Howl Now
Posted: June 26th, 2011, 3:49 am
For those of us that were alive when Howl was read in North Beach in 1955.
for those of us that remember what it was like in America in 55 when a few writers and poets dare open the poetic marvelous out of the bag, man.
Allen was at the center of the maelstrom of the Beat that is just a word that replaced the other word, for the Lost Generation.
We do not need to call hippies, "Hippies", we do not need to call beats, "Beat". the beat is the street, Howl broke on through to the other side, and became the flower of power of love that shouted it from the roof tops.
Howl was a cry in the dark night of America, it was a poem of poems that crawled out of the basements, and into the living rooms of black and white TV.
Howl is like all of Dylan songs rolled into one, Howl is a blueprint for blues and jazz poetry that tells it like it is, it is the romantic revolution born from the sardonic saxophone of the times a changin.
I don't remember the first time I read Howl, I was 17, in 67, I was another teenager in the middle of the psychedelic wave looking for a sign in the torrent of voices that washed over me, a stranger in a strange days found us land.
from the radio, the television, the school, the people in charge. I remember the rock music and the lyrics and sounds were large.
I was seeing the lies and the brainwash and the distortion before my eyes, I was looking high and low for a vision that would clear the static from my mental attic.
Out of this came the wild Beat, the stony Dylan days, and the shiny Beatles nights, I heard the surrealistic Howl come through the frail construct of my world, it blew down what was left of my childhood conditioning, and the LSD did not hurt at all, too.
Slowly I began to find the poets that would blow my mind, and Ginsberg was a source that would awaken in me the need and desire to find a way to say what it was that all that howling wind of freedom flashing in my brain, to help me stay sane in an insane hard rain a fallin.
Calling me to go out into the Allen alleyways and let the bongos in my blood pound to the nice noise out of the vacuum voids of cities and silence, of wars and machines of hate and floods of poverty when we walked to the different drum.
Howl knocked down the barriers, was a vessel for the influence of all those writers and poets that inspired Allen in the cardboard dawn of late fifties doldrums, depressing gray conformity, and dreary beatnik deadpan indifference, but like Kerouac rides on the road until the road goes no more, the writers ride the keys on their sacred second-hand typewriters until the ribbon runs out of ink, and they think what they did not want to think, but what they had to think, until the thought meets the empty white page.
yes, we let out the rage of pent up emotion, of the horror of desolation of our leaders who forget the wisdom of the ancients, and the native sons left behind in the trail of tears and chains, and a brain is a terrible thing to waste.
In our haste to be cool, we to forget to learn what history tells us, as we rush down the hallucinations that are manufactured by one-dimensional man, in this wasteland of hidden reality, we forgot to smell the coffee for the flowers, and lost all our precious hours to the media blackout that was a coming down the tube, we should have read our Poe by candle light and saw the gothic shadows winging through the home of the brave,
as we run through the flimsy reasons they are giving us for our amnesia of ambiguity.let all the howls that came from Howl arrive on time in the future when the Blessed minds of generations once again take on the tall call, and read the mind staggering stream of consciousness writing on the western wall.
for those of us that remember what it was like in America in 55 when a few writers and poets dare open the poetic marvelous out of the bag, man.
Allen was at the center of the maelstrom of the Beat that is just a word that replaced the other word, for the Lost Generation.
We do not need to call hippies, "Hippies", we do not need to call beats, "Beat". the beat is the street, Howl broke on through to the other side, and became the flower of power of love that shouted it from the roof tops.
Howl was a cry in the dark night of America, it was a poem of poems that crawled out of the basements, and into the living rooms of black and white TV.
Howl is like all of Dylan songs rolled into one, Howl is a blueprint for blues and jazz poetry that tells it like it is, it is the romantic revolution born from the sardonic saxophone of the times a changin.
I don't remember the first time I read Howl, I was 17, in 67, I was another teenager in the middle of the psychedelic wave looking for a sign in the torrent of voices that washed over me, a stranger in a strange days found us land.
from the radio, the television, the school, the people in charge. I remember the rock music and the lyrics and sounds were large.
I was seeing the lies and the brainwash and the distortion before my eyes, I was looking high and low for a vision that would clear the static from my mental attic.
Out of this came the wild Beat, the stony Dylan days, and the shiny Beatles nights, I heard the surrealistic Howl come through the frail construct of my world, it blew down what was left of my childhood conditioning, and the LSD did not hurt at all, too.
Slowly I began to find the poets that would blow my mind, and Ginsberg was a source that would awaken in me the need and desire to find a way to say what it was that all that howling wind of freedom flashing in my brain, to help me stay sane in an insane hard rain a fallin.
Calling me to go out into the Allen alleyways and let the bongos in my blood pound to the nice noise out of the vacuum voids of cities and silence, of wars and machines of hate and floods of poverty when we walked to the different drum.
Howl knocked down the barriers, was a vessel for the influence of all those writers and poets that inspired Allen in the cardboard dawn of late fifties doldrums, depressing gray conformity, and dreary beatnik deadpan indifference, but like Kerouac rides on the road until the road goes no more, the writers ride the keys on their sacred second-hand typewriters until the ribbon runs out of ink, and they think what they did not want to think, but what they had to think, until the thought meets the empty white page.
yes, we let out the rage of pent up emotion, of the horror of desolation of our leaders who forget the wisdom of the ancients, and the native sons left behind in the trail of tears and chains, and a brain is a terrible thing to waste.
In our haste to be cool, we to forget to learn what history tells us, as we rush down the hallucinations that are manufactured by one-dimensional man, in this wasteland of hidden reality, we forgot to smell the coffee for the flowers, and lost all our precious hours to the media blackout that was a coming down the tube, we should have read our Poe by candle light and saw the gothic shadows winging through the home of the brave,
as we run through the flimsy reasons they are giving us for our amnesia of ambiguity.let all the howls that came from Howl arrive on time in the future when the Blessed minds of generations once again take on the tall call, and read the mind staggering stream of consciousness writing on the western wall.
