HOWL

by Allen Ginsberg

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,

I try to revisit Howl once a year because it has never lost relevance.

Howl was 50 years old in 2006. The reading of Howl in S.F.  helped to launch the Beat generation which in turn led to my generation, in part by turning on us little brothers.

From the World Socialist Website http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/apr200 7/gins-a05.shtml

Last year(2006 ed.) marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of American poet Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," one of the most influential poems of the twentieth century. Very few poems sell over a million copies and get translated into virtually every language in the world. Where a generation could repeat from memory that two roads "diverged in a yellowed wood" that may at other times be "lovely, dark and deep" though there be miles to go before you sleep, so the laconic opening line of "Howl," "I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness," is widely known.

The poem has been annotated, every episode labeled by Ginsberg scholars, who have also written fat biographies and testify to Ginsberg's greatness in documentaries and the better web sites supporting American education. The tykes at the elementary school near the boarding house where "Howl" was pecked out on a second-hand typewriter in 1955 enter a new century with an Allen Ginsberg Poetry Garden, where annually during National Poetry Month children recite their own compositions. There was a "Transatlantic Howl" employing major universities and the resources of the Web. But undoubtedly, the central event in "Howl's" anniversary year was the widely reviewed collection edited by one of many Ginsberg secretary/editors, Jason Shinder, The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later.

A portion of the great work.

HOWL

by Allen Ginsberg

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,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement 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,
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,

It continues on the flip side.