"Howl" for Carl Solomon.
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,
angel-headed 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!
Someti mes I feel i n command when I'm writing.
When I'm in the heat of some truthful tears, yes.
Other times... most of the time, not.
You know, just diddling around...
woodcarving, you know, finding a pretty shape,
like most of my poetry.
There's only been a few times when I've reached a state of...
complete control...
Probably a piece of "Howl," and...
one or two moments in other poems.
The beginning of the fear for me was
what would my father think of something that I would write.
At the time, writing "Howl,"
I assumed when writing it that
it was not something that would be published,
because...
I wouldn't want my daddy to see what was in there.
So, I assumed it wouldn't be published, therefore, I could...
write anything that I wanted to.
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,
angel-headed 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 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,
What I wanted to read into the record, Your Honor, is...
not very much, but it is pertinent to our case.
Why aren't you at the trial?
'Cause...
the trial's not about me.
As much as I have to thank them...
completely for my fame...
It's the publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti that was
busted for selling
obscene materials.
What I want to show is on the first page inside of "Howl".
It says, "All these books are published in Heaven".
And...
I don't quite understand that, but anyway,
let the record show, Your Honor,
it's published by the City Lights Pocketbook Shop.
Mr. Ferlinghetti could go to jail if convicted?
I hope not. That would be terrible.
May I have your name, please?
Gail Potter.
And have you done any writing yourself?
Yes, I have done considerable.
I was on an NBC station for 10 years while I was teaching.
I was community service director,
educational coordinator...
I have rewritten "Faust".
It took me three years to do that, but I did it.
I rewrote "Everyman".
That isn't as funny as you might think.
Pardon me, madam.
Ladies and gentlemen,
this is a trial that involves serious issues.
Now kindly accord the witness...
the courtesy you would want to be accorded.
Alright.
And did you form an opinion as to whether or not the book called
"Howl and OOther Poems" has any literary merit?
I think it has no literary merit.
Go ahead.
In order to have literary style, you must have
form, diction, fluidity, clarity.
Now, I am speaking only of style.
And in content, every great piece of literature,
anything that can really be classified as literature, is...
of some moral greatness,
and I think this fails to the nth degree.
I see.
Can you think of any other reasons?
Yes...
Use of language.
In regards to the figures of speech he uses,
he fails in rhetoric, of course,
for one thing, because his figures of speech are
crude, and you feel like you are going through the gutter
when you read that stuff.
I didn't linger on it long, I assure you.
You may cross-examine.
Step down.
There's something more you want?
Step down.
Mr. Ehrlich doesn't want to cross-examine.
You're through with me?
Step down.
What is "The Beat Generation"?
There is no Beat Generation.
It's just a bunch of guys, trying to get published.
Why don't you tell me how you started writing poetry?
I started writing poetry because I was a dope,
and my father wrote poetry.
So I began writing rhymes like him.
And then I went to Columbia University and I fell in love
with Jack Kerouac.
Until I was 18, I was a virgin.
I was unable to reach out to anybody's body.
To reach out to desire.
I just felt...
Chained.
Jack gave me permission to open up.
He's a romantic poet.
And he taught me that writing is personal,
that it comes from the writer's own person.
His body,
his breathing rhythm,
his actual talk.
Eventually I developed a much deeper sense of confession.
I needed to...
express my feelings to him, but he didn't want to hear them.
So I had to find a new way of expressing them...
a way that would entrance him.
This is good here.
"I was offered refreshments which I accepted.
"I ate a sandwich of pure meat.
"Enormous sandwich of human flesh, I noticed,
"while I was chewing on it.
"It also included a dirty asshole"!
That's good!
That's good! The meat and the asshole.
Allen, alright.
And then I realized that if I actually
admitted and confessed the secret tenderness
of my soul in my writing,
he would understand nakedly who I was. And so...
that sincere talk replaced the earlier
imitative rhyming that I was doing for my father.
Jack was the first person I really opened up to and said,
"I'm a homosexual".
I very soon realized that nobody was really shocked by anything.
Unless you're out murdering people, you know,
People would never really be shocked by
an expression of feeling.
Really I wrote "Howl" for Jack.
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride...
from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine...
until the noise of wheels and children brought them down...
shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain...
all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
Who talked continuously 70 hours...
from park to pad to bar to Bellevue...
to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
A lost battalion of platonic conversationalists...
jumping down the stoops,
off fire escapes, off windowsills,
off Empire State,
out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting...
whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and...
eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars...
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars...
racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-father night...
who studied Plotinus Poe St, John of the Cross,
telepathy and bop kabbalah...
because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho...
seeking visionary Indian angels...
who were visionary Indian angels,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma...
on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight small-town rain,
who reappeared on the West Coast...
investigating the FBI in beards and shorts...
with big pacifist eyes...
sexy in their dark skin...
passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms...
protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Super-Communist pamphlets in Union Square...
weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos...
wailed them down and wailed down Wall,
and the Staten Island Ferry also wailed,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists...
and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors,
caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
The problem, when it comes to literature, is this:
There are many writers who have preconceived ideas...
about what literature is supposed to be,
but their ideas seem to preclude...
everything that makes them most interesting...
in casual conversation.
Their faggishness,
their solitude,
their neuroses,
their goofiness,
their campiness,
or, even their masculinity at times.
Because they think that they're gonna write something...
that sounds like something else that they've read before,
instead of...
sounds like them.
OOr, comes from their own life.
We all talk amongst ourselves;
we have a common understanding,
we say anything we want to say. We talk about our assholes,
we talk about our cocks,
we talk about who we fucked last night,
or who we're gonna fuck tomorrow,
or what kind of love affair we're in, or...
when we got drunk and had a broom stick shoved up our ass in the...
Hotel Ambassador in Prague...
I mean, everyone tells one's friends about that! Right?
So...
the question is, what happens when you make a distinction...
between what you tell your friends and what you tell your Muse?
The trick is to break down that distinction,
to approach your Muse as...
frankly as you would talk to yourself or to your friends.
It's the ability to commit to writing - to write...
the same way that...
you are.
Who balled in the morning in the evenings...
in rose gardens and the grass ofpublic parks and cemeteries...
scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
Who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle...
but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish bath...
with a blonde and naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
The act of writi ng becomes, li ke, a meditation exercise.
If you walk down the street in New York for a few blocks,
you'll get this gargantuan feeling of buildings.
And, if you walk all day, you'll be on the verge of tears.
But, you have to walk all day before you get that sensation.
What I mean is, if you write all day, you'll get into it.
Into your body, into your feelings, into your consciousness...
I don't write enough in that way.
Who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate...
the one eyed shrew ofthe heterosexual dollar...
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb...
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass...
and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom...
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer,
a sweetheart, a package of cigarettes,
a candle and fell off the bed...
and continued along the floor and down the hall...
and ended fainting on the wall...
with a vision of ultimate cunt and come...
eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who faded out in vast sordid movies,
were shifted in dreams,
woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up...
out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay...
and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams...
and stumbled to unemployment offices,
who created great suicidal dramas...
on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson...
under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon...
and their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who wept at the romance of the streets...
with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge,
and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations...
which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits...
on Madison Avenue...
amid blasts of leaden verse...
and the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion...
and the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising...
and the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors,
or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
Would you say that "Howl" has any literary merit?
Yes.
And I presume you understand the whole thing, is that right?
I hope so.
It's not always easy to know that one...
understands exactly what a contemporary poet is saying,
but I think I do.
Well, let's go into some of this.
"With dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares,
"alcohol and cock and endless balls".
What significance does that have to you?
Well...
there are uprooted people wandering around the United States,
dreaming,
drugged...
That's clear isn't it?
Even their waking hours like nightmares,
loaded with liquor and...
enjoying, I take it,
a variety of indiscriminate sexual experience.
You understand what "angelheaded hipsters...
"burning for the ancient heavenly connection...
"to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night" means?
Sir, you can't translate poetry into prose.
That's why it is poetry.
But what are "angelheaded hipsters"?
I was working as a copyboy at Associated Press,
and I was able to manage things.
Except that I was living in a $13-a-month, cold-water apartment...
filled with junkies and thieves.
So the place was being filled with stolen silverware and...
beautiful oaken furniture...
taken from the lobbies of apartment buildings.
At a certain point,
I figured that things were getting too hot, and that...
I'd better get out of there. You know, get out from under.
So...
I piled myself and all my manuscripts...
into the back of some guy's car...
that turned out to be stolen.
You know, he had in the back,
all these stolen suits and suitcases and silverware,
and he turned the wrong way up a one-way street,
at the end of which there was a police car.
So he swerves his car to take a side road out,
and skidded and smashed and papers flying...
my eyeglasses lost, all the clothes upside down.
I jumped out, looked around, and...
went back in the car to find my notebooks, but...
I couldn't find my eyeglasses, so I couldn't find my papers.
The crowd was gathering around.
Chaos.
The easiest way to get out of the whole thing,
as it turns out, was
to just go to the Psychiatric Institute on 168th Street.
I was in the looney bin for eight months.
I met Carl Solomon there.
He was thinking about the void, also...
and such problems, and...
We spent months sitting around asking ourselves whether the...
authority of the doctors...
and their sense of reality was right for us...
or whether we were right, or you know what was happening.
And Carl was having problems...
because he was receiving shock treatment.
I didn't have any of that, no medication, no shock.
'Cause I'd promised the doctor that I would be heterosexual.
And that's how I got out.
Your mother was institutionalized, wasn't she?
the concrete void ofinsulin Metrazol...
electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy...
occupational therapy pingpong and amnesia,
who in humorless protest,
overturned only one symbolic pingpong table,
resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood,
and tears and fingers,
to the visible madman doom of the wards...
of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls...
My mother Naomi was...
in and out of mental institutions...
from the time I was 6.
When I was 21, I had to sign the papers for her lobotomy.
She died at Pilgrim State Hospital.
bickering with the echoes of the soul,
rocking and rolling in the midnight...
solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love,
dream of life a nightmare,
bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother...
finally fucked,
and the last fantastic book...
flung out of the tenement window,
and the last door closed at 4 am...
and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply...
and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece...
of mental furniture,
a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet,
and even that imaginary,
nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination...
Ah, Carl,
while you are not safe...
I am not safe,
and now you're really in the total animal soup of time...
After I got out of the mental hospital,
I had a period of fear where...
I felt I had to get out of New York.
I was questioning my sense of reality versus the...
social sense that was being imposed on me.
It was a position that...
Many people in the hospital came out with, you know,
a total self-rejection,
a rejection of, you know, their own universe.
Lip service, actually, to...
supposedly acceptable social patterns.
But I was falling in love over and over again,
and I kept writing my poetry about...
the people I was falling in love with.
All straight men.
And I hitch-hiked cross-country...
from Denver with my friend, Neal Cassady.
And Neal was very frenetic,
very charming,
and he had six thousand...
girls across the continent that were keeping him very busy.
OOk... um... no. Um...
Kiss!
Wait, wait, you have something...
I'll get that.
- Better? - Yeah.
- Get it? - I got it.
OOne day, Neal and I were thrown together in bed, at 4 am...
By circumstance...
with no place else to go and no place else to sleep.
And I remember being a little scared,
and not quite sure what to do, so...
I sort of like turned over and...
stiffened my body and got on the edge of the bed.
And he saw that I was shy.
At the time I was still...
scared of feeling with another person.
So he put his arm around me,
and pulled me, and...
put my head on his breast, and...
gave me love, actually.
And then one day, I got a letter...
saying, finally,
"We shouldn't consider ourselves lovers...
"I'm distracted with the wife,
"as much as I love you".
So my heart was broken.
"Dear Allen,
"What you say is honestly what I've been doing...
"or striving for all my life.
"Therein lies our,
"or my confused sense of closeness.
"Also I fear therein lies our strength of tie to each other.
"I say, 'I fear,'
"for I really don't know how much I can be satisfied to love you.
"I mean 'bodily. '
"You know, I sometimes dislike pricks and men and before you
"had consciously forced myself to be homosexual.
"You meant so much to me.
"I now feel I was forcing a desire for you bodily...
"as a compensation to you...
"for all you were giving me.
"Allen, this is straight.
"What I truly want is to live with you from September to June,
"have an apartment, a girl, go to college,
"see all and do all,
"and become truly straight, so please, Allen,
"give this a good deal of thought".
who drove cross-country 72 hours to find out if I had a vision...
or you had a vision...
or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver,
who died in Denver,
who came back to Denver and waited in vain,
who watched over Denver and brooded and loned in Denver...
and finally went away to find out the Time,
and now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals...
praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls...
trembling in the sunset,
and were red eyed in the morning but prepared...
to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise,
flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars,
Neal Cassady, secret hero of these poems,
cocksman and Adonis of Denver,
joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls...
in empty lots and diner backyards,
Moviehouses'rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves...
or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside...
lonely petticoat upliftings,
I thi nk it's a howl of pai n.
Figuratively speaking, his toes have been stepped on.
He's poetically putting his cry of pain and...
protest into this book, "Howl".
And do you think this book has definite literary value?
I do.
As a matter of fact, I think in a way...
he is employing the jazz phraseology here...
and, may I say, I...
I think he's also employing the words he heard...
in his life on the road and in his various experiences.
Thank you.
Now, do you understand most of the words in this book?
I think I understand their significance...
and the general context of it.
I see.
Taking on page 13,
the 14th line:
"who howled on their knees in the subway...
"and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts".
Now, do you understand what that paragraph is trying to say,
as a part of the "Howl"?
Not explicitly.
I would say he was attempting to show the...
lack of inhibition in the persons he's talking of,
post-World War ll generation...
those who returned,
went into college or went into work immediately after WW ll...
perhaps were somewhat displaced by the chaos of the war and...
didn't immediately settle down.
Now, the next paragraph:
"who blew and were blown...
"by those human seraphim, the sailors,
"caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love".
Now, you understand what "blew" and "blown" mean?
Well, I think they are words that have several meanings.
What meanings do you attribute to the words in this paragraph?
It can at one level mean... that they were vagabonds,
that they were being blown about by natural, literal winds.
OOn the other hand, perhaps it does have a sexual connotation.
In reference to oral copulation, right?
Yes, possibly.
Now then, do you find that those words...
are necessary to the context...
to make it a work of literary value?
I thought we had settled this, Your Honor.
Yes, Mr. Mclntosh, if you will recall,
I said that I would not allow the use of the word "necessary".
But you may ask the question, "Are they relevant?"
Are they relevant to make this a work of literary value?
Yes, I would say so.
Now then if you took those words out of there,
Would that spoil the portrayal?
That's doing indirectly what Your Honor won't permit him to do directly.
This man is an expert.
He has to speculate.
No, Mr. Mclntosh, I'm afraid I can't go along with you on that.
Whether the author might have used other or different words,
you're getting into the realm of speculation there.
OObjection sustained.
Going down a little further...
"who sweetened the snatches of a million girls...
"trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning...
"but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise,
"flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake".
What's your question?
Is that word "snatches" in there...
Is that...
relevant to Mr. Ginsberg's literary endeavor?
Yes. I think to use euphemisms in describing this would...
seem dishonest to Mr. Ginsberg.
You also said, I believe, literary value sometimes...
is a book which will survive any test of time.
Do you think Mr. Ginsberg's work will survive the test of time?
He has no way of knowing,
no more than some people thought "Leaves of Grass" would survive.
I'm asking him for his opinion, to give us an opinion on that book.
He says that literary value...
depends on surviving the test of time.
I want to know if it will.
If Luther Nichols could answer that,
then the Good Lord could use a helper and he ought to be up there.
How can he tell?
I'm asking for his opinion as an expert.
I'll ask him.
Can you answer the question?
It calls for a prediction.
I think that this trial will draw attention to it.
"Howl" will have a wider readership than it might otherwise have had,
and may go down in history as a stepping-stone along the way...
to greater or lesser liberality...
in the permitting of poems of its type.
Poetry, generally, is a...
rythmic articulation of feeling...
And the feeling is...
an impulse that begins inside.
Like a sexual impulse, you know. Almost as definite as that. It's
It's a feeling that begins, in the pit of the stomach, right?
And rises up through the breast, and...
out the mouth and ears, right?
And...
it comes forth as a croon or a groan or a sigh, right?
So if you try to put words to that...
by looking around you and...
trying to describe what's making you sigh,
just sigh in words,
you simply articulate what you're feeling.
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight...
in police cars for committing no crime,
but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway...
and were dragged off the roof...
waving genitals and manuscripts,
In the moment of composition,
I don't necessarily know what it means.
It comes to mean something later,
after a year or two, I come to realize...
it meant something clear,
unconsciously.
Which takes on meaning in time, you know like...
a photograph developing slowly.
If it's at all spontaneous,
I don't know whether it even makes sense sometimes.
And other times, I do know it makes complete sense,
I start crying.
'Cause I realize that I'm...
I'm hitting on an area that's...
absolutely true.
In that sense, able to be read by someone...
and wept to, maybe, centuries later.
In that sense, prophecy,
because it touches a common key.
I mean,
what prophecy actually is,
is not knowing whether...
the bomb will fall in 1942.
It's knowing and feeling something...
which someone knows and feels...
in a hundred years. Hmm?
And maybe articulating it in a hint that...
they will pick up on in a 100 years.
who crashed through their minds in jail...
waiting for impossible criminals...
with golden heads...
and the charm of reality in their hearts...
who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism...
and were left with their insanity...
and their hands and a hung jury..
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism...
and subsequently presented themselves...
on the granite steps of the madhouse...
with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide,
demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead...
the concrete void of insulin Metrazol...
electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy...
occupational therapy pingpong and amnesia,
and who therefore ran through the icy streets...
obsessed with a sudden flash...
of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse...
the catalog the meter and the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time and Space...
through images juxtaposed,
and trapped the arch-angel of the soul...
between 2 visual images...
to recreate the syntax and measure ofpoor 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,
After I left New York,
I spent a year i n San Francisco.
I had an apartment on Nob Hill,
the tie and suit,
a job with several secretaries which was...
beginning to give me pleasure,
the pleasure of knowing I could do it...
and was no longer intimidated by the social forms,
to be able to make it in the very dry, business world...
And that's when I met Peter.
It was when I met Peter...
that everything changed for me.
It was as if the heavens showered with gold.
Finally somebody loved me like I loved them,
and for the first time, I felt accepted in my life.
Completely.
In San Francisco,
I had a year of psychotherapy with Dr. Hicks.
I was blocked, I couldn't write...
I was still trying to act normal.
I was afraid I was crazy.
I was sure that I was supposed to be heterosexual...
and that something was wrong with me.
And Dr. Hicks kept saying,
"What do you want to do?
"What is your heart's desire?"
Finally I said...
what I'd really like to do is to...
just quit all this...
and...
get a small room with Peter...
and devote myself to my writing and...
contemplation and fucking and smoking pot and...
doing whatever I want.
And he said, "Why don't you do it, then?"
I mean, what will happen if I grow old...
and I have pee-stains in my underwear...
and I'm living in some furnished room...
and nobody loves me and I'm...
white-haired and...
I have no money, bread crumbs are falling on the floor?"
And he said,
"Don't worry about that,
"you're very charming and lovable and people will always love you".
What a relief to hear that!
I very soon realized that it was all...
a fear-trap...
Illusory!
What sphinx of cement and aluminum...
bashed open their skulls...
and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth!
Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars!
Children screaming under stairways!
Boys sobbing in armies!
Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch!
Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless!
Mental Moloch!
Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Peter and I saw Moloch one day when we took peyote...
and were wandering around downtown streets.
It's a god that you make fire sacrifices to.
But...
in my mind, it was what drove my mother to madness.
So, I had the line...
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows.
I had this word,
And... I also had the feeling...
DA de de DA de de DA de de DA DA, Hmm?
So then all I had to do was look up and see a lot of windows,
and say, "OOh, windows, of course,"
But what kind of windows? Right? And...
Not only that...
"Moloch whose eyes"... Right?
"Moloch whose eyes" which is beautiful in itself but...
You know, what about it?
"Moloch whose eyes" what?
"Moloch whose eyes"...
Then the next thing I thought was probably...
"Thousands".
OK, but "thousands" what?
"Thousands blind"...
And then I had to finish it somehow. So...
I had to say "windows".
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers...
stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs!
Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone!
Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!
Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely!
Moloch in whom I dream Angels!
Crazy in Moloch!
Cocksucker in Moloch!
Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early!
Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon!
Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch!
Robot apartments!
Invisible suburbs!
Skeleton treasuries!
Blind capitals!
Demonic industries!
Spectral nations!
Invincible mad houses!
Granite cocks!
Monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven!
Pavements, trees!
Lifting the city to Heaven...
which exists and is everywhere about us!
Dreams!
Adorations!
Illuminations!
Religions!
The whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs!
Over the river!
Flips and crucifixions!
Gone down the flood!
Highs! Epiphanies!
Despairs!
Ten years'animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation!
Down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river!
They saw it all!
The wild eyes! The holy yells!
They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! To solitude!
Waving!
Carrying flowers!
Down to the river!
Into the street!
It is my opi nion that if it has any literary value,
it's negligible.
I endeavored to arrive at my opinion...
on an objective basis.
For example,
a great literary work, or even a fairly great literary work,
would obviously be exceedingly successful in form,
but this poem is really just a weak imitation...
of a form that was used 80 to 90 years ago by Walt Whitman.
And do you recall the name of that poem?
"Leaves of Grass" was the name of the poem.
Literary value could also reside in theme,
and what little literary value there is in "Howl,"
it seems to me does come in theme.
The statement of the idea of the poem was relatively clear,
but it has little validity, and, therefore, the theme...
has a negative value.
No value at all.
Thank you.
Did I understand you to say that...
Ginsberg used Walt Whitman's style?
The form.
The form of the book "Leaves of Grass".
And because of Ginsberg's using this format,
it is your opinion that the poem "Howl"
has no literary value or...
merit, is that true?
OOn the basis of form, that's correct,
because great literature always creates...
its own form for each significant occasion.
By that, you do not mean that...
Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" doesn't quite qualify?
That is great literature.
The form was created by Walt Whitman.
And at the same time, you say, because...
Ginsberg copied that format,
"Howl" has no value or merit, am I correct?
That is correct.
An imitation never does have the value of the original.
Who did Walt Whitman copy?
To my knowledge, no one.
But you don't know,
isn't that your answer, you don't know, sir?
That's right.
As I understand, your next signpost...
is that the idea...
of "Howl" is clear, but has little validity.
Am I quoting you correctly?
That's the general conclusion, yes...
the idea of "Howl" is clear in theme.
- The idea is clear? - Yes.
What idea does Ginsberg have in "Howl"?
Well, he celebrates the unfortunate life of...
I can't remember the man's name, Solomon...
the unfortunate life of the man, Solomon,
who is a drifter of Dadaist persuasion.
A drift what?
Drifter of Dadaist persuasion.
He portrays that?
That's correct.
And does that portrayal have any validity?
Not as literature, no.
Carl Solomon!
I'm with you in Rockland where you're madder than I am,
I'm with you in Rockland where you must feel very strange,
I'm with you in Rockland where you imitate the shade of my mother,
I'm with you in Rockland where you pun on the bodies of your nurses,
the harpies of the Bronx,
I'm with you in Rockland...
where you bang on the catatonic piano...
the soul is innocent and immortal...
it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse,
I'm with you in Rockland...
where fifty more shocks will never return...
your soul to its body again...
from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void,
I'm with you in Rockland...
where you accuse your doctors of insanity...
and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution...
against the fascist national Golgotha...
I'm with you in Rockland...
where you will split the heavens of Long Island...
and resurrect your living human Jesus...
from the superhuman tomb...
I'm with you in Rockland where there are 25,000...
mad comrades all together singing...
the final stanzas of the Internationale,
I'm with you in Rockland...
where we wake up electrified out of the coma...
by our own souls'airplanes roaring over the roof,
They've come to drop angelic bombs...
the hospital illuminates itself...
imaginary walls collapse...
O skinny legions run outside...
O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here...
O victory forget your underwear we're free...
I'm with you in Rockland...
in my dreams...
you walk dripping from a sea-journey...
on the highway across America...
in tears to the door of my cottage...
in the Western night,
What is your i mpression of the thi rd portion of "Howl"?
My understanding there would be that the poet expresses...
the usual Dadaist line that...
everything is created for man's despair,
that everything must be forgotten and destroyed, and...
that Solomon's life apparently has had this kind of rhythm.
Therefore, there is some validity...
of theme, in that area.
So, there is validity of theme there?
I am afraid I got my tongue tripped up there... this...
I should have said "clarity" instead of "validity".
But you've been using the term "validity"
the entire time you've been on the stand.
By the way, Mr. Kirk, have you read the Holy Bible?
I have.
Tell me, did you read Job?
I have.
Isn't Job crying the same cry as Ginsberg's "Howl"?
Not at all.
Do you agree with me that Job does condemn life?
Job condemns man's condition, yes,
but he does not go on then, as the Dadaist goes on, to...
desire to wipe out all human memory...
of everything the human race has ever done...
so that there can be a fresh start made...
as the Dadaist does.
And you don't believe in that philosophy?
Not at all.
No, it's been dead since about 1922 or '23.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that...
someone who does believe that is...
wrong, does it?
No, but that does not create literature.
Well, what...
What creates literature, Mr. Kirk?
I'd have to return to my three bases of objective criticism:
form, theme and opportunity.
Well...
Do you feel that Ginsberg had the...
opportunity in his travels...
to observe life and to write about it?
A small segment, yes.
And this is the segment that he's writing about,
isn't that right?
One thing...
Answer that question, please, "Yes" or "No".
Uh... I'm... I'm confused.
This is the segment that he is writing about,
isn't that true?
I can't answer that either "Yes" or "No".
But you said in his travels,
he wrote about a small segment of the community.
Here's where the confusion comes in:
I believe the travels are Solomon's, not Ginsberg's.
That's the basis of my confusion.
Yes, well, Ginsberg is writing it about Solomon...
It's his own observations.
You have read that, haven't you?
I am unable to know whether he has...
an acquaintance with Solomon.
That is the thing that is beyond my experience,
beyond my knowledge.
Do you evaluate a work by whether the writer knew...
the person he was talking about?
Absolutely.
Are you certain that Carl Solomon ever lived?
No.
Then you don't know, do you?
Not at all.
Have you ever read... Voltaire?
I've read one work,
"Candide".
And what is your opinion of "Candide"?
As literature? It's great literature.
And whose style did Voltaire copy?
Oh!
- Your Honor! - Please!
Counsel is allowed to make an objection.
If he objects.
Well, I would like to...
I don't want to box with him.
He's disturbing me.
I get my mouth open and out fly fists.
How long have you reflected on "Howl"?
I believe two weeks.
Two weeks?
Two weeks would be the limit of my opportunity.
However, I made my mind up after 5 minutes.
And you reflected a long, long time...
on Voltaire's "Candide," is that right?
Exactly.
Well, do you think that if you had another...
ten years to reflect on "Howl,"
you might change your opinion?
I am quite certain I would not.
That is all.
where you accuse your doctors ofinsanity...
and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution...
against the fascist national Golgotha,
I'm with you in Rockland...
where you will split the heavens of Long Island...
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb...
I'm with you in Rockland...
where there are 25,000 mad comrades all together...
singing the final stanzas of the Internationale...
I'm with you in Rockland...
where we hug and kiss...
the United States under our bedsheets,
The United States...
that coughs all night and won't let us sleep,
I'm with you in Rockland...
where we wake up electrified out of the coma...
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof...
they've come to drop angelic bombs...
the hospital illuminates itself...
imaginary walls collapse...
O skinny legions run outside...
O starry-spangled shock of mercy...
the eternal war is here!
O victory!
Forget your underwear!
We're free!
I'm with you in Rockland...
in my dreams...
you walk dripping from a sea-journey...
on the highway across America...
in tears to the door of my cottage...
in the Western night,
"Howl" contai ns words,
taken just by themselves, Your Honor,
that are definitely obscene.
And we have had different literary experts testify that...
the books have literary merit, and that the words...
are necessary to that so-called merit.
But it's funny in our law,
we are allowed to use...
expert witnesses to testify as to literary merit,
but we are not allowed to bring in,
we will say, the average man...
to testify that when he reads the book,
he doesn't understand it.
He doesn't know what it's all about.
Perhaps it's over his head.
Take, for example...
Frankly, and I made the comment in open court that I'd read it,
I don't understand it very well.
In fact, looking it all over,
I think it's a lot of sensitive bullshit,
using the language of Mr. Ginsberg.
So then,
If the sale of a book is not being limited to just...
modern book reviewers...
and experts on modern poetry,
but falls into the hands of the general public,
that is to say, the average reader,
this court should take that into consideration...
in determining whether or not "Howl" is obscene.
Thank you, Your Honor...
Alright...
I will hear from the defense.
The United States Supreme Court has said that obscenity...
is construed to mean
"having a substantial tendency to corrupt...
"by arousing lustful desires".
Is the word relevant to what the author is trying to say,
or did he just use it to be dirty and filthy?
He sees what he terms as...
"an Adonis of Denver, joy to the memory...
"of his innumerable conquests.
who went out whoring through Colorado...
in myriad stolen night-cars...
Neal Cassady, secret hero of this poem,
cocksman and Adonis of Denver,
joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls...
in empty lots and diner backyards,
moviehouses'rickety rows,
on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses...
in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings...
and especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns,
and hometown alleys too,
Now, I suppose he could have said that,
the secret hero of these poems,
this "cocksman," this "Adonis of Denver,"
joy to memory of his innumerable conquests...
at the Waldorf Astoria...
or at dinner at Chasen's, or after one or two drinks,
in going to bed at the Stork Club.
I presume he could have said that...
but that isn't the kind of person...
he is writing about.
It is not for us to choose the words.
Mr. Ginsberg, in telling his story,
is telling the story as he sees it.
He is using his words.
There are books that have the power to change...
men's minds,
and call attention to situations that...
are visible but...
unseen.
Now whether "Howl" is or is not "obscene" is of
little importance to our world, faced as it is with the threat
of physical survival,
but...
the problem of what is legally permissible...
in the description of sexual acts or feelings...
in arts and literature is of the greatest importance...
to a free society.
What is "prurient"?
And to whom?
And the material so described is dangerous to some...
unspecified, susceptible reader.
It is interesting that
the person applying such standards of censorship...
rarely feels as if their own...
physical or moral health is in jeopardy.
The desire to censor is...
not limited, however, to crackpots and bigots.
There is...
in most of us, a desire to...
make the world conform to our own views.
And it takes all of the force of our own reason as well as...
our legal institutions to defy so human an urge.
The battle of censorship will not be...
finally settled by Your Honor's decision,
but you will either add to liberal, educated thinking,
or by your decision, you will add fuel...
to the fire of ignorance.
Let there be light.
Let there be honesty.
Let there be no running from...
non-existent destroyers of morals.
Let there be honest understanding.
Gentleman, is the matter submitted?
It is submitted, Your Honor.
It is so submitted.
All rise.
Be seated.
There are a number of words used in "Howl"
that are presently considered coarse and vulgar...
in some circles of the community,
and in other circles, such words are in everyday use.
The author of "Howl"
has used those words because he believed that...
his portrayal required them as being in character.
The People state that such words are not necessary...
and that others would be more palatable for good taste.
The answer is that life is not encased in one formula...
whereby everyone acts the same...
and conforms to a particular pattern.
No two persons think alike.
We were all made from the same form...
but in different patterns.
Would there be any freedoms of press or speech...
if one must reduce his vocabulary...
to vapid, innocuous euphemism?
An author should be real in treating his subject...
and be allowed to express his thoughts...
and ideas in his own words.
In considering material claimed to be obscene,
it is well to remember the motto,
"Honi soit qui mal y pense"
"Evil to him who evil thinks".
The freedoms of speech and press...
are inherent in a nation of free people.
These freedoms must be protected if we are to remain free,
both individually and as a nation.
Therefore, I conclude that the book "Howl and Other Poems"
does have some redeeming social importance,
and I find the book is not obscene.
The defendant is found not guilty.
The crucial moment of breakthrough came when...
I realized how funny it would be,
in the middle of a long poem,
if I said:
"Who let themselves be fucked in the ass...
"and screamed with joy!"
Instead of "and screamed with pain".
That's the contradiction in that line.
An American audience would expect it to be pain and,
instead, it's "screamed with joy!"
Which is really true.
Absolutely, 100%.
And, again, I have a line, like...
"Who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of...
"Atlantic and Caribbean love".
It was an acknowledgement of the...
basic reality of homosexual joy.
That was a breakthrough in the sense of...
public statements about...
feelings, emotions, attitudes, you know,
that...
I wouldn't have wanted my father or my family to see,
and that I even hesitated to make public.
The poem is misinterpreted as...
a promotion of homosexuality.
Actually, it's... more like a promotion of...
frankness, about any subject.
If you're a foot fetishist, you write about feet.
If you're a stock-market freak,
you can write about the rising sales-curve erections...
of the Standard Oil chart.
When a few people are...
frank about homosexuality in public,
it breaks the ice.
Then people are free to be frank about anything and...
That's socially useful.
Homosexuality is a condition,
and because it alienated me...
or set me apart from the beginning,
it served as a catalyst for self-examination,
or...
a detailed realization of my environment and...
the reasons why everyone else is different and...
why I am different.
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
The world is holy!
The soul is holy!
The skin is holy!
The nose is holy!
The tongue and cock and hand and asshole, holy!
Everything is holy!
Everybody's holy!
Everywhere is holy!
Everyday is an eternity!
Everyman's an angel!
The bum's as holy as the seraphim!
The madman is holy as you my soul are holy!
The typewriter is holy!
The poem is holy!
The voice is holy!
The hearers are holy!
The ecstasy is holy!
Holy Peter!
Holy Allen!
Holy Solomon!
Holy Lucien!
Holy Ikerouac!
Holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cassady!
Holy the unknown buggered and suffering beggars!
Holy the hideous human angels!
Holy my mother in the insane asylum!
Holy the cocks of the grandfathers of IKansas!
Holy the groaning saxophone!
Holy the bop apocalypse!
Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters...
peace and junk and drums!
Holy time in eternity!
Holy eternity in time!
Holy the clocks in space!
Holy the fourth dimension!
Holy the Fifth Internationale!
Holy the Angel in Moloch!
Holy the sea!
Holy the desert!
Holy the railroad, holy the locomotive...
Holy the visions!
Holy the hallucinations!
Holy the miracles!
Holy the eyeball!
Holy the abyss!
Holy forgiveness!
Mercy!
Charity!
Faith!
Holy!
Ours!
Bodies!
Suffering!
Magnanimity!
Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness...
of the soul,
Hey Father Death, I'm flying home...
Hey, poor man, you're all alone...
Hey, old daddy, I know where I'm going,
Father Death, don't cry any more,
Mama's there, underneath the floor,
Brother Death, please mind the store,
Old Auntie Death, I hear your groans,
Old Uncle Death, I see your bones,
Oh Sister Death, how sweet your moan...
Oh Children Death, go breathe your breaths,
Sobbing breasts'll ease your deaths,
Pain is gone, tears take the rest,
Genius Death, your art is done...
Lover Death, your body's gone...
Father Death, I'm coming home...
Guru Death, your words are true...
Teacher Death, I do thank you...
For inspiring me to sing this Blues...
Buddha Death, I wake with you...
Dharma Death, your mind is new...
Sangha Death, we'll work it through...
Suffering is what was born...
Ignorance made me forlorn...
Tearful truths I cannot scorn...
Father Breath, once more farewell...
Birth you gave was no thing ill...
My heart is still,
as time will tell,