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Originally Posted by Katy
I don't think I could disagree more. Usually, if i disagree with someone (particularly on the internet) I just let it go, won't argue, because I don't care. But I'll defend Ginsberg hard.
Just about every line of 'Howl' makes my insides vibrate. I don't just like that poem, I adore it. It's probably the only poem that has ever spoken to me clearly. I wrote the whole thing out on lined paper (copied it out of a library book), about twelve A4 pages worth, and stuck it on my bedroom door when I was a teenager. It was there for years. I used it like a talisman to ward of evil from my bedroom. (I should never have taken it down, really.. it all went to shit after that.)
I got sick of the other "beat" writers. But I've never stopped loving Allen Ginsberg. If anything, I've come to appreciate him more as I've got older. 'Howl' meant a lot to me when I was younger, but I'm not sure I really knew why. As the years have gone by and things have happened, passages in it have unfolded for me, like little secrets. There is SO MUCH in it (not just because of it's length, either) almost every stanza has more than one meaning, and each one is so beautifully, powerfully put. They spring into my head randomly, just pop in there and make me smile and/or tear up sometimes. Lines in it have actually helped me, made me feel a bit better at times. And that's only a small portion of it. It's far from exhausted its use to me.
I can't tell you on how many occasions the lines "banging on the catatonic piano, the soul IS innocent and immortal, it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse" have run through my head, at various times, meaning various things to me. And how many things I've named after lines in 'Howl', how many times I've quoted and recited parts of it, scribbled bits of it onto walls and other surfaces. How many times when I'm thinking about certain people I love "while you are not safe, I am not safe" has popped into my mind.
Perhaps it's a personal thing, but.. there you go. I got an email recently from an old friend who reminded me of something I don't remember saying. Apparently one of the things she remembers most about our trip to Paris years ago is a rant I went on in the hotel room about 'Howl' and Ginsberg and how I would've married him on his deathbed, the beardy old pederast, for giving me just one line of that poem...
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