Howl at 50; Happy New Year

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the first reading of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”, most famously an angry eulogy for the destruction wrought by McCarthyite fifties America:

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.

But he was too good a poet to settle merely for spewing bile, too much in love with the language of William Blake and Walt Whitman:

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 thereby inventing the otherwise often overrated Beats.

Ginsberg’s publishers, City Lights Books of San Francisco, are organizing celebratory events for the next year, starting on October 6, the date of the poem’s first public performance.

I am happy but somewhat perplexed to note that “Howl” boasts an entry in an Astronomy Encyclopedia (perhaps it’s those lines about the “starry dynamo”?).

And, since Ginsberg was, like me, nothing if not a good (bad) Jewish boy from New Jersey, and it’s Rosh Hashanah this week: Happy New Year!