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HOWLERS

                                                July 31, 2006

"Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
     where you're madder than I am"

 "I'm with you in Rockland
     where you laugh at this invisible humor
  I'm with you in Rockland
     where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
  I'm with you in Rockland
     where you condition has become serious and is reported on the radio
  I'm with you in Rockland
     where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses"

                   -- part III of "Howl", (1956)

Many and various tie-ins of the fiftieth
anniversary of Ginsberg's "Howl" were
published recently, but my own private
celebration was to retreat to an excellent
1989 edition which contains a massive amount
of material, including:

 o  draft facsimiles,
 o  annotations by Ginsberg,
 o  photographs of the key players,
 o  additional commentary by many of them


    I've become very conscious that many
    (perhaps most) artists play a somewhat
    cynical game with the public:

    Every artist fears that really
    they've done very little:
    a re-working of various cultural
    influences into something with only
    a small honest claim to novelty.

    But no artist-- no *successful* 
    artist-- voices their own opinon 
    of their work.

    Instead they nod gravely at the gushing
    appreciation of the fans, and try to
    dodge the interview questions about
    "influences".


But the loquacious Allen Ginsberg could
never have been accused of this...

Consider Appendix IV:
"Model texts: Inspirations Precursor
to Howl", a short collection of
poems with which Ginsberg makes it
absolutely clear where the voice of
Howl came from.


Or consider the various quite
critical comments he includes
from various quarters: he let's
the subjects of the poem have the
last say.


  There's a notable passage from
  Tuli Kupferberg -- a man who really
  did jump off a bridge into the                  
  East River and survive -- talking            
  about what a stupid thing it is to           "Howl" has definite     
  attempt suicide...                           problems with               
                                               romanticizing madness...
                                               
                                               
    And my favorite quote, from                
    Carl Solomon himself:                      

      "I was never in Rockland ..
      Neither of us has ever been
      in Rockland.  Ginsberg never         Peculiar punctuation...
      even on a tour."                     presumably he was sloppy
                                           because it was only a private
                                           letter.

                                           What I hear in these words is:

                                           "I was never in Rockland.
                                            Neither of us has ever been
                                            in Rockland, Ginsberg; never
                                            even on a tour."



I had the idea that I might do a reading
of outtakes from "Howl" by digging through
the multiple versions presented in this volume,
but the early and published versions are
usually a little too similar:

  Original:                                 Final:


  who passed through universities          who passed through universities with
    with radiant cool eyes hallucinating      radiant cool eyes hallucinating
    anarchy & Blake-light tragedy             Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
    among the post-war cynical scholars       among the scholars of war

Still, one might gather some little fragments...

                   FIRST_THOUGHTS



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