Howl (Pocket Poets)

click here for more details, find new or used items	Allen Ginsberg Our price £5.06 (£5.95) New from £0.57 Used from £0.99 Pages: 57 (Paperback) ISBN: 0872860175 Pub: City Lights Books Pub date: 1986-10-01 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 2955

Reader Reviews:

Direct, honest and passionate (1/4 people found this helpful)

This CD gives you a direct insight to the beat generation and the radicalism of the 1950s underground. It takes no prisoners and covers issues such as sexuality,drugs, music and spirituality directly and without apology. Even by today's standards its shocking. Ginsberg is lyrical and passionate. His poetry is honest and direct. None of that "wandering lonely as a cloud" crap

Don't just read poetry, hear to it! (14/16 people found this helpful)

This CD comprises of Ginsberg reading a selection of the poems from Ginsberg's Howl & other poems including an unabridged live recording of Howl.

The sound quality is good, the words are audible and clear though it is by no means a pristine studio reading (hence no 5 stars).

By listening to this you can get a sense of the fervour and energy Ginsberg had about his poetry. This is what the Beat Generation was about and you can hear it rather than try and work it out from the biographies and second hand accounts.

This is good stuff and I'd recommed it to anyone.

Howl of the Young Generations (7/10 people found this helpful)

Imagine that you close your eyes and the vibrating sound of the jazz slightly flows over your skin. While you are completely absorbed by that sound, a vortex of emotions gently comes out to shake your steadfastness, no matter who you are and how old you are. This is the sentiment I feel every time I read this book. Above all I appreciate its universal dimension that, almost half-century after its creation, make me share with the author this boundless feeling of defeat. Whenever you believe in something; whenever you are ready to bet on it; whenever you spend your positive energy to improve it and your trustfulness is betrayed, then, you are sharing the truest feeling of this book with the countless people who experienced it. When you read this book you feel the need of living and the pain of doing it: both of them portrayed in the picture of a gloomy America unables to take care of her sons. The poems convey the hopelessness of the American Dream which proved mendacious. They are made up of concrete images, which express the metaphysical aspects of life. Drug, sex and dead-living bodies seeking what does not exist: these are the most striking figures. In 'Howl' "Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!" represent the varied universe of sufferers who are joined by a metaphysical brotherhood. This union is best represented by the friendship between the narrator and Carl Solomon, the poet to whom the poem is addressed. The theme of a metaphysical brotherhood is also traced in 'A Supermarket in California' where the author dreams of talking to Walt Whitman and asking about the lost America. In 'America', the hopeful land, which was joyfully sung by the old bard in 'Leaves of Grass' a century before, has become the world of atom bomb, of human war, of machinery. Ginsberg says: "America I've given you all and now I'm nothing", but when he deepens into the problem he realises that he is America and he is talking to himself. Think about what it means...

Buy it for Howl, enjoy it for the others... (9/12 people found this helpful)

To be completely honest, I don't find Howl as interesting as I find Ginsberg's other poems. While Howl does reach the soul, I find that Ginsberg's poems America, Sunflower Sutra, and A Supermarket in California are much more effective this and a lot less annoying to read. I found myself plugging away through Howl because it got redundant and boring. The other poems are fresh and more personal than Howl. Howl is a great poem and it is easy to see how it receives so much acclaim, but as a fan of Ginsberg's work, I find that Howl pales in comparison to Ginsberg's America. By all means, purchase this book, but don't buy it with the expectation that Howl is the best poem in there, because it isn't.

HOWL if you dig Allen Ginsberg (3/3 people found this helpful)

Allen Ginsberg's HOWL and Other Poems does what true poetry is supposed to do...break all barriers. It does that in a way unmatched by any other book of poetry. Poetry is written for self sepression...so that we can carry on in collective individualism. Not only does Ginsberh thoroughly express himself in these hiply fresh poems, but he gives us the keys to his soul...he unlocks the jambs. Squares would squeal, and yet, he did was poetry was intended to do...reveal the soul's deepest thoughts. Dig it.

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