ALLEN GINSBERG (Newark, New Jersey 1926 - NYC, 1997)
Allen Ginsberg wrote “Howl,” his landmark poem, shortly after moving from New York City to San Francisco. Ginsberg had left New York after being released from eight months of incarceration in a psychiatric ward.
This experience, along with the influence of the other writers who made up the Beat Generation, provided the conditions necessary for Ginsberg’s poem. More than anything, “Howl” is a fierce cry of lament for the decay of the American imagination.
The speaker announces this theme in the poem’s famous opening line, where he declares: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.”
As the words “I saw” suggest, the speaker of “Howl” offers an elaborate and apocalyptic vision of America on the verge of collapse. In particular, the speaker laments how mainstream culture has curtailed the spirit of freedom and creativity.
The result is that those who most fully embody this spirit have been reduced to little more than madmen, bums, and “angelheaded” (line 3) mystics.
Yet even as the speaker laments what has been lost, he also offers a celebratory prayer for all those artists, intellectuals, and activists who resist the calcifying effects of normative American morality.
HOWL (1956)
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
[…]
Ho visto le migliori menti della mia generazione distrutte dalla follia, affamate isteriche nude, trascinarsi nei quartieri negri all'alba in cerca di un sollievo astioso, alternativi dalle teste d'angelo in fiamme per l'antica celeste connessione con la dinamo stellata nel
meccanismo della notte, che in povertà e stracci e occhi vuoti e fatti sedevano fumando nell'oscurità oprannaturale di appartamenti con acqua fredda galleggianti tra le cime delle città contemplando il jazz,
Who are the BEST MINDS of our generation?
What is “Madness”?
What or Who do you “contemplate”?
A FAMOUS "INNER" HOWL IN VISUAL ART
Beneath a boiling sky, aflame with yellow, orange and red, an androgynous figure stands upon a bridge. Wearing a sinuous blue coat, which appears to flow, surreally, into a torrent of aqua, indigo and ultramarine behind him, he holds up two elongated hands on either side of his hairless, skull-like head.
His eyes wide with shock, he unleashes a bloodcurdling shriek. Despite distant vestiges of normality – two figures upon the bridge, a boat on the fjord – everything is suffused with a sense of primal, overwhelming horror.
This, of course, is The Scream, by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch – the second most famous image in art history, after Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.
There are different interpretations made for this painting but according to what Munch himself explained in his diary in an entry headed "Nice 22 January 1892”:
“One evening I was walking along a path; the city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord—the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The color shrieked. This became The Scream.
Can the poem and the painting somehow be compared? Explain
THE BEST MINDS OF A GENERATION
New York Post journalist Al Aronowitz introduced Allen Ginsberg, the legendary Beat author, to the folk singer-songwriter, Bob Dylan in 1963, and a creative friendship like no other began.
However, Dylan’s introduction to Ginsberg’s – and the work of other Beat poets – happened before then. It was part of the reason why Dylan found his way to the city by 1961. “I came out of the wilderness and just naturally fell in with the Beat scene, the bohemian, Be Bop crowd, it was all pretty much connected,” Dylan said in 1985.
Dylan shared that same hunger for the sacred and the mad. “There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars,” Kerouac wrote in the book. If Kerouac was the heart of the Beats, then Ginsberg was the brain. Dylan would never get to meet the former, and grew out of touch with Kerouac’s writing as he couldn’t relate to its machismo and self-destruction; by the mid-1960s, Kerouac began his slow but painful process of death by alcoholism. “I didn’t start writing poetry until I was out of high school. I was eighteen or so when I first discovered Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Frank O’Hara and those guys,” Dylan said about his early influence of beat poetry.
After Ginsberg and Dylan met, the two hit it off instantly. They naturally became a dual face of a new underground New York City counterculture, a beat generation of the ’60s. “If Dylan was beginning to provide the soundtrack for the counter-culture, Ginsberg gave it both a face and the networks which were essential in sustaining its momentum.”
SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK BLUES (1965)
Johnny’s in the ______________
Mixing up the medicine
I’m on the pavement
Thinking about the ______________
The man in the trench coat
Badge out, laid off
Says he’s got a bad cough
Wants to get it paid off
Look out kid
It’s somethin’ you did
______________ knows when
But you’re doin’ it again
You better duck down the alley way
Lookin’ for a new ______________
The man in the coon-skin cap
By the big pen
Wants eleven dollar bills
You only got ten
Maggie comes fleet foot
Face full of black soot
Talkin’ that the heat put
Plants in the ______________ but
The phone’s tapped anyway
Maggie says that many say
They must bust in early ______________
Orders from the D.A.
Look out kid
Don’t matter what you did
Walk on your tiptoes
Don’t try “No-Doz”
Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose
Keep a clean ______________
Watch the plain clothes
You don’t need a weatherman
To know which way the ______________ blows
Get sick, get ______________
Hang around a ink well
Ring bell, hard to tell
If anything is goin’ to sell
Try hard, get barred
Get back, write braille
Get jailed, jump bail
Join the ______________ if you fail
Look out kid
You’re gonna get hit
But users, cheaters
Six-time losers
Hang around the theaters
Girl by the whirlpool
Lookin’ for a new fool
Don’t follow ______________
Watch the parkin’ meters
Ah get born, keep warm
Short pants, romance, learn to dance
Get dressed, get blessed
Try to be a success
Please her, please him, buy gifts
Don’t steal, don’t lift
______________ years of schoolin’
And they put you on the day shift
Look out kid
They keep it all hid
Better jump down a ______________
Light yourself a candle
Don’t wear ______________
Try to avoid the scandals
Don’t wanna be a bum
You better chew gum
The pump don’t work
’Cause the vandals took the handles
PATTI’S POWER
Patti Smith has always had a reputation for saying exactly what she thinks. The American punk-poet laureate emerged from New York City’s downtown new wave and punk scene in the mid-1970s, quickly establishing herself as one of the most influential figures of that pioneering underground world.
After working on a factory assembly line on arrival to New York, she took to performing spoken word poetry in small clubs and venues, later forming the Patti Smith Group. She is an essential part of New York and, indeed America’s, complex musical DNA. Not only did she help introduce the world to punk, but she also toured with Bob Dylan on his Rolling Thunder Revue Tour, a carnivalesque, self-generating musical road trip unlike any the world had seen until that point.
I was dreaming in my dreaming
Of an aspect bright and fair
And my sleeping it was broken
But my dream it lingered near
In the form of shining valleys
Where the pure air recognized
And my senses newly opened
I awakened to the cry
That the people have the power
To redeem the work of fools
Upon the meek the graces shower
It's decreed the people rule
The people have the power
The people have the power
The people have the power
The people have the power
Vengeful aspects became suspect
And bending low as if to hear
And the armies ceased advancing
Because the people had their ear
And the shepherds and the soldiers
Lay beneath the stars
Exchanging visions
And laying arms
To waste in the dust
In the form of shining valleys
Where the pure air recognized
And my senses newly opened
I awakened to the cry
The people have the power
The people have the power
The people have the power
The people have the power
Where there were deserts
I saw fountains
Like cream the waters rise
And we strolled there together
With none to laugh or criticize
And the leopard
And the lamb
Lay together truly bound
I was hoping in my hoping
To recall what I had found
I was dreaming in my dreaming
God knows a purer view
As I surrender to my sleeping
I commit my dream to you
The people have the power
The people have the power
The people have the power
The people have the power
The power to dream, to rule
To wrestle the world from fools
It's decreed the people rule
It's decreed the people rule
Listen
I believe everything we dream
Can come to pass through our union
We can turn the world around
We can turn the earth's revolution
We have the power
People have the power
The people have the power
The people have the power
The power to dream, to rule
To wrestle the world from fools
It's decreed the people rule
It's decreed the people rule
We have the power
People have the power
We have the power...
Read the first stanza up to line 4. What sort of experience is the song about?
Lines 4 to 12: what did the artist picture and feel?
Lines 17 to 29: underline the images of peace.
Lines 34-47:what does the artist believe in?
Our dreams never come true
Our dreams are beautiful but can't change the world
Our dreams can change the world if we respect nature
Our dreams can change the world if we work al together
Riccardo Zambon - Babylon Lingue - 23 September 2023