HOWL: Allen Ginsberg's 100th birthday

Beat poet Allen Ginsberg's 100th birthday is being marked by celebrations around the world – an appreciation of his importance to poetry and how his influence on the medium continues.

• Wisdom Quarterly: American Buddhist Journal: JewBu: Why are so many Jews Buddhist?
• Literary events around the world celebrate the poet Allen Ginsberg's 100th birthday (NPR)
• American Buddhist and Beat Poet Jack Kerouac
• Jack Kerouac's nonfiction book on Buddhism
• AUDIO: Buddhist-Catholic poet Jack Kerouac
• VIDEO: Dharma Bum Temple, San Diego, California

"Howl" by Allen Ginsberg summarized

JuBu Ginsberg's Sunflower Sutra (poem)

(extropyofdays) Allen Ginsberg's modernist poem "Sunflower Sutra"

Nazis invented meth as pharmaceutical Pervitin

"Howl," also known as "Howl for Carl Solomon," is a poem composed by drug-addled Allen Ginsberg (who had shot himself up with methamphetamine or what Hitler's doctor shot up the Fuhrer with under the German pharmaceutical name Pervitin, possibly linked to words like perky and perverted) in 1954–1955.

Poet activist Ginsberg with protestors, Miami

Gay Ginsberg began work on "Howl" in autumn of 1954. He performed it at the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco in Oct. 1955. Fellow poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books was at the performance and published the work in the 1956 collection Howl and Other Poems.

Howl and Other Poems

Upon its release, Ferlinghetti and City Lights Bookstore Manager (Japanese Buddhist) Shigeyoshi Murao were charged with disseminating obscene literature. Both perverts were arrested.

On Oct. 3, 1957, Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene [1], and the heroic publishers were hailed as innovative geniuses and brave publishing mavericks for spotting Ginsberg's talent.

Highly controversial at first and for years excluded from the academic canon, "Howl" has gradually come to be regarded as a great work of 20th-century American literature [2].

Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg

(Swingin' Pig) Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg visit Jack Kerouac's grave (1975)

The poem is also closely associated with the group of writers known as the "Beats" or Beat Generation [2,3]. More

• "Sunflower Sutra" (The Poetry Foundation)

The "Sunflower Sutra"

1967 Mantra-Rock Dance Avalon
poster by poet Allen Ginsberg

This poem is an account of a sojourn (trip) with Jack Kerouac in a railroad yard, the discovery of a sunflower covered in dirt and soot from the railroad yard, and the subsequent revelation that this is a metaphor for all humanity: "We are not our skin of grime."

This relates to his vision, an auditory hallucination of poet William Blake reading "Ah, Sunflower": "Blake, my visions." (See also line in Howl: "Blake-light tragedies" and references in other poems).

• Author Emily Sigalow, American JewBu (Princeton U Press)

Manager Shig Murao

The theme of the poem is consistent with Ginsberg's revelation in his original vision of Blake: the revelation that all of humanity is interconnected. (See also the line in "Footnote to Howl": "The world is holy!").

The structure of this poem relates to "Howl" both in its use of the long line and its repetition of the "eyeball kick" (paratactical juxtapositions) at the end. Ginsberg says in relating his thought process after the experiments of "Howl":

"What about a poem with rhythmic buildup power equal to Howl without use of repetitive base to sustain it? The Sunflower Sutra...did that, it surprised me, one long who" [6]. More