The world's least postmodern poem. Pain, rage, terror, panic heartfelt and body-felt without protective irony or afterthought or sneaking reservations. The horror fortissimo, unqualified:

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls
     and ate up their brains and imagination?

And the ecstasy, too, heartfelt and unhedged:

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.

A poem profoundly the opposite of the current, early twenty-first-century fashion for the oblique. Majestic in its crazed vulnerability, able to be funny while it is absolutely earnest:

who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson
     under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned
     with laurel in oblivion.

A poem based explicitly, as William Carlos Williams says in his introduction, on the experience of horror and defeat.

Horror and defeat. And yet when I first read it as a teenager, what thrilled me was the leash-breaking manner, the deliberate unthrottled throwing around of parts of speech and images and phrases, a musical parade of words celebrating their berserk Mardi Gras of freedom:

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes
     on the windows of the skull.

I was a teenager. Expelled for crazy felt like the party I was desperate to discover. If I were a little more wide-awake, or smarter, I would have heard the howl of the feeling and the howl of the mind as well as the howl of the writing. Williams says, "Everyone in this life is defeated, but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated."

The poem was not a party, not a picnic. He was explicit enough! —

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of
     Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and
     were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing
     old and cried.

The excitement of the speed, the rush of spontaneity, the quickness of moves like "successively unsuccessfully," the on-fire directness of attack, all dramatize the subject matter, the panic and aspiration of the half-destroyed, agonized spirit, pitted against and enveloped by the repressive, parental money-monster of the actual, social world:

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity
     and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose
     fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
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 in whom I am a consciousness
     without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch
     whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

What poem could be more contrary to the current modes of language doubting itself? Rereading now the work of art that inspired me with its freedom, directness, and ebullience when I was a teenager, I marvel more than ever at how dire it is, how wholeheartedly tormented, meaning every word, with no implied quotation marks. A howl: that is, utterly the opposite of doubt about the efficacy of language. The sex, for example, is not "camp" or coy, it too is unironic, tormented, and ecstatic and actual:

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a
     partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
     them with a sword.

There's nothing superior or disengaged – in an important way, even, nothing alienated – about the relation to our country, imagined as a fellow patient, sick in mind and body, comforting and discomfiting, sharing a bed in a mental hospital:

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 think that back then I welcomed the poem partly as a counter-force to the literary fashion of that day, the nearly religious emphasis on "metaphor" and "image" and "objective correlative," Eliot's phrase associated with his notion that the apparent subject of the poem is like a piece of meat the poet-burglar uses to distract the watchdog conscious intelligence of the reader. Ginsberg seemed to break down the partitions of that formula: the bait and the household goods, the beast and the thief and the householder all part of the same parade, the meat as much a part of it as the safe, the bite as much as the howl.

That snarling, ever-hungry dog changes over time. "The Waste Land," like "Howl" a great poem that helped conduct me into poetry, feels today more personal than it once did: still, I guess, a work where Eliot broods about the shadowy archetypal roots and malaises of civilization – but more of a personal lyric, more about the wounds and cravings of the poet. Bodily and spiritual cravings: the incantational "Shantih" of Eliot's resolution, at the top of its voice, resembles the incantational "Holy!" of Ginsberg's "Footnote to Howl." The soon-to-be-Christian anglophile royalist seeming to resemble more than he used to the Jewish Buddhist supercommunist. And the supercommunist truly meaning the word "Holy," used in his manner that is comical but not ironical:

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy!
     The tongue and cock and ass hole holy! . . .
Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria & Seattle Holy
     Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow Holy Istanbul!

For decades now I have smiled at how in my ear "Holy Peoria" and "Holy Istanbul" sound like "Holy Cow" and "Holy Moly."

If "Howl" were published for the first time tomorrow, it would be sensational and challenging: a critique maybe not only of a world where Moloch now claims Jesus as his best friend but also, implicitly, of our postmodern cool.

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