Weekly Response - Howl PDF

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Response to Alan Ginsberg's Howl....

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Weekly Response - Howl Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl deals a great deal with breath and rhythm; on the one hand, the poem demands to be read aloud with his copious use of emerging slang terms and rhythmic alliteration. On the other hand, this poem is quite long, with the first part having no end of a sentence until the final 78th line, and the lines themselves are similarly long, extending far beyond the margins of the page. Ginsberg seems to acknowledge the behemoth task it is to read this poem aloud and seems to intentionally make it difficult for the reader, which adds a breathless quality to a reading of the poem aloud, which in turn parallels the intense energy and endlessness of the subject matters of the poem. For the majority of the first part, Ginsberg seems to offer no break, no pause, in the middle of most of his lengthy lines adding simply a comma at the end of each to avoid enjambment. There are a few exceptions to this, however. One of the first comes in line 11 “with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,”. Before this line, Ginsberg tends to neglect to use any other commas to create pauses in lines, except as end-stops, with a few exceptions. Howl is a poem that deals heavily with mental health, or rather mental illness, amongst a multitude of other subjects. Prior to this line, Ginsberg has been describing his surroundings, the people in those surroundings, and the (usually) unfortunate situations they find themselves in. He uses long, unending lines to describe the magnitude of New York, each line capturing one aspect of the city, drawling on, and never seeming to be able to describe the city in its entirety. In line 11, however, he breaches the subject of drug use, abuse and mental health and things seem to slow down. As if to mimic the lethargy of these afflictions, or to give his readers time to fully feel the weight of these situations, he adds in commas to his work, pauses which allow us time to reflect or feel and live in these experiences. One of the two times he gives us pause in the middle of a line before this is indeed in the very first line, which gives the reader false hope that the entirety of the poem will be as easy to read as that first, shorter line. But thematically, this pause also falls in line with line 11. The subject of this line also deals with mental illness, the poets of the mid1900s being “destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked”. Again, the pause here allows us to reset, and reconsider these situations, if only for a brief second, before continuing on with other subject matters. Moving on to the twelfth line, we get a complete contrast to the first ten lines of the poem. In the half of line before the comma, Ginsberg takes us into Canada and New Jersey, and that’s seemingly all the treatment these two areas need. After spending ten

lines trying to scratch the surface of New York, and dozens more describing the city later on in the poem, he seems to resign other areas to less than a line. In the following line, Ginsberg seesaws back again to the subject of drug use, and we again get an abundance of pauses. However, the phrases between these commas are not as coherent as the phrases separated by commas in line 10; the lines here deal with a variety of disparate subjects, bouncing back and forth from one incoherent thought to another, mimicking the hallucinogenic and anxiety-inducing effects of Peyote. Here, he breaks up an exceptionally long line for the reader, but instead of adding soft breaths to allow time to reflect, the breaks here create a sense of breathless panic or overstimulation. So then it is through Ginsberg’s lack of pauses, or addition of them, in context with the subject of his lines, that add extra significance to the lines of Howl and allows us, as readers, to fully participate and immerse ourselves in his world....