[lit-ideas] Re: early recording of 'Howl' discovered
- From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2008 23:43:52 -0600
IC:
>I cringe when I read Ginsberg. What am I missing?
RP:
>Not a thing. That is exactly the right response.
Pay no attention to the logician behind the curtain. Ginsberg is God, or he
was for a while. If not God, at least a demiurge. It wasn't what he said, it
was how he said it -- vomitously. Yes, yes, yes, yes! He puked pure poetry.
Ginsberg broke the mold -- again -- like Whitman. I had been brought up to
believe that poetry was the purview of those precious New York poets who at the
time mostly celebrated their precious, personal little epiphanies about their
precious aloneness in precious metaphors, meanwhile all the while the country
was going to hell in a McCarthy and John Birch handbasket, etc. And then along
came Ginsberg, who stood up in the boat and shouted: Moloch, Moloch, Moloch!
God I loved it.
You had to be there.
Ginsberg as a human being doesn't interest me. Biography almost never does.
But I still get a thrill reading "Howl."
Mike Geary
Memphis
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