by Allen Ginsberg
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Product Description
"Allen Ginsberg's Howl & Other Poems was originally published by City Lights Books in the fall of 1956. Subsequently seized by U.S. Customs and the San Francisco police, it was the subject of a long court trial at which a series of poets and professors persuaded the court that the book was not obscene. Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg, Russian migr, and Louis Ginsberg, lyric poet and schoolteacher, in Paterson, New Jersey. To these facts Ginsberg adds: "High school in Paterson till 17, Columbia College, merchant marine, Texas and Denver copyboy, Times Square, amigos in jail, dishwashing, book reviews, Mexico City, market research, Satori in Harlem, Yucatan and Chiapas 1954, West Coast 3 years. Later Arctic Sea trip, Tangier, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, read at Oxford Harvard Columbia Chicago, quit, wrote Kaddish 1959, made tape to leave behind & fade in Orient awhile. Carl Solomon to whom Howl is addressed, is a intuitive Bronx dadaist and prose-poet.""
Amazon.com Review
The epigraph for Howl is from Walt Whitman: "Unscrew the locks from the doors!/Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!" Announcing his intentions with this ringing motto, Allen Ginsberg published a volume of poetry which broke so many social taboos that copies were impounded as obscene, and the publisher, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was arrested. The court case that followed found for Ginsberg and his publisher, and the publicity made both the poet and the book famous. Ginsberg went on from this beginning to become a cultural icon of sixties radicalism. This works seminal place in the culture is indicated in Czeslaw Milosz's poetic tribute to Ginsberg: "Your blasphemous howl still resounds in a neon desert where the human tribe wanders, sentenced to unreality".
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Ginsberg the 'greatest'?.. hmmm, 2008-05-23
Don't get me wrong. I attended 3 readings by Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky at Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusettes in the late 1970's and even recorded "Contest of the Bards" and handed him a copy of it at his request,... I 'absolutely' consider his oratory style of delivery and poetic verse and style amazing and brilliant and so very very entertaining and inspiring.. but the 'greatest' epic poem or poet of his century I just can't agree with. Gary Snyder made such an impact with introducing the marriage of Zen and the Orient into modern poetry style of his day (as Vincent vanGogh and Gauguin did in painting in the Expressionest era in painting/art), and Gary's poems of the passing of a day's events are so brilliant and open and revealing, and Jack Kerouac's style and impact, and Ferlinghetti's brilliance stemming from such a variety of different drugs... T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Patty Smith, Bob Dylan, ... Marianne Moore,... grins... there are so many just 'great' poets from that and before and after generations in American history... one can really not call one the 'greatest' of any of their peers when there is such an overabundance of wealth to choose from and to have been entertained and inspired by. Howl is about the 'awakening' of american society, the public, the 'beginning' of awakening that could happen. But we actually have reverted, we actually believe that it was 'only' Russians or Chinese or Cubans or the Germans of WWII who were lied to or not told the truths by their governments whether led by Political Action Groups, Special Interest, drug companies, oil companies, insurance companies, etc. The rending of the veil of sleepiness of being 'content' socially is what Howl is all about, the 'rage' against that as we should be enraged against the last moment of breath to deaths' face as deat come to take us to the next realm. I don't know if anybody actually feels the rage of "Howl" within anymore, whether it was worth it after all, after all of the tea and ices... shrugs.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Seeking Jazz or S*x or Soup, 2008-02-21
While Allen Ginsberg's three-part, long poem "Howl" is borne of a particular moment in American history --- the Joseph McCarthy congressional witch hunts; the cold war with Russia (which includes, to a degree, the Korean War); social and racial unrest --- it is still possible to read and appreciate the work without the context of the time. The staccato beats of the stanzas, the raw and potent language, as well as the cross-country travels in the poem are all worth exploring in detail outside of the realm of Ginsberg's cultural experience. With powerful imagery, specific American locales, and references to John Milton, William Blake, Neal Cassady and the Bible, the 1956 poem ushered in not only the age of Beat poetry, but a lasting piece of fury, compassion and madness.
The opening line, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness" sets in motion a seemingly endless list of unnamed, but mostly male, people whom the narrator apparently knew who lost their sanity in the streets, subways, back alleys and bars of America. Written as a single, run-on sentence, the rhythm scheme is structured as mini-tales, each passage of a new, mind-blowing experience beginning simply with "who," connecting back to that first line of the poem. The sense of dislocation within familiar terrain is the theme repeated throughout, with places in the heartland like Laredo, Texas and Arkansas as sinister and terrifying as Chicago and New York City. The people of the narrator's generation come from and travel to all points on the U.S. map, but share the common states of sorrow and confusion, unable to feel grounded within landscapes that no longer hold the same security and dependency that they once did. When the "angelheaded hipsters [...] / [...] bare their brains to Heaven under the El" and "[drink] turpentine in Paradise Alley," the America that once made sense is transformed into a jumble of seedy and depressed places where screaming at God, poisoning oneself, and having meaningless s*x for an almighty, capitalistic dollar is the current norm.
Time, space, eternity, the universe and Plato are invoked throughout the narrator's journey across America, allowing Ginsberg to delve into the big questions asked by man, albeit without attempting to directly answer any of them. He is ambitious in his reachings, detailing the concerns and experiences of an entire generation, his only judgments coming in the form of labeling the various acts performed as the actions of an insane group of people. He then follows the list of his generation's misdeeds with a section devoted to Moloch, invoking the biblical Canaanite who also shows himself in poems by Coleridge and Milton. The third and final section addresses Carl Solomon, a real-life friend to Ginsberg, to whom the poem is dedicated. It continues the societal course of madness to its logical conclusion, with Solomon in a Rockland, N.Y. mental hospital receiving treatment for the destruction of his, the best, mind.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Howl, And Other Pocket Poems, 2007-11-25
Howl, And Other Poems-Allen Ginsberg *****
When originally released in the 1950's Howl was one of the most contraversial works in literature up to that point even rivaling that of Ulysses. Filled with shocking imagry and what some may concider to be distasteful wording and dipictions of overt homosexuality and non-conformity along side excessive drug use and things of that nature. The author as well as other poets were taken to court on the subject matter of the poem was obscene, which it was latter ruled not to be.
Many will tell you in todays world that Ginsberg as well as all the other Beat poets were overrated and hyped up to be something that they really were not, well this is all a matter of opinion but that opinion is just wrong.
Regardless of whether the beats were 'hyped' and if this poem had not been taken to court there is no way it would have been this popular but that does not howeve mean that it would be any less powerful and well written.
So in the end you must read Ginsberg for your self and form your own opinion. But most of the time people who read his poems agree that he is one of the best, and while Howl is not his best work, it is truly a powerful poem non the less.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Amazing, 2007-10-01
Amazing, this book truely is one of the books of modern Bohemia ... A must for every dark-inspired beat-nick.
0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
good book, 2007-02-18
If you love Whitman, you'll be a fan of this book. It's short, but the free verse is very similar.
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