"Howl" for Carl Solomon.
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,
angel-headed 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!
Sometimes I feel in command when I'm writing.
When I'm in the heat of some truthful tears, yes.
Other times... most of the time, not.
You know, just diddling around...
woodcarving, you know, finding a pretty shape,
like most of my poetry.
There's only been a few times when I've reached a state of...
complete control...
Probably a piece of "Howl," and...
one or two moments in other poems.
The beginning of the fear for me was
what would my father think of something that I would write.
At the time, writing "Howl,"
I assumed when writing it that
it was not something that would be published,
because...
I wouldn't want my daddy to see what was in there.
So, I assumed it wouldn't be published, therefore, I could
write anything that I wanted to.
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,
angel-headed 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,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and
Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy
& publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,
burning their money in wastebaskets
and listening to the Terror through the wall,
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,
alcohol and cock and endless balls,
What I wanted to read into the record, Your Honor, is
not very much, but it is pertinent to our case.
Why aren't you at the trial?
'Cause...
the trial's not about me.
As much as I have to thank them
completely for my fame...
It's the publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti that was
busted for selling
obscene materials.
What I want to show is on the first page inside of "Howl."
It says, "All these books are published in Heaven."
And...
I don't quite understand that, but anyway,
let the record show, Your Honor,
it's published by the City Lights Pocketbook Shop.
Mr. Ferlinghetti could go to jail if convicted?
I hope not. That would be terrible.
May I have your name, please?
Gail Potter.
And have you done any writing yourself?
Yes, I have done considerable.
I was on an NBC station for 10 years while I was teaching.
I was community service director,
educational coordinator...
I have rewritten "Faust."
It took me three years to do that, but I did it.
I rewrote "Everyman."
That isn't as funny as you might think.
Pardon me, madam.
Ladies and gentlemen,
this is a trial that involves serious issues.
Now kindly accord the witness
the courtesy you would want to be accorded.
Alright.
And did you form an opinion as to whether or not the book called
"Howl and Other Poems" has any literary merit?
I think it has no literary merit.
Go ahead.
In order to have literary style, you must have
form, diction, fluidity, clarity.
Now, I am speaking only of style.
And in content, every great piece of literature,
anything that can really be classified as literature, is...
of some moral greatness,
and I think this fails to the nth degree.
I see.
Can you think of any other reasons?
Yes...
Use of language.
In regards to the figures of speech he uses,
he fails in rhetoric, of course,
for one thing, because his figures of speech are
crude, and you feel like you are going through the gutter
when you read that stuff.
I didn't linger on it long, I assure you.
You may cross-examine.
Step down.
There's something more you want?
Step down.
Mr. Ehrlich doesn't want to cross-examine.
You're through with me?
Step down.
What is "The Beat Generation"?
There is no Beat Generation.
It's just a bunch of guys, trying to get published.
Why don't you tell me how you started writing poetry?
I started writing poetry because I was a dope,
and my father wrote poetry.
So I began writing rhymes like him.
And then I went to Columbia University and I fell in love
with Jack Kerouac.
Until I was 18, I was a virgin.
I was unable to reach out to anybody's body.
To reach out to desire.
I just felt...
Chained.
Jack gave me permission to open up.
He's a romantic poet.
And he taught me that writing is personal,
that it comes from the writer's own person.
His body,
his breathing rhythm,
his actual talk.
Eventually I developed a much deeper sense of confession.
I needed to...
express my feelings to him, but he didn't want to hear them.
So I had to find a new way of expressing them...
a way that would entrance him.
This is good here.
"I was offered refreshments which I accepted."
"I ate a sandwich of pure meat."
"Enormous sandwich of human flesh, I noticed,"
"while I was chewing on it."
"It also included a dirty asshole!"
That's good!
The meat and the asshole.
Allen, alright.
And then I realized that if I actually
admitted and confessed the secret tenderness
of my soul in my writing,
he would understand nakedly who I was. And so...
that sincere talk replaced the earlier
imitative rhyming that I was doing for my father.
Jack was the first person I really opened up to and said,
"I'm a homosexual."
I very soon realized that nobody was really shocked by anything.
Unless you're out murdering people, you know,
People would never really be shocked by
an expression of feeling.
Really I wrote "Howl" for Jack.
Who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride
from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought them down
shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain
all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
Who talked continuously 70 hours
from park to pad to bar to Bellevue
to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
A lost battalion of platonic conversationalists
jumping down the stoops,
off fire escapes, off windowsills,
off Empire State,
out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting
whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and
eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars
racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-father night
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross,
telepathy and bop kabbalah
because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho
seeking visionary Indian angels
who were visionary Indian angels,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma
on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight small-town rain,
who reappeared on the West Coast
investigating the FBI in beards and shorts
with big pacifist eyes
sexy in their dark skin
passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms
protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Super-Communist pamphlets in Union Square
weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos
wailed them down and wailed down Wall,
and the Staten Island Ferry also wailed,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists
and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors,
caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love.
The problem, when it comes to literature, is this:
There are many writers who have preconceived ideas
about what literature is supposed to be,
but their ideas seem to preclude
everything that makes them most interesting
in casual conversation.
Their faggishness,
their solitude,
their neuroses,
their goofiness,
their campiness,
or, even their masculinity at times.
Because they think that they're gonna write something
that sounds like something else that they've read before,
instead of
sounds like them.
Or, comes from their own life.
We all talk amongst ourselves;
we have a common understanding,
we say anything we want to say. We talk about our assholes,
we talk about our cocks,
we talk about who we fucked last night,
or who we're gonna fuck tomorrow,
or what kind of love affair we're in, or
when we got drunk and had a broom stick shoved up our ass in the
Hotel Ambassador in Prague...
I mean, everyone tells one's friends about that! Right?
So...
the question is, what happens when you make a distinction
between what you tell your friends and what you tell your Muse?
The trick is to break down that distinction,
to approach your Muse as
frankly as you would talk to yourself or to your friends.
It's the ability to commit to writing - to write -
the same way that
you are.
Who balled in the morning in the evenings
in rose gardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries
scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
Who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle
but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish bath
with a blonde and naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
The act of writing becomes, like, a meditation exercise.
If you walk down the street in New York for a few blocks,
you'll get this gargantuan feeling of buildings.
And, if you walk all day, you'll be on the verge of tears.
But, you have to walk all day before you get that sensation.
What I mean is, if you write all day, you'll get into it.
Into your body, into your feelings, into your consciousness...
I don't write enough in that way.
Who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass
and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer,
a sweetheart, a package of cigarettes,
a candle and fell off the bed
and continued along the floor and down the hall
and ended fainting on the wall
with a vision of ultimate cunt and come
eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who faded out in vast sordid movies,
were shifted in dreams,
woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up
out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay
and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams
and stumbled to unemployment offices,
who created great suicidal dramas
on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson
under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon
and their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who wept at the romance of the streets
with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge,
and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations
which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue
amid blasts of leaden verse
and the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion
and the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising
and the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors,
or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality.
Would you say that "Howl" has any literary merit?
Yes.
And I presume you understand the whole thing, is that right?
I hope so.
It's not always easy to know that one
understands exactly what a contemporary poet is saying,
but I think I do.
Well, let's go into some of this.
"With dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares,"
"alcohol and cock and endless balls."
What significance does that have to you?
Well...
there are uprooted people wandering around the United States,
dreaming,
drugged...
That's clear isn't it?
Even their waking hours like nightmares,
loaded with liquor and...
enjoying, I take it,
a variety of indiscriminate sexual experience.
You understand what "angelheaded hipsters
"burning for the ancient heavenly connection
"to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night" means?
Sir, you can't translate poetry into prose.
That's why it is poetry.
But what are "angelheaded hipsters"?
I was working as a copyboy at Associated Press,
and I was able to manage things.
Except that I was living in a $13-a-month, cold-water apartment
filled with junkies and thieves.
So the place was being filled with stolen silverware and
beautiful oaken furniture
taken from the lobbies of apartment buildings.
At a certain point,
I figured that things were getting too hot, and that...
I'd better get out of there. You know, get out from under.
So...
I piled myself and all my manuscripts
into the back of some guy's car
that turned out to be stolen.
You know, he had in the back,
all these stolen suits and suitcases and silverware,
and he turned the wrong way up a one-way street,
at the end of which there was a police car.
So he swerves his car to take a side road out,
and skidded and smashed and papers flying...
my eyeglasses lost, all the clothes upside down.
I jumped out, looked around, and
went back in the car to find my notebooks, but
I couldn't find my eyeglasses, so I couldn't find my papers.
The crowd was gathering around.
Chaos.
The easiest way to get out of the whole thing,
as it turns out, was
to just go to the Psychiatric Institute on 168th Street.
I was in the looney bin for eight months.
I met Carl Solomon there.
He was thinking about the void, also
and such problems, and...
We spent months sitting around asking ourselves whether the
authority of the doctors
and their sense of reality was right for us
or whether we were right, or you know what was happening.
And Carl was having problems
because he was receiving shock treatment.
I didn't have any of that, no medication, no shock.
'Cause I'd promised the doctor that I would be heterosexual.
And that's how I got out.
Your mother was institutionalized, wasn't she?
The concrete void of insulin Metrazol
electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy
occupational therapy pingpong and amnesia,
who in humorless protest,
overturned only one symbolic pingpong table,
resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood,
and tears and fingers,
to the visible madman doom of the wards
of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls...
My mother Naomi was...
in and out of mental institutions
from the time I was 6.
When I was 21, I had to sign the papers for her lobotomy.
She died at Pilgrim State Hospital.
Bickering with the echoes of the soul,
rocking and rolling in the midnight
solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love,
dream of life a nightmare,
bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother
finally fucked,
and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window,
and the last door closed at 4 am
and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply
and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece
of mental furniture,
a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet,
and even that imaginary,
nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination
Ah, Carl,
while you are not safe
I am not safe,
and now you're really in the total animal soup of time...
After I got out of the mental hospital,
I had a period of fear where...
I felt I had to get out of New York.
I was questioning my sense of reality versus the
social sense that was being imposed on me.
It was a position that...
Many people in the hospital came out with, you know,
a total self-rejection,
a rejection of, you know, their own universe.
Lip service, actually, to...
supposedly acceptable social patterns.
But I was falling in love over and over again,
and I kept writing my poetry about
the people I was falling in love with.
All straight men.
And I hitch-hiked cross-country
from Denver with my friend, Neal Cassady.
And Neal was very frenetic,
very charming,
and he had six thousand
girls across the continent that were keeping him very busy.
Ok... um... no. Um...
Kiss!
Wait, wait, you have something...
I'll get that.
- Better? - Yeah.
- Get it? - I got it.
One day, Neal and I were thrown together in bed, at 4 am
By circumstance...
with no place else to go and no place else to sleep.
And I remember being a little scared,
and not quite sure what to do, so...
I sort of like turned over and
stiffened my body and got on the edge of the bed.
And he saw that I was shy.
At the time I was still...
scared of feeling with another person.
So he put his arm around me,
and pulled me, and
put my head on his breast, and
gave me love, actually.
And then one day, I got a letter
saying, finally,
"We shouldn't consider ourselves lovers..."
"I'm distracted with the wife,"
"as much as I love you."
So my heart was broken.
"Dear Allen,
"What you say is honestly what I've been doing
"or striving for all my life.
"Therein lies our,
"or my confused sense of closeness.
"Also I fear therein lies our strength of tie to each other.
"I say, 'I fear, '
"for I really don't know how much I can be satisfied to love you.
"I mean 'bodily.'
"You know, I sometimes dislike pricks and men and before you
"had consciously forced myself to be homosexual.
"You meant so much to me.
"I now feel I was forcing a desire for you bodily
"as a compensation to you
"for all you were giving me."
"Allen, this is straight."
"What I truly want is to live with you from September to June,"
"have an apartment, a girl, go to college,"
"see all and do all,"
"and become truly straight, so please, Allen,"
"give this a good deal of thought."
Who drove cross-country 72 hours to find out if I had a vision
or you had a vision
or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver,
who died in Denver,
who came back to Denver and waited in vain,
who watched over Denver and brooded and loned in Denver
and finally went away to find out the Time,
and now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals
praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls
trembling in the sunset,
and were red eyed in the morning but prepared
to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise,
flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars,
Neal Cassady, secret hero of these poems,
cocksman and Adonis of Denver,
joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots and diner backyards,
Moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves
or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside
lonely petticoat upliftings.
I think it's a howl of pain.
Figuratively speaking, his toes have been stepped on.
He's poetically putting his cry of pain and
protest into this book, "Howl."
And do you think this book has definite literary value?
I do.
As a matter of fact, I think in a way
he is employing the jazz phraseology here
and, may I say, I...
I think he's also employing the words he heard
in his life on the road and in his various experiences.
Thank you.
Now, do you understand most of the words in this book?
I think I understand their significance
and the general context of it.
I see.
Taking on page 13,
the 14th line:
"Who howled on their knees in the subway"
"and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts."
Now, do you understand what that paragraph is trying to say,
as a part of the "Howl"?
Not explicitly.
I would say he was attempting to show the...
lack of inhibition in the persons he's talking of,
post-World War II generation...
those who returned,
went into college or went into work immediately after WW II
perhaps were somewhat displaced by the chaos of the war and
didn't immediately settle down.
Now, the next paragraph:
"Who blew and were blown"
"by those human seraphim, the sailors,"
"caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love."
Now, you understand what "blew" and "blown" mean?
Well, I think they are words that have several meanings.
What meanings do you attribute to the words in this paragraph?
It can at one level mean... that they were vagabonds,
that they were being blown about by natural, literal winds.
On the other hand, perhaps it does have a sexual connotation.
In reference to oral copulation, right?
Yes, possibly.
Now then, do you find that those words
are necessary to the context
to make it a work of literary value?
I thought we had settled this, Your Honor.
Yes, Mr. Mclntosh, if you will recall,
I said that I would not allow the use of the word "necessary."
But you may ask the question, "Are they relevant?"
Are they relevant to make this a work of literary value?
Yes, I would say so.
Now then if you took those words out of there,
Would that spoil the portrayal?
That's doing indirectly what Your Honor won't permit him to do directly.
This man is an expert.
He has to speculate.
No, Mr. Mclntosh, I'm afraid I can't go along with you on that.
Whether the author might have used other or different words,
you're getting into the realm of speculation there.
Objection sustained.
Going down a little further...
"who sweetened the snatches of a million girls"
"trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning"
"but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise,"
"flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake."
What's your question?
Is that word "snatches" in there...
Is that...
relevant to Mr. Ginsberg's literary endeavor?
Yes. I think to use euphemisms in describing this would...
seem dishonest to Mr. Ginsberg.
You also said, I believe, literary value sometimes
is a book which will survive any test of time.
Do you think Mr. Ginsberg's work will survive the test of time?
He has no way of knowing,
no more than some people thought "Leaves of Grass" would survive.
I'm asking him for his opinion, to give us an opinion on that book.
He says that literary value
depends on surviving the test of time.
I want to know if it will.
If Luther Nichols could answer that,
then the Good Lord could use a helper and he ought to be up there.
How can he tell?
I'm asking for his opinion as an expert.
I'll ask him.
Can you answer the question?
It calls for a prediction.
I think that this trial will draw attention to it.
"Howl" will have a wider readership than it might otherwise have had,
and may go down in history as a stepping-stone along the way
to greater or lesser liberality
in the permitting of poems of its type.
Poetry, generally, is a...
rythmic articulation of feeling
And the feeling is
an impulse that begins inside.
Like a sexual impulse, you know. Almost as definite as that. It's
It's a feeling that begins, in the pit of the stomach, right?
And rises up through the breast, and...
out the mouth and ears, right?
And...
it comes forth as a croon or a groan or a sigh, right?
So if you try to put words to that
by looking around you and
trying to describe what's making you sigh,
just sigh in words,
you simply articulate what you're feeling.
Who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in police cars for committing no crime,
but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication.
Who howled on their knees in the subway
and were dragged off the roof
waving genitals and manuscripts.
In the moment of composition,
I don't necessarily know what it means.
It comes to mean something later,
after a year or two, I come to realize
it meant something clear,
unconsciously.
Which takes on meaning in time, you know like...
a photograph developing slowly.
If it's at all spontaneous,
I don't know whether it even makes sense sometimes.
And other times, I do know it makes complete sense,
I start crying.
'Cause I realize that I'm...
I'm hitting on an area that's...
absolutely true.
In that sense, able to be read by someone
and wept to, maybe, centuries later.
In that sense, prophecy,
because it touches a common key.
I mean,
what prophecy actually is,
is not knowing whether...
the bomb will fall in 1942.
It's knowing and feeling something
which someone knows and feels
in a hundred years. Hmm?
And maybe articulating it in a hint that
they will pick up on in a 100 years.
Who crashed through their minds in jail
waiting for impossible criminals
with golden heads
and the charm of reality in their hearts
who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism
and were left with their insanity
and their hands and a hung jury
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves
on the granite steps of the madhouse
with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide,
demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead
the concrete void of insulin Metrazol
electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy
occupational therapy pingpong and amnesia,
and who therefore ran through the icy streets
obsessed with a sudden flash
of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse
the catalog the meter and the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time and Space
through images juxtaposed,
and trapped the archangel of the soul
between 2 visual images
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose
and stand before you speechless and intelligent
and shaking with shame,
rejected yet confessing out the soul
to conform to the rhythm of thought
in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time,
unknown, yet putting down here
what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz
in the goldhorn shadow of the band
and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love
into an eli eli lamma lamma
sabacthani saxophone cry
That shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life
butchered out of their own bodies
good to eat a thousand years.
After I left New York,
I spent a year in San Francisco.
I had an apartment on Nob Hill,
the tie and suit,
a job with several secretaries which was...
beginning to give me pleasure,
the pleasure of knowing I could do it
and was no longer intimidated by the social forms,
to be able to make it in the very dry, business world
And that's when I met Peter.
It was when I met Peter
that everything changed for me.
It was as if the heavens showered with gold.
Finally somebody loved me like I loved them,
and for the first time, I felt accepted in my life.
Completely.
In San Francisco,
I had a year of psychotherapy with Dr. Hicks.
I was blocked, I couldn't write...
I was still trying to act normal.
I was afraid I was crazy.
I was sure that I was supposed to be heterosexual
and that something was wrong with me.
And Dr. Hicks kept saying,
"What do you want to do?"
"What is your heart's desire?"
Finally I said...
what I'd really like to do is to
just quit all this
and...
get a small room with Peter
and devote myself to my writing and
contemplation and fucking and smoking pot and...
doing whatever I want.
And he said, "Why don't you do it, then?"
I mean, what will happen if I grow old...
and I have pee-stains in my underwear
and I'm living in some furnished room
and nobody loves me and I'm...
white-haired and...
"I have no money, bread crumbs are falling on the floor?"
And he said,
"Don't worry about that,"
"you're very charming and lovable and people will always love you."
What a relief to hear that!
I very soon realized that it was all...
a fear-trap...
Illusory!
What sphinx of cement and aluminum
bashed open their skulls
and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth!
Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars!
Children screaming under stairways!
Boys sobbing in armies!
Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch!
Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless!
Mental Moloch!
Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Peter and I saw Moloch one day when we took peyote
and were wandering around downtown streets.
It's a god that you make fire sacrifices to.
But...
in my mind, it was what drove my mother to madness.
So, I had the line
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows.
I had this word,
And... I also had the feeling
DA de de DA de de DA de de DA DA. Hmm?
So then all I had to do was look up and see a lot of windows,
and say, "Oh, windows, of course,"
But what kind of windows? Right? And...
Not only that...
"Moloch whose eyes"...Right?
"Moloch whose eyes" which is beautiful in itself but...
You know, what about it?
"Moloch whose eyes" what?
"Moloch whose eyes"...
Then the next thing I thought was probably...
"Thousands."
OK, but "thousands" what?
"Thousands blind"...
And then I had to finish it somehow. So...
I had to say "windows."
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers
stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs!
Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone!
Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!
Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely!
Moloch in whom I dream Angels!
Crazy in Moloch!
Cocksucker in Moloch!
Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early!
Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon!
Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch!
Robot apartments!
Invisible suburbs!
Skeleton treasuries!
Blind capitals!
Demonic industries!
Spectral nations!
Invincible mad houses!
Granite cocks!
Monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven!
Pavements, trees!
Lifting the city to Heaven
which exists and is everywhere about us!
Dreams!
Adorations!
Illuminations!
Religions!
The whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs!
Over the river!
Flips and crucifixions!
Gone down the flood!
Highs! Epiphanies!
Despairs!
Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation!
Down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river!
They saw it all!
The wild eyes! The holy yells!
They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! To solitude!
Waving!
Carrying flowers!
Down to the river!
Into the street!
It is my opinion that if it has any literary value,
it's negligible.
I endeavored to arrive at my opinion
on an objective basis.
For example,
a great literary work, or even a fairly great literary work,
would obviously be exceedingly successful in form,
but this poem is really just a weak imitation
of a form that was used 80 to 90 years ago by Walt Whitman.
And do you recall the name of that poem?
"Leaves of Grass" was the name of the poem.
Literary value could also reside in theme,
and what little literary value there is in "Howl,"
it seems to me does come in theme.
The statement of the idea of the poem was relatively clear,
but it has little validity, and, therefore, the theme
has a negative value.
No value at all.
Thank you.
Did I understand you to say that
Ginsberg used Walt Whitman's style?
The form.
The form of the book "Leaves of Grass."
And because of Ginsberg's using this format,
it is your opinion that the poem "Howl"
has no literary value or...
merit, is that true?
On the basis of form, that's correct,
because great literature always creates
its own form for each significant occasion.
By that, you do not mean that
Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" doesn't quite qualify?
That is great literature.
The form was created by Walt Whitman.
And at the same time, you say, because
Ginsberg copied that format,
"Howl" has no value or merit, am I correct?
That is correct.
An imitation never does have the value of the original.
Who did Walt Whitman copy?
To my knowledge, no one.
But you don't know,
isn't that your answer, you don't know, sir?
That's right.
As I understand, your next signpost
is that the idea
of "Howl" is clear, but has little validity.
Am I quoting you correctly?
That's the general conclusion, yes...
the idea of "Howl" is clear in theme.
- The idea is clear? - Yes.
What idea does Ginsberg have in "Howl"?
Well, he celebrates the unfortunate life of...
I can't remember the man's name, Solomon...
the unfortunate life of the man, Solomon,
who is a drifter of Dadaist persuasion.
A drift what?
Drifter of Dadaist persuasion.
He portrays that?
That's correct.
And does that portrayal have any validity?
Not as literature, no.
Carl Solomon!
I'm with you in Rockland where you're madder than I am.
I'm with you in Rockland where you must feel very strange.
I'm with you in Rockland where you imitate the shade of my mother.
I'm with you in Rockland where you pun on the bodies of your nurses,
the harpies of the Bronx.
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano
the soul is innocent and immortal
it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse.
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return
your soul to its body again
from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void.
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity
and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution
against the fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island
and resurrect your living human Jesus
from the superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland where there are 25,000
mad comrades all together singing
the final stanzas of the Internationale.
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof.
They've come to drop angelic bombs
the hospital illuminates itself
imaginary walls collapse
O skinny legions run outside
O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here
O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams
you walk dripping from a sea-journey
on the highway across America
in tears to the door of my cottage
in the Western night.
What is your impression of the third portion of "Howl"?
My understanding there would be that the poet expresses
the usual Dadaist line that
everything is created for man's despair,
that everything must be forgotten and destroyed, and
that Solomon's life apparently has had this kind of rhythm.
Therefore, there is some validity
of theme, in that area.
So, there is validity of theme there?
I am afraid I got my tongue tripped up there... this...
I should have said "clarity" instead of "validity."
But you've been using the term "validity"
the entire time you've been on the stand.
By the way, Mr. Kirk, have you read the Holy Bible?
I have.
Tell me, did you read Job?
I have.
Isn't Job crying the same cry as Ginsberg's "Howl"?
Not at all.
Do you agree with me that Job does condemn life?
Job condemns man's condition, yes,
but he does not go on then, as the Dadaist goes on, to...
desire to wipe out all human memory
of everything the human race has ever done
so that there can be a fresh start made
as the Dadaist does.
And you don't believe in that philosophy?
Not at all.
No, it's been dead since about 1922 or '23.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that
someone who does believe that is...
wrong, does it?
No, but that does not create literature.
Well, what...
What creates literature, Mr. Kirk?
I'd have to return to my three bases of objective criticism:
Form, theme and opportunity.
Well...
Do you feel that Ginsberg had the
opportunity in his travels
to observe life and to write about it?
A small segment, yes.
And this is the segment that he's writing about,
isn't that right?
One thing...
Answer that question, please, "Yes" or "No."
Uh... I'm... I'm confused.
This is the segment that he is writing about,
isn't that true?
I can't answer that either "Yes" or "No."
But you said in his travels,
he wrote about a small segment of the community.
Here's where the confusion comes in:
I believe the travels are Solomon's, not Ginsberg's.
That's the basis of my confusion.
Yes, well, Ginsberg is writing it about Solomon...
It's his own observations.
You have read that, haven't you?
I am unable to know whether he has
an acquaintance with Solomon.
That is the thing that is beyond my experience,
beyond my knowledge.
Do you evaluate a work by whether the writer knew
the person he was talking about?
Absolutely.
Are you certain that Carl Solomon ever lived?
No.
Then you don't know, do you?
Not at all.
Have you ever read... Voltaire?
I've read one work,
"Candide."
And what is your opinion of "Candide"?
As literature? It's great literature.
And whose style did Voltaire copy?
Oh!
Your Honor!
Please!
Counsel is allowed to make an objection.
If he objects.
Well, I would like to...
I don't want to box with him.
He's disturbing me.
I get my mouth open and out fly fists.
How long have you reflected on "Howl"?
I believe two weeks.
Two weeks?
Two weeks would be the limit of my opportunity.
However, I made my mind up after 5 minutes.
And you reflected a long, long time
on Voltaire's "Candide," is that right?
Exactly.
Well, do you think that if you had another
ten years to reflect on "Howl,"
you might change your opinion?
I am quite certain I would not.
That is all.
Where you accuse your doctors of insanity
and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution
against the fascist national Golgotha.
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are 25,000 mad comrades all together
singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss
the United States under our bedsheets.
The United States
that coughs all night and won't let us sleep.
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof
they've come to drop angelic bombs
the hospital illuminates itself
imaginary walls collapse
O skinny legions run outside
O starry-spangled shock of mercy
the eternal war is here!
O victory!
Forget your underwear!
We're free!
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams
you walk dripping from a sea-journey
on the highway across America
in tears to the door of my cottage
in the Western night.
"Howl" contains words,
taken just by themselves, Your Honor,
that are definitely obscene.
And we have had different literary experts testify that
the books have literary merit, and that the words
are necessary to that so-called merit.
But it's funny in our law,
we are allowed to use
expert witnesses to testify as to literary merit,
but we are not allowed to bring in,
we will say, the average man
to testify that when he reads the book,
he doesn't understand it.
He doesn't know what it's all about.
Perhaps it's over his head.
Take, for example...
Frankly, and I made the comment in open court that I'd read it,
I don't understand it very well.
In fact, looking it all over,
I think it's a lot of sensitive bullshit,
using the language of Mr. Ginsberg.
So then,
If the sale of a book is not being limited to just
modern book reviewers
and experts on modern poetry,
but falls into the hands of the general public,
that is to say, the average reader,
this court should take that into consideration
in determining whether or not "Howl" is obscene.
Thank you, Your Honor
Alright...
I will hear from the defense.
The United States Supreme Court has said that obscenity
is construed to mean
"having a substantial tendency to corrupt"
"by arousing lustful desires."
Is the word relevant to what the author is trying to say,
or did he just use it to be dirty and filthy?
He sees what he terms as
"an Adonis of Denver, joy to the memory"
"of his innumerable conquests."
Who went out whoring through Colorado
in myriad stolen night-cars
Neal Cassady, secret hero of this poem,
cocksman and Adonis of Denver,
joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots and diner backyards,
moviehouses' rickety rows,
on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses
in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings
and especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns,
and hometown alleys too.
Now, I suppose he could have said that,
the secret hero of these poems,
this "cocksman," this "Adonis of Denver,"
joy to memory of his innumerable conquests
at the Waldorf Astoria...
or at dinner at Chasen's, or after one or two drinks,
in going to bed at the Stork Club.
I presume he could have said that...
but that isn't the kind of person
he is writing about.
It is not for us to choose the words.
Mr. Ginsberg, in telling his story,
is telling the story as he sees it.
He is using his words.
There are books that have the power to change
men's minds,
and call attention to situations that...
are visible but
unseen.
Now whether "Howl" is or is not "obscene" is of
little importance to our world, faced as it is with the threat
of physical survival,
but...
the problem of what is legally permissible
in the description of sexual acts or feelings
in arts and literature is of the greatest importance
to a free society.
What is "prurient"?
And to whom?
And the material so described is dangerous to some
unspecified, susceptible reader.
It is interesting that
the person applying such standards of censorship
rarely feels as if their own
physical or moral health is in jeopardy.
The desire to censor is...
not limited, however, to crackpots and bigots.
There is...
in most of us, a desire to
make the world conform to our own views.
And it takes all of the force of our own reason as well as
our legal institutions to defy so human an urge.
The battle of censorship will not be
finally settled by Your Honor's decision,
but you will either add to liberal, educated thinking,
or by your decision, you will add fuel
to the fire of ignorance.
Let there be light.
Let there be honesty.
Let there be no running from
non-existent destroyers of morals.
Let there be honest understanding.
Gentleman, is the matter submitted?
It is submitted, Your Honor.
It is so submitted.
All rise.
Be seated.
There are a number of words used in "Howl"
that are presently considered coarse and vulgar
in some circles of the community,
and in other circles, such words are in everyday use.
The author of "Howl"
has used those words because he believed that
his portrayal required them as being in character.
The People state that such words are not necessary
and that others would be more palatable for good taste.
The answer is that life is not encased in one formula
whereby everyone acts the same
and conforms to a particular pattern.
No two persons think alike.
We were all made from the same form
but in different patterns.
Would there be any freedoms of press or speech
if one must reduce his vocabulary
to vapid, innocuous euphemism?
An author should be real in treating his subject
and be allowed to express his thoughts
and ideas in his own words.
In considering material claimed to be obscene,
it is well to remember the motto,
"Honi soit qui mal y pense'"
"Evil to him who evil thinks."
The freedoms of speech and press
are inherent in a nation of free people.
These freedoms must be protected if we are to remain free,
both individually and as a nation.
Therefore, I conclude that the book "Howl and Other Poems"
does have some redeeming social importance,
and I find the book is not obscene.
The defendant is found not guilty.
The crucial moment of breakthrough came when
I realized how funny it would be,
in the middle of a long poem,
if I said:
"Who let themselves be fucked in the ass"
"and screamed with joy!"
Instead of "and screamed with pain."
That's the contradiction in that line.
An American audience would expect it to be pain and,
instead, it's "screamed with joy!"
Which is really true.
Absolutely, 100%.
And, again, I have a line, like
"Who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,"
the sailors, caresses of
"Atlantic and Caribbean love."
It was an acknowledgement of the
basic reality of homosexual joy.
That was a breakthrough in the sense of
public statements about
feelings, emotions, attitudes, you know,
that...
I wouldn't have wanted my father or my family to see,
and that I even hesitated to make public.
The poem is misinterpreted as...
a promotion of homosexuality.
Actually, it's... more like a promotion of
frankness, about any subject.
If you're a foot fetishist, you write about feet.
If you're a stock-market freak,
you can write about the rising sales-curve erections
of the Standard Oil chart.
When a few people are...
frank about homosexuality in public,
it breaks the ice.
Then people are free to be frank about anything and...
That's socially useful.
Homosexuality is a condition,
and because it alienated me
or set me apart from the beginning,
it served as a catalyst for self-examination,
or...
a detailed realization of my environment and...
the reasons why everyone else is different and
why I am different.
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
The world is holy!
The soul is holy!
The skin is holy!
The nose is holy!
The tongue and cock and hand and asshole, holy!
Everything is holy!
Everybody's holy!
Everywhere is holy!
Everyday is an eternity!
Everyman's an angel!
The bum's as holy as the seraphim!
The madman is holy as you my soul are holy!
The typewriter is holy!
The poem is holy!
The voice is holy!
The hearers are holy!
The ecstasy is holy!
Holy Peter!
Holy Allen!
Holy Solomon!
Holy Lucien!
Holy Kerouac!
Holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cassady!
Holy the unknown buggered and suffering beggars!
Holy the hideous human angels!
Holy my mother in the insane asylum!
Holy the cocks of the grandfathers of Kansas!
Holy the groaning saxophone!
Holy the bop apocalypse!
Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters
peace and junk and drums!
Holy time in eternity!
Holy eternity in time!
Holy the clocks in space!
Holy the fourth dimension!
Holy the Fifth Internationale!
Holy the Angel in Moloch!
Holy the sea!
Holy the desert!
Holy the railroad, holy the locomotive
Holy the visions!
Holy the hallucinations!
Holy the miracles!
Holy the eyeball!
Holy the abyss!
Holy forgiveness!
Mercy!
Charity!
Faith!
Holy!
Ours!
Bodies!
Suffering!
Magnanimity!
Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness
of the soul.
Hey Father Death, I'm flying home
Hey, poor man, you're all alone
Hey, old daddy, I know where I'm going.
Father Death, don't cry any more.
Mama's there, underneath the floor.
Brother Death, please mind the store.
Old Auntie Death, I hear your groans.
Old Uncle Death, I see your bones.
Oh Sister Death, how sweet your moan
Oh Children Death, go breathe your breaths.
Sobbing breasts'll ease your deaths.
Pain is gone, tears take the rest.
Genius Death, your art is done
Lover Death, your body's gone
Father Death, I'm coming home
Guru Death, your words are true
Teacher Death, I do thank you
For inspiring me to sing this Blues
Buddha Death, I wake with you
Dharma Death, your mind is new
Sangha Death, we'll work it through
Suffering is what was born
Ignorance made me forlorn
Tearful truths I cannot scorn
Father Breath, once more farewell
Birth you gave was no thing ill
My heart is still,
as time will tell.