The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later

by Jason Shinder (Editor)

Overview

A tribute to Ginsberg's signature work, which stirred a generation of angel-headed hipsters to cultural rebellion.

In 1956, City Lights, a small San Francisco bookstore, published Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems with its trademark black-and-white cover. The original edition cost seventy-five cents, but there was something priceless about its eponymous piece. Although it gave a voice to the new generation that came of age in the conservative years following World War II, the poem also conferred a strange, subversive power that continues to exert its influence to this day. Ginsberg went on to become one of the most eminent and celebrated writers of the second half of the twentieth century, and "Howl" became the critical axis of the worldwide literary, cultural, and political movement that would be known as the Beat generation.

The year 2006 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of "Howl," and The Poem That Changed America will celebrate and shed new light on this profound cultural work. With new essays by many of today's most distinguished writers, including Frank Bidart, Andrei Codrescu, Vivian Gornick, Phillip Lopate, Daphne Merkin, Rick Moody, Robert Pinsky, and Luc Sante, The Poem That Changed America reveals the pioneering influence of "Howl" down through the decades and its powerful resonance today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374173449
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	03/21/2006
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Jason Shinder (1955-2008) was the author of three poetry collections: Stupid Hope, Among Women, and Every Room We Ever Slept In. He also edited numerous anthologies, including The Poem that Changed America and The Poem I Turn To. Shinder earned a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and founded the YMCA National Writer's Voice.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

"Howl" by Allen Ginsberg: 1956 Mimeographed Copy

Vivian Gornick, "Wild at Heart"

Mark Doty, "Human Seraphim: 'Howl,' Sex, and Holiness"

Amiri Baraka, "'Howl' and Hail"

Marjorie Perloff, "'A Lost Battalion of Platonic Conversationalists':

'Howl' and the Language of Modernism"

Bob Rosenthal, "A Witness"

Andrei Codrescu, "'Howl' in Transylvania"

Talking Howl 1: Jack Kerouac, Louis Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, M. L. Rosenthal, John Hollander, Judge Clayton Horn

Rick Moody, "On the Granite Steps of the Madhouse with Shaven Heads"

Sven Birkerts, "Not Then, Not Now"

Eileen Myles, "Repeating Allen"

Gordon Ball, "Wopbopgooglemop: 'Howl' and Its Influences

Billy Collins, "My 'Howl'"

Alicia Ostriker, "The Poet as Jew: 'Howl' Revisited"

Kurt Brown, "A Thirteen-Year-Old Cadet"

Phillip Lopate, "'Howl' and Me"

Talking Howl 2: James Dickey, Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Donald Justice, Richard Eberhart, Anaïs Nin, Reed Whittemore, Czeslaw Milosz

Allen Ginsberg, "I've Lived With and Enjoyed 'Howl'"

Jane Kramer, "The Best Mind"

David Gates, "Welcoming 'Howl' into the Canon"

John Cage, "Writing Through Howl"

Eliot Katz, "Radical Eyes: Political Poetics and 'Howl'"

Marge Piercy, "The Best Bones for Soup Have Meat on Them"

Talking Howl 3: Paul Zweig, Lewis Hyde, Bob Dylan, Michael McClure, Vaclav Havel, Cynthia Ozick, Denise Levertov, Andy Clausen, Antler, Ann Charters, Stanley Kunitz

Luc Sante, "The Ballot of Eternity"

Robert Polito, "Holy the Fifth International"

Carol Muske-Dukes, "'Howl' in and out of Prison"

Frank Bidart, "A Cross in the Void"

Robert Pinsky, "No Picnic"

Anne Waldman, "Premises of Consciousness"

Chronology

About the Contributors

Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

In 1956, the original edition of Allen Ginsberg's landmark "Howl" was published in a mimeograph version of 25 copies for friends. At that time, not even Ginsberg's staunchest supporters could have imagined the effect that this intense personal statement would have on poetry, literature, and culture. Now, 50 years after its advent, Howl and Other Poems receives its just due from appreciative writers Rick Moody, Robert Pinsky, Luc Sante, Vivian Gornick, Andrei Codrescu, Phillip Lopate, and others.

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.
— The Washington Post

Eric Miles Williamson

If the opening lines of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" aren't seared into your brain, they will be by the end of this collection of 26 essays compiled by Shinder, a poet (Among Women) who learned much of his craft as Ginsberg's pupil. It's a shame the poem isn't included, though it feels as if it's quoted in its entirety at various points (the hardcover edition does come with a Ginsberg reading on CD). This collection juxtaposes reflections by writers such as Rick Moody and Andrei Codrescu about the impact of "Howl' on their lives; Billy Collins writes, "...it wasn't a waste of time for a Catholic high school boy from the suburbs to try to sound in his poems like a downtown homosexual Jewish beatnik." Robert Pinsky writes that he was initially elated by the poem's linguistic freedom even more than by its raw emotion. Though everybody gives the poem its due as an American classic, personal reactions dominate, and nearly everyone has a Ginsberg story to tell, even if it's just about being blown away by hearing him read. For those who have been moved by Ginsberg's words, this collection serves as a stirring confirmation. Photos. (Apr.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

The most influential poem since T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" is about to celebrate its 50th anniversary. Shinder (writing, Bennington Coll., VT; Among Women) has collected 26 essays that document the poem's reception, from its stormy City Lights publication in November 1956 to the canonical status it enjoys today. Contributors include fellow poets Amiri Baraka, Andrei Codrescu, Alicia Ostriker, and Robert Pinsky as well as disciples like Anne Waldman and Eliot Katz. There are also appreciations by scholars and journalists like Marjorie Perloff, Gordon Ball, David Gates, Vivian Gornick, and Ginsberg's early biographer, Jane Kramer (Allen Ginsberg in America). While the contributors' tone is generally respectful, their comments are not always laudatory. Phillip Lopate, for instance, complains about Ginsberg's sentimentality, while Frank Bidart charges that fame turned the poet into a guru. The hardcover edition includes a CD of Ginsberg reading "Howl." Recommended for all literature collections.-William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Poet and anthologist Shinder (Tales from the Couch, 2000) rounds up two dozen literati to reflect on the revolutionary impact of Allen Ginsberg's most famous work. "Howl" has been outraging the squares and enrapturing the alienated ever since Ginsberg first read portions of it at a San Francisco gallery in 1955. Published in the famous City Lights paperback edition in 1956, it overcame obscenity prosecutions to spread its subversive message overseas (Andrei Codrescu recalls reading it in Romania as a teenager) and across the generations (Alicia Ostriker, Marge Piercy and Eileen Myles are among the younger poets who write here of being inspired by it to break free from literary constraints). "Allen Ginsberg is responsible for loosening the breath of American poetry," Helen Vendler once wrote; Shinder's introduction points out that it loosened up a whole lot more. Amiri Baraka captures-in jazzy Beat prose-the poem's status as a quintessential Beat document; Mark Doty investigates it as an expression of queer sexuality (but not an icon of the gay movement); Rick Moody proclaims its relevance to the punk-rock crowd; and Eliot Katz rather drably explains its political relevance, then and now. Thank goodness for Marjorie Perloff's excellent explication of its formal qualities, or we might forget that "Howl" is, first and foremost, a truly great poem. (Doty also does a nice job of reminding us how funny it is.) But Ginsberg's cry of revolt and embrace of excess has always burst the bounds of literature, promising ecstasy and liberation to all kinds of people, from Robert Lowell to Bob Dylan, 1960s radicals to New Age spiritual seekers. It was, perhaps, "the last poem to hit the world with theimpact of news and grip it with the tenacity of a pop song," as Luc Sante notes with characteristic acuity. Variable in quality though they are, taken as a whole the essays here offer a plethora of reasons why. A moving tribute to Walt Whitman's truest heir.

Kirkus Reviews