because one side of the debate believes
homosexuality is not a legitimate topic of discussion -- but not so
close as Ball on the "spiritual base" at "the heart of the Beat
Generation," which "may offer a redemption of the woeful American
legacy projected by Walt Whitman 125 years ago."

Shinder, Ginsberg's friend and assistant, a poet ("Among Women") and
a packager (the editor of "Divided Light: Father and Son Poems" and
other anthologies), has produced a tribute album -- but a tribute
album in which half of the contributors are covering the same song.
Rather than "critical texts," Shinder wanted "personal narratives"
from well-known writers on "how the poem changed their lives": thus
the word "I" appears in the first or second line of more than half
the pieces here. The famous first lines of "Howl" are quoted from at
least 11 times.

This gets tiresome.

Sven Birkerts, bidding fair to replace Rick Moody as Dale Peck's
"worst writer of his generation," offers an unbearable template: "Can
I possibly convey how those words" -- the first lines of "Howl" --
"moved in me, how that cadence undid in a minute's time whatever
prior cadences had been voice-tracking my life?" No, he can't. He
wanders on, into "the moment of Shakespearean ripeness." "Ripeness"
would do the job, but you get the feeling it's important to Birkerts
to remind us he knows Shakespeare -- or maybe to equate his reading
"Howl" with Edgar's revelation in "King Lear."

As it happens, it's with the critical pieces that Ginsberg's poem
comes back to life -- critical pieces that take the shape of real
talk. With David Gates there's an instant change in tone. "I drove to
the store the other day" -- and you realize he's not going to tell
you he discovered "Howl" there.

He parks, hears the boom of an obscene rap song from the S.U.V. in
the next spot and starts thinking: "Banned literary mandarins such as
Joyce and Nabokov may simply have wanted to go about their hermetic
work unmolested, but Ginsberg was a public poet and a provocateur.
'Howl,' for all its affirmations, is a profoundly oppositional poem,
and it counts on being opposed. . . . It's a radically offensive
poem, or used to be -- offensive even to received notions of what
poetry is, and it needs offended readers whose fear and outrage bring
it most fully to life."

Ginsberg wrote "Howl" in San Francisco and Berkeley; he read the long
first section in public for the first time in San Francisco in 1955,
and the whole of the poem for the first time in Berkeley the next
year. (A CD of that performance is included in this book.) All sorts
of divisions, exclusions, restrictive manners and deferences that
were second nature in the East were missing in the Bay Area. If the
primary terrain of the poem is New York City, the freedom one could
find in California in the 50's is crucial to the air that blows
through the dank rooms of "Howl," blowing all the way back to New
York -- but you wouldn't know it from the Eastern writers Shinder has
brought together, as if such Bay Area poets and critics as Ishmael
Reed, Robert Hass, Rebecca Solnit, Joshua Clover or Richard Candida
Smith would have less to say about where "Howl" came from and where
it went than Jane Kramer and Eileen Myles, who have plenty to say.
The America that gets changed in "The Poem That Changed America" is a
Steinberg map, with San Francisco as far away as Tangier. "No one,"
Marjorie Perloff says off-handedly, but too revealingly, "New Yorker
or foreigner. . . . "

You can forget that when Luc Sante begins to tell his tale -- from
437 East 12th Street, which is, as it happens, the same New York City
building where Ginsberg lived.

As if rising from the swamp of Eliot Katz on "Political Poetics"
(right off, with Katz's invocation of a poet attempting "to envision
and create a more humane world," you somehow know this is going to be
the longest piece in the book), Sante changes the discussion as if
throwing open a door: "Was 'Howl' the last poem to hit the world with
the impact of news and grip it with the tenacity of a pop song?" The
language is burning, the ideas are jumping and, finally, you are
brought into the adventure of the poem, Ginsberg and his fellows
turning New York City into their own frontier, then heading west,
through Kansas, into Colorado, to the coast, then back again,
discovering, you can feel, more of America in the decade before
Ginsberg wrote the poem in 1955 than de Soto, Daniel Boone or even
Lewis and Clark did in the centuries before them.

"Reading 'Howl' aloud or reciting it," Sante writes, "you could feel
the poem giving you supernatural powers, the ability to punch through
brick walls and walk across cities from rooftop to rooftop" -- faster
than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap
tall buildings in a single bound, as George Reeves was doing on TV as
Ginsberg wrote, just like Scotty Moore's second guitar break in Elvis
Presley's "Hound Dog," on Ginsberg's hydrogen jukebox the year that
"Howl" first made it into print.

Why not? Sante lived for 11 years in Ginsberg's building.

He was 36 when he moved out, and when he looks back to that moment,
the self-regard of adolescent illumination, so common elsewhere in
the pages Sante shares, is replaced by something that doesn't melt at
the touch. " 'Howl' probably meant more to me then than ever before,"
he says, "because finally I could reconcile it with my own
experience. 'Poverty' and 'tatters' and 'hollow-eyed' and 'high' were
more than poetic figures by then. I could compile my own list of the
best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.

The decade during which I lived two flights down from Allen was
particularly notable for its body count in suicides and overdoses,
and those cadavers really had contained some of the best minds I
knew. . . . If 'Howl' is a catalog of flameouts and collapses, it is
ecstatic in its lamentation. And that is the basic measure of its
strength: it is a list of . . . leprous epiphanies as redoubtable as
Homer's catalog of ships, but rather than stopping at that, it seizes
the opportunity to realize all the botched dreams it enumerates. It
envisions every broken vision, supplies the skeleton key that reveals
the genius of every torrent of babble, reconstitutes every page of
scribble that looks like gibberish the next morning."

Fixed in time in Gordon Ball's photograph, the cadets are still
reading "Howl"; they're still fixed in irony.

But the story the picture doesn't tell -- that, in its way, it
protects the viewer from imagining -- doesn't end in irony.

As Bob Rosenthal, for 20 years Ginsberg's secretary, writes in
perhaps the plainest lines in "The Poem That Changed America," only a
fool pretends to know what might happen when a poem finds a reader. "
'Howl' still helps young people realize their actual ambitions,"
Rosenthal writes: "not to become a poor poet living in a dump but
maybe to become a physical therapist when you are expected to become
a lawyer, or maybe to become a lawyer when everybody expects you to
fail at everything."