*Q3 Journal 3*

For my poetry paper, I chose to read “Howl” as one of the poems for analysis since it was Allen Ginsberg’s master work that gave him public attention for the first time.  “Howl” is literally a howl against all of the social injustices caused by the way the world worked in the Cold War era and even today.  Even though the poem is five pages long, it is thankfully split into three sections, each of which uses a drastically different tone from the others.  The first section, the “who” section, was a long, rough part of the poem to get through.  I could not believe that one sentence could extend for three full pages when I first printed out the poem.  Each gigantic clause, most of which started with “who,” consisted of a group of the “best minds of [Ginsberg’s] generation.”  These best minds generally included people like drug addicts, suicidal people, bums, indecent men, musicians, travelers, and poets rather than the conventional doctors and lawyers, which I found to be shocking.  There were also a number of strange words or repetition such as “yacketayakking,” “bop kablabbah,” and “boxcars boxcars boxcars,” which maybe makes these “best minds” seem as despairing and mad as Ginsberg feels that society has driven them.  Once I finally moved through the first section, the tone completely changes to anger in the “what” section as the narrator, presumably Ginsberg, blames Moloch, an idolatrous god to whom people sacrificed children to fire, for making all of these people insane.  To the narrator, Moloch is the government, capitalism, money, war, and anything else that causes social problems.  I found the many exclamatory sentences to be almost excessive, but it was nonetheless necessary because they emphasize the utter anger of the speaker.  This section is probably where I really felt that “Howl” deserved its title because I could almost imagine the narrator screaming out the lines.  Finally, in the third section, the “where” section, it felt as if the narrator, now more clearly known to be Ginsberg, had gone insane.  Every other line, he repeated “I’m with you in Rockland” followed by what was likely a few events that he witnessed in the mental hospital that he had stayed in for eight months.  The poem seems to get more personal yet much more frenzied, which is emphasized by the run-ons near the end. “Howl” blew my mind so much that even though I could not read it in one sitting, I still felt the “whoa” factor that readers of his time probably felt after completing the poem.