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Since 1982, the ALA has sponsored this event to remind us not to take our intellectual freedom for granted.
ALA reports that there were 581 challenges to books in schools and libraries in 2008; however,the Banned Books Week web sight informs us that the official ALA figures do not include ALL the challenges. Seventy to eighty percent of challenges are not reported to the ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom (though they do not provide supporting documentation for that figure, other resources indicate this data is supported by surveys undertaken by a variety of advocacy groups.) Banned Books does offer a nice mashup that maps the challenges.
At the ALA web site, you can review the differences between a challenge and an actual banning of books. They also provide information about the types of challenges and bans that take place in schools and libraries throughout the country.
On the web site, there is little information about the procedures ALA follows in response to these challenges or activities, or exactly how many are successful or unsuccessful. You can learn a little more about the challenges in this report by Roger Doyle at http://www.ila.org/pdf/2008banned.pdf.
A further exploration of the ALA web site reveals the Office of Lawyers for Libraries which holds regional advocacy institutes for lawyers retained to represent libraries on legal issues. In February they will be holding an Advocacy Institute in Los Angeles. You can also take advantage of a number of self help tools posted on the ALA Advocacy University web site.
Most of the resources focus on how to advocate for your library in terms of lobbying. There is only one paper based resource that focuses on lobbying for the library workers. There are no resources to help advocate for job security or academic freedom for individual librarians who are on the front lines battling censorship everyday. Oh wait, that was yesterday’s post.
In any case, Resource Shelf is doing a marvelous job keeping track of banned book resources to consult. This is a very important issue that I hope will all support.(VS)
I’d rather be alone with a schizophrenic,
than a psychiatrist.
…Carol Batton 1998
Manchester based poet Carol Batton is unique. She is a living legend who shares her poetry with the world. A frequent performer at poetry events in and around Manchester, Carol also distributes copies of her poems to anyone who cares to read them. She estimates that she may have given away fifty thousand sheets of poems.
Her writing deals with a wide range of subjects including environmental issues and the difficult topic of mental illness. Her poetry can be sad, witty, angry and above all full of her strength of spirit. In fact, she has been described as ‘the poet laureate of the survivors movement’.
Her debut collection of poems ‘Page Fright’ is published by The Bad Press. ISBN 1-903160-00-6 www.thebadpress.co.uk
CAROL’S PROFILE
DOB: 1/3/51
Religion: Jewish; Quaker attending; Eclectic; Tao!
Favourite colour: Don’t know but I’ve been called The Psychedelic Sunbeam Kid.
What is your mission in life? To expose psychiatry as bad; to do the poems and get through life somehow.
Are you drawn to any particular places or cultures? The city centre, Manchester and people.
Regarding poetry, who are you inspired by? Emily Dickinson’s use of dashes – !
If you were a TV character who would you be ? Me!
But you’re not a TV character. But I could be!
Your favourite film stars or celebrities? Aiden Gillen from ‘Queer as Folk’ because I’m a fag hag, though reliable sources tell me he’s not gay!
What do you think is the most desirable profession? Poet. People are good at different things and we should do what we choose to do and what we’re good at.
Which would be the most unappealing profession to you? Something unethical or dangerous eg. making weapons.
Favourite people: My boyfriend and handsome young men and gay men and gay women because they love me. In fact nobody else loves me but gay women. Gay women think I’m the bees’ knees. Straight men only love my body!
Favourite animals: Cows, they’re delicious. Do you want to know the truth? I don’t actually eat that many of them. That’s why I find them delicious.
Favourite Plants: Every plant including dandelions. My ‘totem animal’ would be a plant.
What are your views on the state of the world? “Nothing can change ‘cept me, the world’s injustice remains, but I can be kind.” It’s alright I’ll be off it in twenty years.
Name three things one might find in your attic. Haven’t got an attic, do you mean my bedroom? You’ll never find anything in it, it’s so full of stuff.
What sort of stuff? Pieces of paper.
Name three things one might find in your food cupboard: Orange juice, stuffed vine leaves, a tin of baked beans I’ve never eaten that dad bought.
Don’t you like baked beans? Too much sugar and salt. There’s always something in the cupboard I never eat / I’ve never ate.
What are you reading just now if anything? Poetry books, 50 of them.
If you had three wishes, what would they be? For 50 more wishes – forget the rest, I’ll have to think about them.
Is there anything else you’d like to add? “I’d rather be alone with a schizophrenic, Yeah!
Than a psychiatrist”.
Biography and profile compiled by Helên Thomas http://www.creativewomensnetwork.co.uk/CWNvoicesCarolBatton.htm
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a recitation of “judgement”
-
Making the Grade.
My Voices behave
In a Support Worker Way,
So why don’t they get pay…
Grade A?
My voice tells me to eat.
My voice says to be very careful on the street.
My voice wakes me up, to tell me to sleep.
My voice tells me to try harder.
My voice tells me not too weep, when I must weep.
My voice can be very unfriendly;
and sometimes, we don’t treat each other gently,
and it blames me.
I am lonely without my voice.
Three or four voices can ignore me,
and then chat among themselves.
My voices behave
In a Support Worker Way,
So why don’t they get pay…
Grade A?
-
BEE-ING
This is the reality of our flowering strength.
Listen you Dandelions!
Don’t try to be daisies. Don’t try to be tall, like the trees. Did some of you try to be pink? Be content – be yellow. It is not a failure if you are not a pink Dandelion. Be the flowers you were meant to be…but learn from others, learn from the thin grass and recover from life’s blows, even from trampling boots, all is not lost if you remember you have roots.
Live each summer for itself. Let it be a beautiful summer that lasts right up to the second frost. And in winter go underground and grow, don’t just wait.
You don’t have to sing at the very first day of sun, but by autumn try to have flowered at least once.
Wait for the friendly little flies. Take your turn for the sun to find your spot.
Some colours are unlikely, others imposible, (probably). Much can be achieved in a short flowering season for which we have waited all winter.
At any time there may appear opportunities.
Take credit for having flowered when you could, (remember some other year), and add it to your contentment.
It isn’t always as easy to be a flower, as the Trees think it is.
Life is a lot of waiting; things happen so slowly.
We do it for the seeds, we all know that.
No two flowers are ever the same. Every Dandelion matters! Trust all. Recognise that we are all flowers, together, even the trees are ‘sort of flowers’.
Talk flowers, try to talk. Stop looking at each other askeance. We are all insecure. Speak to each other. Communicate your plight. Share your doubts. Talk and tell of truth.
It will fill all that waiting, with meaning.
-
Weed
I’m a weed, disabled
I’m a seed; potential
I’m a deed of kindness,
And sometimes, I’m essential.
Even though I’m mad,
Even though I’m mental,
There are moments in my life,
When I’m influential.
-
Psychiatric Pills
It’s only got one side effect,
You really must give it a try.
It’s only got one side effect,
It makes you want to die.
-
Safety
Money is the best insulating material.
-
Subterranean Living Under the DSS
Hell is Fine
Lit by tiny candles
Water from the DSS above drips randomly down – I cannot be sure of my candles staying lit.
The ceiling is made of impenetrable denial, weakened in places by implausibility.
There is no wind, or rain, to worry about.
But there is no sun either.
I plan next year’s pacing: this year I plan the pacing, which I am definitely (Next time) going to do. I must do something with my death.
I hear the ‘Too-Late’ prayers of the doomed dead, (Repentance past the sell-by date). We are crushed at random, by the ‘Lack-of-benefits-system’…dripped on, one by one until it is our own turn to get soaked in the cold.
It’s cold as hell, in hell…let no one say it is hot. They’ve cut back the heating on which the myth is based.
Actually they tell you it’s perfectly warm…They’re right, but not if one has not eaten all day.
The boredom – one gets used to it. But not the loneliness. The loneliness just gets more desperate, with the inescapable dripping, squeezing the camaraderie – friendliness needs sufficiency.
I waste my time like some criminal in jail…guilty of unemployment.
A ‘Parasite’ they say.
There is no clock…I find clocks painful…still I wish I hadn’t destroyed it.
The tunnels leading off are open to me, but it is understood they are forbidden to us.
So I crouch by the nearest candle…it has been like this for many years.
The little candle. That drip is very near that little light… a flicker of excitement – at the threat…but no, I’ve moved the candle to yet another safer place …where ‘Splot’, a big blob of water – puts it out.
‘You’ll have to refer to the DSS for a grant to relight it’: I forgot my hunger. The DSS is an impregnable well-lit office, on floor three. There are still some other candles and while five candles should not be despair -
I cried.
I was hungry, I was cold, I was wet (but of course), and not making use of my death very well.
They relit the candle after two months disagreement -but he was not happy.
They blew it out again.
Hell is fine, said the memo from above the DSS, on floor six.
-
Veggie
One must go cold turkey
When going veggie
Or maybe, cold lentil
Is gentler.
-
Stage
If I were on stage again,
You’d clap.
It is only when I’m
In need
Of help,
You say,
“attention seeking”,
and walk off.
-
Choices
They ask how I want
The new buildings,
They put me on the User’s Group…
We are holding a kitty, of £200,
And we’re installing a small
Hearing loop.
They tell me, to take empowerment,
They ask, how I want my cup of tea?
But the Stelazine -
Well I have no choice…
I have to take it at three.
-
The Plant
It’s gone a most beautiful shade of browny-red.
And it’s dead.
-
Short Description of Manic Depression
1. Save the World.
2. “I can’t do it”.
3. “Let’s kill myself”.
-
Disabled
You deny us work,
And give us money,
It’s almost
Equality
-
Relax…
There is absolutely
Nothing the
Psychiatrist can do!
So take off your
Slippers, forgive
Yourself, and cry!
-
Another “The Pills” Poem
I say it makes me miserable,
She says, “That cannot be”
I say that I am certain,
(but so is she)
She says “So say the drug firms,
And they have done research”
I say “They make the profit.”
She says I am psychotic,
She says that I can’t know these things
And cannot be believed,
She says I’m being awkward, and should take more of these.
-
Too sad to kill myself
On major tranquillisers I don’t
Kill myself… I don’t do
Anything at all.
-
How??
How can I hope for world peace,
When I can’t get you to say, “Hello”
In the streets.
-
Anti Social-Behaviour
We have social-behaviour,
And the government
is against that.
-
“Got Me”
My boy-friend got me some
St John’s Wort
to cheer me up.
I put it in a vase
with some other yellow stuff.
The flowers don’t help….
The fact he tried….
-
Weedkiller?
I can’t find it in these Instructions –
(I know it’s not for Trees).
I’ve looked everywhere, for Reasons,
and comforted the Seeds.
I can’t see why it’s needed,
for the murdering of these.
Dear God, who created Them,
Which Flowers are the Weeds?
Dear God, who created Us,
Which of Us, are weeds?
-
Tamagochi
And the buttons won’t work on my Tamagochi
and the elephant touches his large infant, with
his trunk, repeatedly,
and the batteries will go, eventually,
and the dead child lies still, at the feet of its
persistent mother
and I put my Cyber Pet back into the cupboard,
at the back;
it cannot be pressed into mobility;
she stands, and sways, and pushes;
sometimes my Cyber Pet still beeps to me,
she cries, until life says, ‘continue’,
and she stays and nudges,
she thinks the batteries are dead,
whatever she touches.
-
Years Dominate
Like clouds
at the end
of the Season
…
Pausing, to wait,
and to go
…
I will go
Beyond the Horizon
now
…
of everything
that I know
…
And be glad
if I can do so.
-
Case Study
I’ve come across a situation
of a middle aged man
who never makes an effort
to change his clothes –
he was nearly arrested as a tramp
but talked his way out of it.
His home is a wreck –
he is very good musically
but totally ‘obsessed’ with it,
(there is nothing else in his life)
and papers. etc. are lying
scattered in his chaotic room.
He has no interest in
looking after himself,
some say his music is odd,
even mad,
though his music makes
enough money to support him.
He has some support from friends.
He has moved house about
thirty times.
He has poor hearing and this
depresses him extremely and makes
him very anxious about whether he can
continue his music.
Does he need social services to
take a look?
Should (or can),
residential care be considered?
This man’s name is Ludwig van Beethoven.
Score nil if you just prevented,
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,
being written.
Note: Carol Batton is happy about you using these poems as long as you acknowledge her authorship
Jack Kerouac penned such books as On the Road and The Dharma Bums, which captured the essence of the bohemian life that he came to personify. This documentary follows him on the road from the life of a beatnik in New York City, and across the country to California, as he set out to find America and himself. Archival photographs, film clips, interviews with those who knew him, readings from his books, and scholarly commentary provide insight into this icon of the Beat generation. -http://www.allmovie.com
Campfire Talk
Lonely, contemplating suicide?
Go alone into the forest, find a clearing,
Gather wood, build a fire, stay up all night
with the fire and the stars.
Have a little blackberry brandy as your telescope
to bring the stars closer in.
The sound of the fire, the smell of the fire,
The light and heat of the fire
will help you, heal you.
A campfire’s a Paleolithic experience
we can all still have.
Renew the pledge of brotherhood round the fire.
Renew the pledge of sisterhood round the fire.
Hold hands in a circle and each make
the sacred vow and pledge
And then silence, silence
and the fire,
But really you’re alone
You only imagined your friends
and lovers near,
Only imagined all the poets you love
holding hands round the fire as one.
The flames recede,
The logs fall in among themselves,
Sparks fly up, a puff of smoke, a sigh,
the fire dies down.
The cold creeps in and you draw nearer
the ebbing flame,
And then the embers, the embers glowing
softly red
While above the startling stars
and forest smell rush in
as eyes adjust to the dark.
The towering ancient trees nearby
Cease being lit
by flickering light.
Warm your hands one last time
over the dying fire.
Remain. Remain long
after the fire is out,
Long after the cold creeps in.
Look up at the stars
longer than you ever have
and maybe ever will.
Renew the pledge of friendship round the fire.
Renew the pledge of love around the fire.
Make the vow of vows under the stars.
Renew, renew around the campfire
in the wilderness under a wilderness of stars.
And then silence, silence and the expiring fire
and the silent continuous movement
of Stars and Earth in Space
Till the embers fade away—
and with the first light of day
shoulder your pack and head forth.
-
Anthem
- Not standing when Star-Spangled Banner played
- by Milwaukee Symphony outdoors in Marcus Amphitheater,
- near Lake Michigan and downtown Milwaukee
- before the Beethovan’s Ninth Concert,
- Everyone else standing, everyone else singing,
- Putting my head in one hand as it plays so heroic,
- Thinking of all the Iraqi dead,
- the dead men murdered by our soldiers
- as they retreated,
- Thinking of Vietnam, My Lai, Wounded Knee, Dresden, Nagasaki,
- Thinking back to Washington Park 20 years ago Vietnam War era
- one summer eve the Star-Spangled Banner played
- before Pagliacci
- and not standing then, everyone singing,
- Remembering the hateful threats and curses whispered
- behind me.
- Now no curses or threats, only singing sadly and sweetly
- mothers and fathers whose voices seem
- soft-spoken and sorrowful too
- as if they think me Vietnam Veteran
- remembering his bestfriend killed there
- and remember their bestfriend
- killed in World War II or Korea,
- No tone of defiant patriotism to my ears,
- No growl of rage in the melody,
- Only a sound of many melancholy voices trying
- to sound cheefful, hopeful, trying
- to believe we still are
- the great nation we were taught we were
- and thought we were
- in gradeschool,
- No tone of hate or scorn–as if they understand
- why I will never stand
- for the Star-Spangled Banner
- or the American Flag again.
- America became Ecotopia and Ecotopia’s flag was the Wilderness
- and Ecotopia’s National Anthem is the wind.
- America loved itself so much
- it became Ecotopia
- after all.
- Now we play no National Anthem
- And need no Symphony or Aphitheater
- or downtown or Milwaukee
- As we sit and listen to crickets
- and watch fireflies as it gets dark
- in hot July along the pure fresh-water shores
- of Great Lake Michigan.
-
Factory
(opening portion of section I
and an excerpt from section IX)
I
The machines waited for me.
Waited for me to be born and grow young,
For the totempoles of my personality to be carved,
and the slow pyramid of days
To rise around me, to be robbed and forgotten,
They waited where I would come to be,
a point on earth,
The green machines of the factory,
the noise of the miraculous machines of the factory,
Waited for me to laugh so many times,
to fall asleep and rise awake so many times,
to see as a child all the people I did not want to be,
And for suicide to long for me as the years ran into the mirror
disguising itself as I grew old
in eyes that grew old
As multitudes worked on machines I would work on,
worked, ceased to exist, and died,
For me they waited, patiently, the machines,
all the time in the world,
As requiems waited for my ears
they waited,
As naked magazines waited for my eyes
they waited,
As I waited for soft machines like mine
time zones away from me, unknown to me,
face, flesh, all the ways of saying goodbye,
While all my possibilities, like hand over hand on a bat
to see who bats first, end up choking the air—
While all my lives leap into lifeboats
shrieking—”You can’t afford to kill time
while time is killing you!”
Before I said Only the religion whose command before all others
is Thou Shalt Not Work shall I hosanna,
Before I said Not only underground are the minds of men
eaten by maggots,
Before I said I would rather be dead
than sweat at the work of zombies,
The machines waited.
Now the factory imagines I am there,
The clock keeps watching me while it works
to see how much time it has left.
How much does it get paid? Are coffins the safes
where it keeps its cash?
I see my shadow working on the shadow of a machine.
Everywhere I look I am surrounded by giant machines—
Machines that breathe me till I become stale
and new windows of meat must be opened.
Each year of my name they ran, day and night,
Each time I kissed, each time I learned a new word,
or name of a color, or how to spell boy,
Night, day, without stopping, in the same place running,
Running as I learned how to walk, talk, read, count, tell time
and every time I ever ran alone
pretending to be a wild black stallion,
They ran as I thought never (my eyes in the clouds)
would my future corpse need to be buried
premature in slavery of exchange to contemplate
the leisure vacations of photosynthesis and limnology
and the retirement of tombstone inscriptions
into veils that veronica the earth,
They ran, and I never heard them,
never stopped to hear them coming,
All the times walking to school and back,
All the times playing sick to stay home and have fun,
All the summers of my summer vacations
I never once thought I’d live to sacrifice my dwindling fleshbloom
packaging the finishing touches on America’s decay
For money to earn me so I can write in the future
about what I am now, then am no longer,
Shortening the lifespan of planet for 6¢ a minute
so I can elegize the lifespan of beauty and my life,
So I can say before my parents ever met
machines were blaring the same hysterical noise,
So I can say they were waiting for me
every mouthful of food I swallowed,
So I can say they were waiting for me
every time paper eyes of paper nakedness
watched my hands perform the ritual of dreams,
So I can say each second so many die so many are born,
like rapid snapping of fingers, snap, snap,
snap you live, snap you die, snap you live and die again!
Each day of my life is my life!
So, winding my watch before work
with the galaxies of my fingerprints—
each twist of my lifeline a dungeon of ticks—
I wondered was it for this
my hide’n’seek Huckleberryhood?
And pondered how each day goes to its grave single file
without the corpse of what I might have been,
Yet the hour hand is so slow
no one will ever see it move.
Each of the great works never written
By those who work in factories so they can write words,
what they say will be great words,
Does not care, does not wait to be written—
At the end of a day’s work he who left his mind
eight hours at his writing desk for the repugnance
of metal on metal, noise on noise,
Sits down with his pen as if he had already written
the great words of his dreams.
His feet feel like nursing homes for wheelchairs,
His ears an inferno of crickets,
And he says—”I feel like the grave of someone I loved”
…
IX (excerpt)
I should be paid for discovering America
is committing suicide with factories!
I should be paid for wondering if I’m only a defect
in the mass-production of zombies!
I should be paid for pondering if God packages universes
the way I package lids!
I should be paid for combering if the sea ever gets tired
of making the same sound!
I should be paid for writing The Infinite Autobiography
of This Spot Through Eternity!
I should be paid to stand on this spot
before America was discovered!
What do I win for singing—”No one can stand where I stand
because my body is in the way”?
I should be paid to memorize the epic of every split-second!
I should be paid for hearing the chorus of fliptops
popped all over the globe this instant!
I should be paid for turning fished-out cans upsidedown
to count how many years falling leaves pour out!
How much do I get for watching the sunrise?
How much do I get for sleeping under the stars?
How much do I get for exploring the undiscovered
oceans and continents
and claiming them in Mescaline’s name?
How much do these words want to work in my lines?
Is this poem worth more than a skyscraper?
This book worth more moolah than ever made?
I should be paid for listening to music
better than virtuosos play!
I should be paid to play Kick the Can
or tie cans to the newlydead’s hearse!
I should be paid to fly a kite underground
careful not to snare it in the roots of trees!
What do I get for sisyphusing my face?
What do I get for glutting my sorrow
on the wealth of the globèd peonies?
What do I get for knowing the hunting and gathering way of life
represents 99% man’s time on earth?
Or for knowing the slaves who built the pyramids
carved graffiti praising Pharaoh on the giant blocks of stone?
What do I get for knowing a billion dollar bills placed end to end
would extend four times round the world
and if you picked them up one per second
it’d take 134 years?
I should be rich for knowing the answers
to so many $64,000 Questions!
I should be rich for crying the Tarzan Cry
that brings the skeletons of extinction to the rescue!
…
Written about working in a factory beside the Milwaukee River in 1970 when he was 24, Antler’s epic poem Factory was acclaimed by a wide range of poets, environmentalists and factory workers. Published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
| Photo by Allen Ginsberg |
as a book to itself in 1980 as #38 in the City Lights Pocket Poet Series, it was heralded by Allen Ginsberg as “the most enlightening and magnanimous American poem I’ve seen of ’60s and ’70s decades.” Of Antler’s book Last Words, published by Ballantine in 1986, Ginsberg said: “More fineness than I thought probable to see again in my lifetime from younger solitary unknown self-inspirer US poet…one of Whitman’s ‘poets and orators to come’.” His book Ever-Expanding Wilderness is seeking a publisher. Antler: The Selected Poems was published in December 2000.
Antler spends one to two months per year backpacking and/or canoeing through wilderness and ekes out a living by performing his poems far and wide in the spirit of Whitman’s invocation of poets who would be “itinerant gladness scatterers.” He won the 1987 Witter Bynner Prize awarded annually “to an outstanding younger poet” by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in New York City, and the 1985 Walt Whitman Award, given annually to an author “whose contribution best reveals the continuing presence of Walt Whitman in American poetry.” The citation accompanying the Whitman Award stated: “His poems make audible the words of the earth, with original energy, insouciance, and affectionate comradeliness toward all beings.”
Introducing Antler’s poetry reading at the “Eco Glasnost Conference” held at the Kerouac Poetics School in Boulder in 1990, Gary Snyder said: “Antler has been writing with a clear focus in a vernacular mode dealing straight-on and first-hand with the actualities of American and planetary life. He’s a fine performance poet and one of the half-dozen or so truly committed wilderness poets in American letters.”
Antler’s poems have appeared in hundreds of periodicals, including City Lights Review, New Directions Journal, Whole Earth Review, Earth First! Journal, the Amicus Journal, Utne Reader, Exquisite Corpse, Kenyon Review, Chiron Review, New York Quarterly, Wilderness and The Sun. His poem “Somewhere Along the Line,” published in The Sun, was awarded a 1993 Pushcart Prize. His poems have also appeared in dozens of anthologies, including Erotic by Nature, Son of the Male Muse, Earth Prayers, The Soul Unearthed—Celebrating Wildness and Personal Renewal through Nature, Wild Song—Poems of the Natural World, What Book!?—Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop, The Journey Home: The Literature of Wisconsin through Four Centuries, and American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century. He has taught at Esalen Institute in California, Omega Institute outside New York City, Antioch College in Ohio, and the Kerouac Poetics School in Boulder. He has performed his poetry at Wilderness University, the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute, Sarah Lawrence College, the 1980 International Festival of the Poet in Rome, with poets from pre-Tiananmen-crackdown China in Nov. ‘88 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and many other places.
He was chosen by Friends of Milwaukee Public Library to be Milwaukee’s poet laureate during 2002-03. In 2003 the Council of Wisconsin Writers chose him to receive its Major Achievement Award. When not wildernessing or traveling to teach and perform poetry, he lives near the Milwaukee River in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Antler is available for poetry readings, etc. Contact him at:
Antler
P.O. Box 11502
Milwaukee, WI 53211
-
http://www.porcupineliteraryarts.com/antler.html
Antler: Learning the Constellations
Interview by Brandon Lewis from Volume7 Issue2
Additional poetry appears in Volume 6 Issue 1
Antler is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Antler: Selected Poems (Soft Skull Press, 2001). His new chapbook, Exclamation Points, Ad Infinitum!, is forthcoming from Centennial Press. Winner of a Pushcart Prize and the Walt Whitman Award, Antler’s poems have appeared in many anthologies including American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century, Wild Song: Poems from Wilderness, and September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond. In February 2002, he was chosen the new Poet Laureate of Milwaukee.
PORCUPINE: As we sit here along the Milwaukee River, I’m struck by how important the river is to you and to your work.
ANTLER: It’s important to me in that it’s always flowing. Coming here regularly is one of the only things that makes it possible for me to live in Milwaukee. I can experience solitude down here, especially during winter after midnight when it’s snowing. It’s great to come and have coffee. I can stay for hours.
In winter I like being able to cross over to the other side, experience walking on the ice and lying on the ice… and in summer, with all the birds – I come because I love birds. I’ve been writing poems that have to do with the river ever since I started living here. So it is something that entered my poetry early on, and became a part of my life. I have snapping turtle experiences, big snapping turtles. And I saw a snake right down there a couple of days ago. I don’t see snakes as much anymore.
PORCUPINE: Is there a divide that surfaces in your poetry between the river, what it represents as a sanctuary for you, and the rest of Milwaukee as an industrial city?
ANTLER: Yeah – and I like that word sanctuary a lot, it seems like a key word. When I first moved here, the rest of Milwaukee ceased to exist. I never went downtown anymore. I didn’t go into the stores because I didn’t have any money. So I would just come down here and read. When I went up north to live, I disengaged from the reality of living in the city. There’s something about having a river nearby, even a lake, that’s very helpful to me. But every writer is different.
PORCUPINE: Watching the river, seeing that blue heron land, I somehow feel restored. It’s like a refuge here. But I wonder what it says about one’s ability to appreciate the realities of the city. Do you think you could be a poet in, say, downtown Manhattan?
ANTLER: Sure. I think you would see the human drama, and the skyscrapers standing in long streets like endless Jehovahs, as Ginsberg says… confirming the human tribe and its domain among millions of people. Both worlds exist. I like the river, but I don’t reject the human tribe. I don’t think it’s a black and white thing, the natural world being just this river escape.
All we know for sure is
all places that exist
were once one place.
All we know for certain is
all the beings that exist
or will exist
or have existed
were originally all together
in an infinitesimal dot.
All we can know for sure is
if humans went from dugout canoes
to spaceships to the Moon
in 10,000 years,
in 10,000 years humans can go from
spaceships to the Moon
to Moons made into spaceships
traveling to other galaxies.
- from Know for Sure
PORCUPINE: When you go on your two-month wilderness sabbaticals, what is it you discover? What do you recover?
ANTLER: I get in touch with my earlier selves: my grade school self, my baby self, early and late boyhood, early youth, later youth, young manhood. All the various chapters become one. Then I can replay the tapes of my life without any interruption, and review what happened on the playground in fifth grade that one day. I recall all the teachers I once had, all the people I knew and loved, and what happened to them. After the tapes are played out and the memories reviewed, then silence and the sense of going beyond myself – especially when juxtaposed against huge vistas of old growth forest without human beings in sight, and the endless Milky Way scintillating above.
PORCUPINE: Why come back at all?
ANTLER: That’s what I always ask myself. But in some way, one never returns. And what one becomes by the end of an extended stay remains there. Later on, growing older, you return to those places and reconnect with your more youthful apparition. You pal around with that youthful spirit and it re-enters you. So you do come back, but something else doesn’t. In a way you have incarnated where you were, and that returns with you and is part of you. I can say that I am in Milwaukee and I am in my house and writing there, but it’s as if I’m still where I was, still what I became.
PORCUPINE: So the depth of experience while you were away creates a reservoir for you to draw on with your poetry.
ANTLER: Yeah. Because in a way, you’re risking your life – especially going off by yourself. Once you risk your life and there are bears around, there’s a different aspect of commitment toward poetry. If you must die to do it, you will. And you risk everything: poverty, scorn, madness, disillusionment, alienation. It’s all at risk to ultimately embrace what the spirit of poetry is.
PORCUPINE: You’re describing the wilderness poet.
ANTLER: Maybe any poet at any time. But there’s something magical about going off away from people, sensing your self, your desires and history, seeing yourself as a tiny little speck surrounded by trees that were around before Christ was sucking his mother’s breast.
PORCUPINE: When you’re walking through a forest and gazing up at treetops, can you simultaneously be noting ideas or lines for poems? Or do you have to take in your experiences purely, without thought?
ANTLER: Sometimes I get ideas and write them down in my notebook, or poems will come to me finalized in a single moment of delight.
Save as feeling if they don’t know of me or the stars
what do I not know of
that’s looking
through me
at something far grander
than itself…
- from Save as an Idea
But often there is no thought. I become an animal spirit wandering endless forests, gazing out at sublime non-human vistas. Somehow the wordless realm of no-thought takes over and my identity as a poet is lost, my memories of myself are lost, everything is lost, and as Emerson says about the eyeball…
PORCUPINE: I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all…
ANTLER: Yeah, I become transparent in that way. Part of it is embracing myself, and being content with wordlessness.
PORCUPINE: So if a poet is jotting down lines while in the midst of the poetic experience, does that take away from the depth of their experience?
ANTLER: Some might say you’re robbing yourself of the cosmic moment by trying to capture it, and maybe emotion recollected in tranquility, as Wordsworth said, is a better way to go, and not go out expecting or demanding anything. But I don’t think one way is necessarily right and the other is wrong. Some people do best in crowded cafes, observing other people with an endless cup of coffee. And for others that’s totally foreign, they have to be alone with no interruptions.
PORCUPINE: Where does your dreaming inner voice arise from – the voice that wonders about frozen bubbles and amoebas swimming on your eyes. Is it a childlike voice?
ANTLER: I hope it is. It seems one of the difficulties is that a lot of people have their child wonder-essence lobotomized. They grow up to be responsible adults but never reconnect with that wonder again. Maybe it’s just openness toward a visionary experience that goes beyond knowing what’s true and not true anymore, and just being in awe of aspects of the natural world that have never occurred to you before.
PORCUPINE: What books influenced you as a child?
ANTLER:The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan. Those had a big effect on me. They beckoned a fantasy realm which was and still is a part of my feelings. Later, Leaves of Grass would be a major book in my life – there was this vision of love and death and nature that was truer than what I found in the Old and New Testaments, or other sacred texts of human-centered spiritual traditions. It seemed Whitman’s vision was more complete, more passionate, more understanding and celebratory of human reality, the reality of the Eros energy and the human promise. I didn’t have any friends, but you can read Leaves of Grass and Whitman can become your friend. He actually has lines which suggest it’s something that can happen. So there’s a kind of seance effect that takes place, and then the spirit of Walt Whitman walks by your side, protecting you, and you have fun taking Leaves of Grass along – that’s your pal, you have fun with Leaves of Grass!
PORCUPINE:Maybe you’re Walt Whitman reincarnated.
ANTLER: I don’t think so – although on some level I may be. I think it’s more complex than that. The spirit and the energy Whitman put forth was absorbed by thousands of poets and spiritual seekers who then had the awareness that he embraced inside himself. I don’t think any one person can be an incarnation of Walt Whitman.
PORCUPINE: How did your friendship with Allen Ginsberg shape your view of poets and poetry?
ANTLER: One of the main things he represented for me was complete courage to trust who I was without fear, and to write poetry with complete candor and openness. He criticized society’s injustice and intolerance, and did so with compassion, tenderness, hopefulness, and humor. He had something to replace it, or balance it with. Endless encouragement of younger poets was also a big part of his mission.
PORCUPINE: Do you have a sense of yourself maturing as a poet?
ANTLER: I hope so, and I believe in that. I think there’s a poet you can be in love with, a thought you can move through as your sensitivities change during metamorphosis from childhood through adolescence, and through the various stages of adulthood. As one matures, one’s work goes to different levels. Some people think poets are better in their younger phases than in their older phases – like, say, Whitman, Wordsworth, and Swinburne. I never felt that way.
PORCUPINE: Would you still be a poet if, after today, you could write no more words?
ANTLER: Yes. The definition of poetry on one level in our society is that you write things down on paper and get them into print, which proves to others in your tribe that you are a poet. But that’s just step one. Your book then has to receive positive reviews, then another book must be coming, and you have to keep cranking out books until you’re a corpse. That seems to certify you as a poet, but endless ages unfold, review what you’ve done, and make their own judgements. There are poets today who we think are the greatest on Earth, but who we might have nothing to do with three hundred years from now. And in ten thousand years everything is dust. So on a huge time-frame, all that we do ends up obliterated, the Earth ends up being swallowed by the sun and the sun cools.
But I find, especially in early adolescence, there is something very poetic that boys and girls don’t even know they have. Some people write poetry when they are young, but go on to other things and stop writing. And yet, because they touched base with it once, it’s always a part of their story. I don’t think there’s anything to be afraid of – the spirit and feeling of it is more important than its publication.
Before there were books and literary magazines, the spirit of poetry existed, and the pulse of the connection with the Big Mystery was felt and experienced, and the tender realization of mortality was present. The fact that Neanderthals buried their dead with flowers sixty thousand years before Christ is very affirming and reaffirming of human beauty and soulfulness.
PORCUPINE: It is there, early in our lives and in the small moments, that our vision begins.
What must it be like for fish
watching ice form
on the surface of their lake
Or looking up at fish
frozen in ice above them
and feeling the water
Thickening around them
till they too
can’t move
But are still alive
looking up seeing
falling snow
Slowly cover the ice
till darkness
engulfs their realm…
- from Looking Up at the Milky Way Thought
ANTLER: It’s a beautiful thing when a young person decides to give their heart to poetry and follow it as a spiritual path – to be infatuated with it the same way as your first love experience with another person, whether it works out or not.
PORCUPINE: …when one creates a relationship with poetry, and trusts in where that voice will lead.
ANTLER: That’s beautiful – to trust in it and have faith in it. To believe in a soul that began before your birth and continues after your death. And knowing it’s just a start.
Doting on Summer Snowflake Shadows
Cut-out
paper snowflakes
taped to windows
in winter
left up
year-round
Cast shadows
of their shapes
on walls
and ceiling
And the shadows
of their shapes
move
as the sun moves
Slowly
as I lounge
on a couch
drinking iced tea
Admiring them
and their shadows
this 100 degree
July afternoon.
- Antler
-
Brandon Lewis lives in Brookfield, Wisconsin. He is a Poetry Editor for Porcupine, and a young poet and English student at UW- Milwaukee who works part-time restoring old homes. His own poetry appears in this issue, and is forthcoming in Anthills.
allen ginsberg – howl and other poems
-
Howl
by Allen Ginsberg
For Carl Solomon
I
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 machin-
ery 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 bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
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, burn-
ing 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, al-
cohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
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 sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
lyn Bridge,
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,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
ings and migraines of China under junk-with-
drawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
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 telep-
athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
ionary indian angels who were visionary indian
angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
homa on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
prehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist 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 broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other
skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars 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 manu-
scripts,
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,
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
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword,
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 can-
dle 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 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 sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver–joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-
ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
ment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat
and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
Bowery,
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 coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo 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 & waited in vain, who
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the
Time, & 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 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 retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & 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 in-
stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
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 mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the
East,
Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-
ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-
mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur-
nished 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–
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 vibrat-
ing 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 intel-
ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-
fessing 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.
II
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
nation?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
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!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-
ned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-
bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking
tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac-
tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
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 in whom
I am a consciousness without a body! 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! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about
us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De-
spairs! 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!
III
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’ve murdered your twelve secretaries
I’m with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I’m with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful
typewriter
I’m with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I’m with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I’m with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
spinsters of Utica
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 scream in a straightjacket that you’re
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the
abyss
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 twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades 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 col-
lapse 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
San Francisco 1955-56
footnote to howl
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
Holy! 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 in 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 Cas-
sady 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 & junk & drums!
Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy
the cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the
mysterious rivers of tears under the streets!
Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the
middle class! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebell-
ion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles!
Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria &
Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow
Holy Istanbul!
Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the
clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy
the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch!
Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the
locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucina-
tions 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!
Berkeley 1955
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howl
The poem “Howl” was written in Ginsberg’s cottage in Berkeley in the summer of 1955. Many factors went into the creation of the poem. A short time before the composition of “Howl”, Ginsberg’s therapist encouraged him to quit his job and pursue poetry full time. That summer he experimented with parataxis in the poem “Dream Record: June 8, 1955″ about the death of Joan Vollmer. He showed this poem to Kenneth Rexroth who criticized it as too stilted and academic; Rexroth encouraged Ginsberg to free his voice and write from his heart. Ginsberg took this advice and attempted to write a poem with no restrictions. He was under the immense influence of William Carlos Williams and Jack Kerouac and attempted to speak with his own voice spontaneously. Ginsberg began the poem in the stepped triadic form he took from Williams, but in the middle of typing the poem his style altered such that his own unique form (a long line based on breath organized by a fixed base) began to emerge. Ginsberg would experiment with this breath-length form in many later poems. The first draft contained what would later become Part I and Part III. It is noted for relating stories and experiences of Ginsberg’s friends and contemporaries, its tumbling hallucinatory style, and the frank address of sexuality, specifically homosexuality, which subsequently provoked an obscenity trial. Though Ginsberg referred to many of his friends and acquaintances (including Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Peter Orlovsky, Lucien Carr, and Herbert Huncke) the primary emotional drive was his sympathy for Carl Solomon to whom it was dedicated (1928-1993); he met Solomon in a mental institution and became friends with him. Ginsberg admitted later this sympathy for Solomon was connected to bottled up guilt and sympathy for his mother’s condition (she suffered from schizophrenia and had been lobotomized), an issue he was not yet ready to address directly.
The poem was first performed at the famous Six Gallery in San Francisco. The reading was conceived by Wally Hedrick – a painter and co-founder of the Six – who approached Ginsberg in the summer of 1955 and asked him to organize a poetry reading at the Six Gallery. “At first, Ginsberg refused. But once he’d written a rough draft of Howl, he changed his ‘fucking mind,’ as he put it”. Ginsberg was ultimately responsible for inviting the readers (Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, and Philip Whalen — Michael McClure and Kenneth Rexroth were involved early in the process) and writing the invitation. “Howl” was the second to the last reading (before “A Berry Feast” by Snyder) and was considered by most in attendance the highlight of the reading. Many considered it the beginning of a new movement, and the reputation of Ginsberg and those associated with the Six Gallery reading spread throughout San Francisco. In response to Ginsberg’s reading, Michael McClure wrote: “Ginsberg read on to the end of the poem, which left us standing in wonder, or cheering and wondering, but knowing 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…” Soon afterwards, it was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who ran City Lights Bookstore and the City Lights Press. Ginsberg completed Part II and the “Footnote” after Ferlinghetti had promised to publish the poem. “Howl” was too short to make an entire book, so Ferlinghetti requested some other poems. Thus the final collection contained several other poems written at that time; with these poems, Ginsberg continued the experimentation with long lines and a fixed base he’d discovered with the composition of “Howl” and these poems have likewise become some of Ginsberg’s most famous: “America”, “Sunflower Sutra”, “A Supermarket in California”, etc.
The earliest extant recording of “Howl” dates from February 14, 1956. Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, after hitch-hiking from San Francisco, read from their poems in the Anna Mann dormitory at Reed College, Snyder’s alma mater. This recording, discovered in summer 2007 on a reel-to-reel tape in the Reed College archives, contains only Part I of “Howl.” After beginning to read Part II, Ginsberg said to the audience, “I don’t really feel like reading any more. I just sorta haven’t got any kind of steam
The poem consists of three parts, with an additional footnote.
Part I
Called by Ginsberg, “a lament for the Lamb in America with instances of remarkable lamb-like youths,” Part I is the best known, and communicates scenes, characters, and situations drawn from Ginsberg’s personal experience as well as from the community of poets, artists, political radicals, jazz musicians, drug-addicts, and psychiatric patients whom he encountered in the late 1940s and early 50’s. These people represent what he considers “the best minds of his generation”, an ironic and shocking declaration since, in what members of the Beat Generation considered the oppressively conformist and materialistic 50’s, those Ginsberg called “best minds” were unrepresented outcasts, what the middle class might consider “worst minds”. The shocking aspect of the poem was further enhanced by Ginsberg’s frank descriptions of sexual, often homosexual, acts. Most lines in this section contain the fixed base “who”. Ginsberg says in “Notes Written on Finally Recording Howl”, “I depended on the word ‘who’ to keep the beat, a base to keep measure, return to and take off from again onto another streak of invention”.
Part II
Ginsberg says that Part II, in relation to Part I, “names the monster of mental consciousness that preys on the Lamb”. Part II is a rant about the state of industrial civilization, characterized in the poem as ‘Moloch’. Ginsberg was inspired to write Part II during a period of peyote-induced visionary consciousness in which he saw a hotel façade as a monstrous and horrible visage which he identified with that of Moloch. Moloch is the biblical idol in Leviticus to whom the Canaanites sacrificed children. Ginsberg intends that the characters he portrays in Part I be understood to have been sacrificed to this idol. Moloch is also the name of an industrial, demon-like figure in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, a film which Ginsberg credits with influencing “Howl, Part II” in his annotations for the poem (see especially Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions). Most lines in this section contain the fixed base “Moloch”. Ginsberg says of Part II, “Here the long line is used as a stanza form broken into exclamatory units punctuated by a base repetition, Moloch”.
Part III
Part III, in relation to Parts I and II, is “a litany of affirmation of the Lamb in its glory” according to Ginsberg. It is directly addressed to Carl Solomon, whom Ginsberg met during a brief stay at a psychiatric hospital in 1949; called “Rockland” in the poem, it was actually Columbia Presbyterian Psychological Institute. This section is notable for its refrain, “I’m with you in Rockland,” and represents something of a turning-point away from the grim tone of the “Moloch”-section. Of the structure, Ginsberg says Part III is, “pyramidal, with a graduated longer response to the fixed base”.
Footnote
The closing section of the poem is the “Footnote”, characterized by its repetitive ‘Holy!’ mantra, an ecstatic assertion that everything is holy. It can be read as the antithesis of Part II. Ginsberg says, “I remembered the archetypal rhythm of Holy Holy Holy weeping in a bus on Kearny Street, and wrote most of it down in notebook there … I set it as Footnote to Howl because it was an extra variation of the form of Part II”.
Rhythm
The frequently quoted (and often parodied) opening lines set the theme and rhythm for the poem:
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.
Ginsberg’s own commentary discusses the work as an experiment with the “long line”. For example, Part I of the poem is structured as a single run-on sentence with a repetitive refrain dividing it up into breaths. Ginsberg said, “Ideally each line of Howl is a single breath unit. My breath is long — that’s the measure, one physical-mental inspiration of thought contained in the elastic of a breath”.
On another occasion, he explained: “the line length … you’ll notice that they’re all built on bop — you might think of them as a bop refrain — chorus after chorus after chorus — the ideal being, say, Lester Young in Kansas City in 1938, blowing 72 choruses of ‘The Man I Love’ until everyone in the hall was out of his head…
