Howl

I mean, hip-hop, it really exploded, but you go back to like ...

I'm thinking of, uh, Allen Ginsberg's famous poem in 1950-something, Howl.

And there's a line in Howl that, um, that, uh ...

I don't remember the k- where it comes in the stanza, but there's just a line that where he's talking to the American government and kind of American conventional society, and he says, "Go fuck yourself with the atom bomb." And that was such a ...

At that time, in the 1950s, that was such a shocking and profound line.

Timothy Leary, even though I wasn't a founder of him, he's promoting LSD and hallucinogenics? This is the bravest thing in the world.

Allen Ginsberg with Howl? Oh, my God.

Did you ever read Howl? Let me tell you something.

Parts of it are pretty titillating, unless you realize this is an ode to gay, but then he goes to show you sex is sex when you get down to it.

It may be performed differently.

I thought it sounded like John Cage.

Well, because he wrote a poem called Writing Through Howl, in which he wrote a whole new poem about, by writing through Allen Ginsberg's Howl.

The idea is that the best way to pay tribute to another writer or another artist is by creating new work through their work.

He ended up using...

He used like some sort of weird algorithm to make his lines.

And it's very, very avant-garde.

And it's almost, it's kind of like if free jazz was poetry, you know, that's what, you know, his writing through Howl is.

The way I did mine is I will pick a writer and And I would.

It did, however, allow more gay-oriented magazines to begin shipping out their own copies.

Later that same year, poet Allen Ginsberg's book Howl also defeated obscenity charges in court.

The tumbling of obscenity laws would also pave the way for popular novels featuring gay characters, like James Baldwin's In Another Country and John Retchie's City of Night.

By the end of the 1950s, progress, however incremental, had been made.

But I did grow up reading the beats.

I mean, I, I feel like my folks saved me a lot of time 'cause I read Howl by Allen Ginsberg when I was a kid.

Um, actually I read things I shouldn't have read when I was a kid.

[laughs]

There's one more I can read from Ginsberg.

I'd love to read all of Howl.

I had it memorized and recited it from memory for years, but that would take 45 minutes.

But I can read you part two of Howl.

One last poem before we do a little outro music.

This is Howl Part Two.

It's very occult, you'll like it.

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? moloch solitude filth ugliness ash cans and unobtainable dollars children screaming out of under the stairways boys sobbing in armies old men weeping in the parks moloch moloch nightmare of moloch moloch the loveless mental moloch the heavy judger of men moloch the incomprehensible prison moloch the crossbones soulless jailhouse and congress of sorrows Moloch whose buildings are judgment.

And the title, The Best Minds, it's ironic.

It's from a poem by A.E. Housman, and it echoes Ginsberg's Howl.

The best minds of a generation, destroyed by madness.

We're still doing that.