[.cnI redruM]

I was equally non-plused. I really got my college English professor red-hot by saying. "This poem is awesome. Why don't you read it to the parents during Freshman Orientation?"

I still managed a B in the course. I admire the man for not gunning me down for that quip.

[dfwgator]

Howl sounds like a poem that Leonard-Pinth Garnell would have featured on "Bad Poetry" on the old SNL.

[Tax-chick]

I feel grateful to have totally missed this. I thought Allen Ginsberg was an economist, to the extent I thought of him at all.

I like the World War I poets - Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, etc.

[trisham]

Then came “Howl.” It blew me away with its sheer awfulness.

**************

That was my reaction as well. Not to mention, that Ginsberg appeared to be a very disturbed individual.

[Chi-townChief]

I actually like "Howl." I realized from first hearing that the message is totally bogus but I love the over-top-melodramatics and the disconnect between them and Ginsburg's quiet nasal voice (although he got into some hysterics in 60s' readings.)

[Chi-townChief]

P.S. I'm also quite a fan of Kerouac's writing.

[.cnI redruM]

By way of funny parody....

"http://www.litkicks.com/Texts/Yowl.html"

[madinmadtown]

I encountered Allen Ginsberg in person a couple of times during the seventies and he was easily recognizable by being even more grubby and unkempt than the nearly anyone I had ever met, which was no mean feat in those days...and his appearance was more palatable than his personality.

[Vaquero]

I met him in 1968 at a reading....he signed my cigar box "Allen Ginsberg doesn't smoke". Of course I didn't know at the time that he was a bone smoking pedophile....

a friend also a (very minor) poet would write poems goofing on such "poets" as Ginsberg... he wrote a work called "Three Room Kaddish"

Funny how Ginsberg paled around with such writers as Kerouac who was revealed to be a closet conservative.

[aculeus]

New Criterion is first rate.

[ckilmer]

During the 70's & 80's I used to drink at West End Cafe on 114st & B-way Across the street from Columbia University. I even read poetry there once or twice. The West End was an old hang out of Ginsberg during the 50's.

At the time Ginsburg lived in Colorado. He would come back to NYC from time to time to do a reading. I attended some of the readings. I never cared much for Ginsburg's stuff. For all his focus on excretions and emissions and such his writing is inhuman. But he was a pretty animated guy.

[wideawake]

ping

[Cicero]

I suppose students should have a look at "Howl" and "Kaddish" just to see what the Beat Generation poets look like.

Great poetry? No.

I have met Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball a few times, and admire them both.

The only point I disagree with them on is that Kramer glorifies High Modernism and pans everything that followed it. I think high modernism was also vastly overrated in its time. I don't think Jackson Pollock or the Abstract Expressionists are worth much more than the pop artists who followed them. Both movements are essentially decadent, IMHO. Perhaps Pollock aimed higher than Andy Warhol, but I don't think in the end that either is worth a place in the museums.

[dighton]

.
Squeal

I saw the best minds of my generation
Destroyed—Marvin
Who spat out poems; Potrzebie
Who coagulated a new bop literature in fifteen novels; Alvin
Who in his as yet unwritten autobiography
Gave Brooklyn an original lex loci.
They came from all over, from the pool room,
The bargain basement, the rod,
From Whitman, from Parkersburg, from Rimbaud
New Mexico, but mostly
They came from colleges, ejected
For drawing obscene diagrams of the Future.

They came here to L.A.,
Flexing their members, growing hair,
Planning immense unlimited poems,
More novels, more poems, more autobiographies.

It’s love I’m talking about, you dirty bastards!
Love in the bushes, love in the freight car!
I saw them fornicating and being fornicated,
Saying to Hell with you!

America.
America is full of Babbitts.
America is run by money.

What is it Walt said? Go West!
But the important thing is the return ticket.
The road to publicity runs by Monterey.
I saw the best minds of my generation
Reading their poems to Vassar girls,
Being interviewed by Mademoiselle.
Having their publicity handled by professionals.
When can I go into an editorial office
And have my stuff published because I’m weird?
I could go on writing like this forever . . .

.
— Louis Simpson.

[Kenny Bunk]

Leave Alan alone. It's the healthy thing to do.

Everyone knows (or should) that his father was the real poet in the family, right up there with that other guy from NJ, William Carlos Williams. The kid, was bright, but a beatnik. Which, at any rate, is better than being a hippy.

BTW, Alan really was very dirty, in a bus station men's room sort of way. Don't let that stop you from reading Dad, though.

[NutCrackerBoy]

New Criterion bump.