HOWL
Direct words.
Howl is a delirious poem, and also, a poem that embody one of the finest things about poetry, the power behind the words. Ginsberg poem is full of meanings, it has rhythm, but one of the strongest point in the poem; it’s the way that Ginsberg use words, powerful words, as a vehicle to confront the reader.
Howl it’s a poem that challenge many of the establishment ideas of the Ginsberg days, the poem takes the reader in a journey to the friends, the places, to the music and the people that was the “Beat” movement, the poem also shows the world around the movement, and portray some of the darkest sides of his friends and himself, along with some of the not socially accepted ways of the group.
“who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al- cohol and cock and endless balls,”
All this things could be portrayed by using words that lead to misdirection’s, half truths and analogies, that could hide the real meaning of the poem in a way that only the people of the “Beat” generation could read it, and fully understand the poem; but Ginsberg chose to use a direct language, he don’t hide his homosexuality, or his drugs experiences, he takes the best and the worse of himself, and show all in the poem, and he do the same with his friends, and the world that surround him.
“who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up
out of basements hung over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
ment offices,”
“who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu- scripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,”
Ginsberg don’t use “nice” words to write about the things that he see, he calls him as the people that lives and endure reality calls him, he use words as “fuck”, he talks about communist, a forbidden taboo in the USA society, he talks about the broken American dream, about the lonely and cold cities, Jews, Negroes, junkies, all in his epic poem, and he use the most powerful voices to write about it, the same voices of the people that lives and dies in the world that he describes.
Howl it’s a poem that could be readied for many reasons, and I believe that one could be the choices that Ginsberg take, when he write his poem, ¿why using the most direct words?, ¿why exposes himself to the society, knowing that the society would not accept many of the truths in his poem?, maybe, because that was the only way really be listened.
