From: lichter@oahu.cs.ucla.edu (Michael I. Lichter)
Subject: Re: the day the music died (plus HOWL(!))
Organization: UCLA, Department of Sociology
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 92 09:44:15 GMT

In article <steele.722224803@chip.aem.umn.edu> steele@aem.umn.edu (Stephanie Steele) writes:
>lichter@oahu.cs.ucla.edu (Michael I. Lichter) writes:
>
>>	[A true story, sort of.  You may need to be a Certain Age
>>	 for this to mean anything.]
>
>michael, you mean old enough to love and know allen ginsberg? i've
>posted his poem at the end of yours. are the similarities a
>coincedence?

Not exactly, and pretty much.

I'm not sure if you're trying to flatter me with a comparison of which
my poem is unworthy, or just accusing me of plagerism.  I'll assume the
former ;-).

I'm You Bet familiar with Ginsberg's excursion to the market. It was
not on my mind, although I was thinking of it when I wrote an earlier
poem about a George Bush shopping spree.

This poem was merely a reaction to my sudden horrified realization
while shopping in Vons that I was humming along to a Muzak version of
Don MacClean's "American Pie".  Although they're masked in the song
(e.g. elvis is (of course) the king, dylan is the jester, etc.) all the
people in this market are from the song.  I'm not sure if this is
painfully clear to everyone, or if I'm being even more obscure (albeit
in a different way) than Alex.  I figured that OLD people like myself
would be cued off immediately by the title, whilst others would turn
away in disgust (which the OLD people may have done as well).

I like the idea of poems taking place in markets.  I'm now working on
"For Marie, the most beautiful supermarket checkout clerk in the world",
which I will probably inflict on RAP in a while.

BTW, ever heard the Muzak version of "Strawberry Fields Forever"?  My
Most Amazing Muzak Experience was, a few years ago, boarding my TACA
(Transportes Centroamericanas) flight from LAX to San Salvador by way
of Guatemala City and being greeted with a Muzak version of John
Lennon's "Imagine".  Sugar-coated pacifist anarchism to ease my
transition to the lands of death squads, Strategic Hamlets, and casual
massacres.

Ah.

Anyway, I will take this opportunity slightly offered by Stephanie to
post as much of Allen Ginsberg's "HOWL" as I can force my lazy and sick
self to type in:


				HOWL

				For
			    Carl Solomon

				 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 cross 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,
	who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
		publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
		skull,
	who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning
		their money in wastebaskets and listening 
		to the Terror through the wall,
	who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
		Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
	who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
		Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
		torsos night after night
	with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares,
		alcohol and cock and endless balls,
	incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and
		lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
		Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the 
		motionless world of Time between,

		[... about 6 pages deleted ...]

	who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
		through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
		archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
		and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun 
		and dash of consciousness together jumping 
		with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna
		Deus
	to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human 
		prose and stand before you speechless and
		intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected
		yet confessing out the soul to conform to the
		rhythm of thought in his naked and endless 
		head,
	the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
		yet putting down here what might be left to say
		in time come after death,
	and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
		the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
		suffering of America's naked mind for love into
		an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
		cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
	with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered 
		out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
		years.

		[parts II and III and Footnote omitted due to laziness]

			Allen Ginsberg
			San Francisco 1955-56
			from 
			HOWL and other poems
			1956, City Lights Books
			San Francisco