About this title: Ginsberg's celebrated 1956 poem brought the writing of the Beat Generation to widespread attention. In the words of a critic who was there, when Ginsberg read "Howl" aloud for the first time at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in October of 1955, the audience knew "at the deepest level that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America." After the reading, budding publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti sent a telegram to Ginsberg that exactly echoed the letter Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to Ginsberg's hero Walt Whitman when Whitman published ...
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Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: City Lights Books
Date Published: 2001
ISBN-13:9780872860179ISBN:0872860175
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Light edege wear to soft cover. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 57 p. Pocket Poets, 4. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: City Lights Books
Date Published: 1978
ISBN-13:9780872860179ISBN:0872860175
Description: Very Good. 29th printing, light shelf wear, small ink smudge on front, no rips or tears, not age toned, 44 unmarked pages, introduction by William Carlos Williams, classic collection of early Ginsberg poems originally appeared in 1956. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: City Lights Books
Date Published: 1956
ISBN-13:9780872860179ISBN:0872860175
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: City Lights Books
Date Published: 1956-06-01
ISBN-13:9780872860179ISBN:0872860175
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780872860179. read more
Edition: Later Printing
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: City Lights, San Francisco
Date Published: 1956
Description: Good+ 20th printing, 1968. Browning to cover and spine. Name on title page at top, no other markings. Secure binding. Introduction by William Carlos Williams.; 16mo 6"-7" tall; 44 pages. read more
Edition: 17th printing, 10 years after the first
Publisher: City Lights Books, (c 1956. ), San Francisco
Date Published: 1966
Description: Near fine (prev owner's name. ) Number Four in the Pocket Poets series, Introduction by William Carlos Williams. Notation on copyright page that 106, 000 copies of this had been sold. Small square format. 44 pp. read more
"Ginsberg was not of my time. Either was Tennyson, Blake or Neruda - so what's the big deal? Why do I think I won't like the 'beat poets?' Could it be because I don't like jazz? Nah, it is just--that microcosm of 60's free expression rebellion-I guess, you had to be there. But HOWL is a great explosion of words and despite the arcane references and self absorbed imagery, its raw passion leaves you breathless.
"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 & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
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.""
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
"Attended the Troy Library sale the other day with my mother and sister, made my sister pick up The Day of the Locust, which I have not read yet, but intend to. I found this little City Light gem for 50cents. I was amazed having not read through "Howl" since the last station of my life, how fresh and wily the poem still reads, full of unexpected comic tones, voice and sincerety (though I think Ginsberg has been sometimes painted the cynic, there is not a note of irony that bears out this human bouquet of living). Along with "Sunflower Sutra," "Supermarket," and "America," this collection is the prismatic explosion of a great poet having pressed up to a surprising realization of scope. Where Kerouac might be the spirit of the Beats, Ginsberg really seems to have a phonograph on the pulse and mind waves.
In an interview I had heard Ginsberg speak about marketing and poetry, and the magical power of poetry that sets it apart from every other form of communication, through the transparency of poems to radically contend and shift reality, to even elbow in some truth. A misinterpretation of the interview perhaps, but what other way would Ginsberg have it than with the celebratory culture of youth taking on the reigns."
""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..."
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