Howl
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 accross the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated… – Howl, Allen Ginsberg It’s been a long time since I engaged with Howl in its entirety. Those first few lines, sure; if you’re into poetry in any way, there’s pretty good odds you can reel off the first line and half of Howl from memory. They’re among the most well-known in American poetry, and there’s no getting around the fact that they’re a brilliant opener (Although, I have to admit, in my head I punctuate it differently – I saw the best minds of my generation, destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked – which is actually kind of sad considering I once wrote an honour’s thesis about the use of space and punctuation in poetry and how it should affect the reading of a poem. In a form that already has a natural break in language generated by the existence of a poetic line, for example, what does it mean when you add a comma to the end of the line, effectively generating a
