Howl

By T.A. Steinlen

It is 60 years since Allen Ginsberg wrote and recorded this remarkable poem.  It is a sort of Beat Waste Land, filled with dark allusions, written in a fresh and very personal style, reminiscent of Whitman (with touches of Ezra Pound).  Rather than striking one as factually correct (some of the hellishness may be more from peyote than memory), it impresses as a work of great subjective truth, a nightmarish daydream of depravity, longing and sorrow.  It is also probably the first explicitly gay poem, starkly and graphically so.  What impresses most, however, are the cadence, the monadic effect, and some killer lines:…