vapid, innocuous euphemisms

 

The poem here yesterday was written by Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926 - April 5, 1997).

------------------------------ [Wikipedia] ------------- Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and writer.  As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation.  

He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions.

        Ginsberg is best known for his poem "Howl", in which he denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States.  San Francisco police and US Customs seized "Howl" in 1956, and it attracted widespread publicity in 1957 when it became the subject of an obscenity trial, as it described heterosexual and homosexual sex at a time when...laws made (male) homosexual acts a crime in every state.  

        The poem reflected Ginsberg's own sexuality and his relationships with a number of men, including Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong partner.  Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that "Howl" was not obscene, stating:  "Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?" --------------------- [end / Wikipedia excerpt]

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Yesterday I considered typing in some or all of "Howl"-the-poem here, on my blog, but didn't because it's a very long poem, and I admittedly was going to cut out -- leave out? -- certain words and phrases...

(I'm against censorship, and then -- sometimes I find myself doing it.  [Committing it??])

For yesterday's Blue Collar Lit. post I selected another Ginsberg poem that isn't nearly as long, "A Supermarket in California" -- and I Googled the word penumbra, to make sure that wasn't a dirty word....  

---------------------- Allen Ginsberg and I have something in common:  we both have deep appreciation for the music of Bob Dylan.  In the documentary about Bob Dylan, directed by Martin Scorsese -- No Direction Home -- there's a clip of an interview with Ginsberg:  describing a performance during the 1960s, he said, "At this point Dylan had become a column of air."

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[the beginning of "Howl"] --

I.

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...

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        I'm picturing the San Francisco police and U.S. Customs "seizing" the poem, in 1956.

        Calling the cops (the fuzz) on a poem.

        "Hello, 911?  We have a poetry emergency here!"

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