612 The American Century: Literature since 1945commented, “In this mode, perfection is basic, and these are not perfect.” Ginsberg
needed, he now saw, to do what Williams and before him Whitman had done,
“to adapt ... poetry rhythms out of ... actual talk rhythms”; and he now recognized
Whitman’s long line as an appropriate precedent, a possible vehicle for what he
called “my romantic inspiration – Hebraic–Melvillian bardic breath.” “My breath is
long,” Ginsberg declared, “that’s the Measure, one physical–mental inspiration of
thought contained in the elastic of breath.” His breath, his speech was to be the
organizer of the line, a perception to which he was helped, not only by Whitman and
Williams, but by the advice of Jack Kerouac. A jazz musician, Kerouac observed –
and especially a saxophone player when improvising – is “drawing breath and blow-
ing a phrase ... till he runs out of breath, and when he does, his sentence, his
statement’s been made.” This sense of drawing in the breath, in a way that reminds
the reader at once of Charlie Parker and a prophet of the Old Testament, is what is
perhaps most noticeable about the famous opening lines of “Howl” (1956):I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed
by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix ......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 ...Having established the basic beat in the opening lines, Ginsberg then relied, he said,
on the word “who” to retain it, to supply “a base to keep the measure, return to and
take off from again onto another stream of invention.” It offered a theme on which
he could improvise, a rhythm he could twist and turn in response to what he once
termed “the actual movie of the mind.”
“Mind is shapely”: that remark of Ginsberg’s suggests how much a piece like
“Howl” is committed to the discontinuities of consciousness and its sudden
revelations. What he was after, he suggested, was “the poem discovered in the mind
and in the process of writing it out on the page.” For all their discontinuities,
though, Ginsberg’s poems do have paraphraseable arguments – or, if not that
exactly, certain structures of feeling and assumption that are more immediately
assimilable than those that animate earlier exercises in the ideogrammic method,
like the Cantos and Paterson. “Howl,” for instance, is a grimly serious and yet
comically surreal account of the betrayal of a generation. The first part explores the
denial of the visionary impulse by forces like “the narcotic tobacco haze of
Capitalism” and celebrates its continuance in such subversive elements as
“angelheaded hipsters,” “saintly motorcyclists,” and “the madman bum and angel
beat in Time.” In the second part, the poet denounces “Moloch the loveless,” the godGGray_c05.indd 612ray_c 05 .indd 612 8 8/1/2011 7:31:34 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 34 PM